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 Williams, Norman Powell, 
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 THE IDEAS OF THE FALL 
 AND OF ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 A HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY 
 
 BEING EIGHT LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, IN THE YEAR 1924, 
 ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE REV. JOHN 
 BAMPTON, CANON OF SALISBURY 
 
 
 
 BY 
 
 NORMAN POWELL WILLIAMS, D.D., 
 
 FELLOW AND CHAPLAIN OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 
 
 Oa ¢ € g e A 3 4 
 aitia eAowevov® Qedg avatttos 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. LTD. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON, E.C.4 
 NEW YORK, TORONTO 
 | CALCUTTA, BOMBAY AND MADRAS 
 
 1927 
 
Made in Great Britain 
 

 
 EXTRACT 
 
 FROM THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT 
 
 OF THE LATE 
 
 REV. JOHN BAMPTON 
 
 CANON OF SALISBURY 
 
 ‘,.. I give and bequeath my Lands and Estates to 
 the Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of 
 Oxford for ever, to have and to hold all and singular the 
 said Lands or Estates upon trust, and to the intents and 
 purposes hereinafter mentioned ; that is to say, I will and° 
 appoint that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of 
 Oxford for the time being shall take and receive all the 
 rents, issues, and profits thereof, and (after all taxes, repara- 
 tions, and necessary deductions made) that he pay all the 
 remainder to the endowment of eight Divinity Lecture 
 Sermons, to be established for ever in the said University, 
 and to be performed in the manner following : 
 
 “I direct and appoint that, upon the first Tuesday in 
 Easter Term, a Lecturer be yearly chosen by the Heads of 
 Colleges only, and by no others, in the room adjoining to 
 the Printing-House, between the hours of ten in the morning 
 and two in the afternoon, to preach eight Divinity Lecture 
 Sermons, the year following, at St. Mary’s in Oxford, 
 between the commencement of the last month in Lent Term 
 and the end of the third week in Act Term. 
 
 “Also I direct and appoint, that the eight Divinity 
 Lecture Sermons shall be preached upon either of the 
 following Subjects—to confirm and establish the Christian 
 
vi EXTRACT FROM CANON BAMPTON’S WILL 
 
 Faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics—upon 
 the divine authority of the holy Scriptures—upon the 
 authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to 
 the faith and practice of the primitive Church—upon the 
 Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ—upon 
 the Divinity of the Holy Ghost—upon the Articles of the 
 Christian Faith, as comprehended in the Apostles’ and 
 Nicene Creeds. 
 
 ‘Also I direct, that thirty copies of the eight Divinity 
 Lecture Sermons shall be always printed, within two months 
 after they are preached; and one copy shall be given to 
 the Chancellor of the University, and one copy to the Head 
 of every College, and one copy to the Mayor of the city of 
 Oxford, and one copy to be put into the Bodleian Library ; 
 and the expense of printing them shall be paid out of the 
 revenue of the Land or Estates given for establishing the 
 Divinity Lecture Sermons; and the Preacher shall not be 
 paid, nor be entitled to the revenue, before they are printed. 
 
 “Also I direct and appoint, that no person shall be 
 qualified to preach the Divinity Lecture Sermons, unless 
 he hath taken the degree of Master of Arts at least, in one 
 of the two Universities of Oxford or Cambridge ; and that 
 the same person shall never preach the Divinity Lecture 
 Sermons twice.’ 
 

 
 PREFACE 
 
 PERHAPS the gravest of the intellectual difficulties which 
 restrain men of thoughtfulness and goodwill from giving 
 their allegiance to the Christian Faith is that which inheres— 
 not in any one article or detail of our religion, not in its 
 doctrines of the Triune being of God or of the two natures 
 of Christ, not in Atonement, miracles, sacraments, or 
 eschatology—but in its fundamental assertion that ‘ God is 
 love.’ It is not that such persons find an intrinsic improba- 
 bility or logical incongruity in the ascription of those 
 qualities which we know in man as righteousness, benevo- 
 lence, compassion, and love to the mysterious Ultimate 
 Source and Ground of things; but rather that the assertion 
 appears to them as irreconcileable with the facts of the 
 world and of human life. ‘Is it possible,’ they ask, ‘ to 
 believe that behind the cruel misfits, the senseless waste, 
 the sordid ferocity with which organic nature, human and 
 sub-human, is deeply marked, there really exists that 
 dazzlingly perfect, that inconceivably glorious and blissful 
 _ Being of whom Christian theology speaks ? Can we recognise 
 in the infinite and eternal Energy, from which all things 
 proceed, which seems with impersonal indifference to weave 
 good and evil, love and hate, beauty and ugliness into the 
 tissue of its phenomenal self-expression, the features of that 
 loving heavenly Father whom Jesus claimed to reveal? 
 Is it not more honest to admit that we are confronted by 
 a morally neutral universe ; and, if we keep the conception 
 of ‘‘God”’ at all, to regard the God of religion as limited, 
 as less than the Absolute, though greater than ourselves— 
 our ally, perhaps, in the work of harnessing the blind forces 
 of nature, without us and within, to ethically valuable ends, 
 
 but like men ultimately dependent for His being on the 
 b 
 
Vill PREFACE 
 
 inscrutable substrate of the world-process, which, for all we 
 know, may in some unpredictable freak eventually crush 
 both Him and us?’ 
 
 For Christians, the faith that God is infinite in power, 
 love, and holiness alike is guaranteed by His revelation of 
 Himself, imparted in the first instance through the Hebrew 
 prophets, consummated in Jesus Christ, and authenticated 
 by the witness of the Spirit within the believer’s heart. 
 Whatever use may be made of intellectual argument for 
 establishing the probability of Christian theism, the con- 
 viction of its certainty must always rest upon experience 
 of a supra-rational kind: and such experience is normally 
 acquired and communicated through the spiritual contagion 
 which clings about the organised fellowship of redeemed 
 people, the visible Church of Christ upon earth. To those 
 who doubt the friendliness and the love of the Power behind 
 the universe, the ultimate appeal of Christians must be 
 “Come and see,’ ‘ gustate et videte, quoniam suavis est 
 Dominus.’ Nevertheless, such an appeal, if it is to exert 
 its full power, should be accompanied by some reasoned 
 answer to the question ‘ How is the hypothesis of God’s 
 infinite goodness and compassion to be reconciled with the 
 actual state of His world ? ’ 
 
 The answer given to this question by historical Chris- 
 tianity consists in the doctrine of the Fall and of its 
 consequences. The world is what it is despite the goodness 
 of its Maker, because it has apostatised from its Maker. 
 But, owing partly to the verdict of Biblical criticism upon 
 the ancient stories with which this doctrine has for many 
 centuries been connected, partly to the revolution effected 
 by modern science in our conception of the universe and of 
 the place of man within it, the idea of the Fall may be said 
 to have been for some time past under a cloud; and such 
 references as have been made to it by Christian thinkers, 
 at least in areas of Christendom where heed is paid to 
 science and Biblical criticism, have been hesitating and 
 uncertain, except when they have involved its definite 
 rejection. It seems, therefore, that there is room for a 
 systematic study of the whole subject, such as is attempted 
 in the following Lectures, a study which will not merely 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 PREFACE 1X 
 
 investigate the origins of the Fall-doctrine and trace the 
 course of its development, but will seek to determine the 
 extent of its acceptance by orthodox Christianity, and 
 the degree of validity, if any, which it may claim before 
 the bar of reason. 
 
 Such a study has indeed been made on an imposing scale 
 by Dr. F. R. Tennant, in three works, of which the latest 
 was published some fifteen years ago—namely, ‘ The Origin 
 and Propagation of Sin’ (Hulsean Lectures, 1902), ‘ The 
 Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin’ 
 (1903), ‘ The Concept of Sin’ (1912). These books constitute 
 the first, and so far the only, attempt in English to subject 
 the Fall-doctrine to a severely scientific examination in 
 respect both of its origin and of its truth, and my obliga- 
 tions to them will be obvious to the reader of these Lectures 
 at every turn. Nevertheless, I have been impelled to essay 
 the task again, partly because at various points I find myself 
 in disagreement with Dr. Tennant’s interpretation of the 
 historical data, and partly because, since the publication of 
 his last-mentioned work, the speculative situation has been 
 largely modified by the development of what is known as 
 the ‘ new psychology,’ and also by the revival of a theory 
 which at the time when Dr. Tennant wrote was not 
 considered as a serious claimant to the attention of modern 
 theologians, but which has been adopted as the basis of the 
 constructive view set forth in the last of these Lectures— 
 the theory, namely, of a transcendental, pre-human or 
 pre-cosmic ‘ Fall.’ This revival is mainly due to Canon 
 Peter Green’s book ‘The Problem of Evil’ (1920) and 
 Dr. C. W. Formby’s ‘ The Unveiling of the Fall’ (1923) ; 
 and I desire to acknowledge here the share which both of 
 these books have had in moulding my own thought on the 
 subject. Apart from these considerations, it has seemed 
 worth while to endeavour to provide a treatment of the 
 whole matter, both in its historical and in its dogmatic 
 aspect, which should be included between the covers of one. 
 book: though it must be confessed that the discussion of 
 so vast and intricate a question, raising as it does almost 
 every other problem both in theology and philosophy, does 
 not lend itself to compression within the limits of eight 
 
% PREFACE 
 
 Lectures; and, whilst rigidly confining myself, so far as 
 was possible, to the examination of the Fall-doctrine proper, 
 and abstaining from entering upon collateral fields of enquiry, 
 I have found myself compelled to make full use of the 
 privilege customarily conceded to a Bampton Lecturer, 
 that of printing considerably more than was actually 
 spoken in the pulpit of St. Mary’s. The apparent dispro- 
 portion between the long and detailed study of pre- 
 Augustinian thought in Lecture IV and the cursory notice 
 of post-Reformation developments in Lecture VI is, I hope, 
 justified by the use made of the former in the constructive 
 part of the book. 
 
 I desire to express sincere gratitude to those who have 
 helped me in the preparation and revision of these Lectures 
 with information and advice: first and foremost to the 
 Rev. Canon Darwell Stone, D.D., who has found time 
 amidst his innumerable employments to read the whole of 
 the historical part of the book in typescript, and has freely 
 placed the immense resources of his patristic learning at 
 my disposal; then to the Rev. Canon Brightman, Fellow 
 of Magdalen College, Oxford, to whom I owe the substance 
 of Additional Note C (‘Congregational Confessions of 
 Original Sin’) > to! Canon “D..-CSimpson;) Dupe eG 
 Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture in the 
 University of Oxford; Professor Dr. Friedrich Loofs, of 
 Halle ; Dr. Charles Singer ; Dr. A. Biichler, Principal of the 
 Jews’ College; Canon T. A. Lacey’; and Mr. H. M. J. Loewe, 
 University Lecturer in Rabbinic Hebrew at Oxford. It is 
 doubtless unnecessary to add that these gentlemen are not 
 to be considered in any way responsible for any of the 
 opinions expressed in the book, or for any mistakes which 
 may appear init. I must also thank the Ven. R. H. Charles, 
 D.D., F.B.A., Archdeacon of Westminster, and the Delegates 
 of the University Press for permission to make use of 
 quotations from the English translations of apocalyptic 
 documents contained in ‘ Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha 
 of the Old Testament’ (1913). 
 
 N. P. WILLIAMS. 
 
 OXFORD : 
 January 1927. 
 
SMNOPSIS 7 OR iwC ON DONS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 LECTURE ].—THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION I 
 
 The Problem of Evil in general. No complete solution is 
 possible ; but Religion ought to contain some indication of 
 the direction in which the solution lies. 
 
 Three classical answers to the question have in the past 
 been given by Religion in its higher forms: (1) the theory of 
 “unmoral monism,’ characteristic of Hindu thought, according 
 to which Good and Evil are alike appearances—presumably 
 necessary appearances—of an Absolute which transcends them 
 both; (2) dualism, the view of later Mazdeism and Mani- 
 cheism, which postulates co-eternal Powers of Good and 
 Evil; (3) the theory of a ‘Fall’ and of ‘ Original Sin,’ in- 
 herited by Christianity from Judaism, and standing in sharp 
 opposition to the two former views. The purpose of these 
 lectures is a critical examination of this last theory, both as 
 regards origin and validity. 
 
 General remarks as to the present position of the Fall- 
 doctrine and of the conception of Redemption which is its 
 inseparable corollary. 
 
 We are faced at the outset by the fact that much diversity 
 has prevailed within historical Christianity as to the exact 
 form and contents of the ideas of the Fall and of Original 
 Sin. Before endeavouring to evaluate them, we must 
 first of all determine what precisely they are. It is impos- 
 sible to assume without enquiry that any existing con- 
 fessional formulary adequately embodies the whole mind of 
 traditional Christianity on these points: and there are no 
 detailed definitions of oecumenical authority. We must 
 therefore endeavour to arrive at the irreducible essence of 
 Fall-doctrine to which Catholic Christianity is committed by a 
 comprehensive survey of the history of the doctrine, employing © 
 the ‘Vincentian canon’ as a scientific—not as a authoritarian 
 —criterion. The first six lectures will, accordingly, be histori- 
 cal in nature, intended to ascertain the origin and fix the 
 essence of these ideas, and the last two, theological or philo- 
 sophical, devoted to a discussion of their validity. 
 
 Our historical survey necessarily begins with the Old Testa- 
 ment. The Paradise-story of Gen. ili. contains no idea of 
 ‘ Original Sin’; it is, therefore, not the historical source of 
 
 
 
Xl SY NOPSISTOD ICON TENS 
 PAGE 
 
 the Fall-doctrine, which originated in the thought of post- 
 exilic Judaism as the result of reflection on the empirical 
 universality of Actual Sin. This observed fact suggested the 
 presence of some inherent taint in human nature: the Jew’s 
 intense conviction of the Creator’s goodness forbade the sup- 
 position that such a taint could have belonged to human _ 
 nature as originally created: it thus seemed necessary to 
 postulate a ‘ Fall,’ or first sin. The necessity of a Fall 
 having been thus arrived at by a priovt reasoning, search was 
 made in the Biblical narratives for some event which could be 
 identified with the first sin; this was found, at first, in the 
 story of the lustful angels narrated in Gen. vi. 
 
 The theory that human wickedness is due to the unnatural 
 mixture of divine and human essences involved in the union 
 of the ‘ sons of God’ and mortal women is elaborated in the 
 Book of Enoch, and other apocalyptic literature. It breaks 
 down, owing to its failure to explain post-diluvian sin, and is 
 gradually ousted from its position as the popular Fall-story 
 by the Adam-narrative of Gen. iii. Traces of it are, however, 
 to be found even in New Testament documents. 
 
 The fact that there has been this rivalry between the two 
 Fall-stories, Gen. vi. and Gen. iii. (ending in the victory of the 
 latter), confirms the conclusion that neither is the real basis 
 of the doctrine: they are rather symbolic fagades, clothing a 
 conceptual structure which rests upon spiritual experience and 
 introspection. And the suggestion of Gen. vi., that the origin 
 of sin is due to lust, represents the first emergence of a motif, 
 which runs through much of Christian Fall-speculation and 
 seems to have reappeared in recent psychology of the Viennese 
 school. 
 
 ADDITIONAL, Notre :A.—THE QRIGIN: OF THE ARTS) HIN 
 PSEUDO-ENOCH AND AESCHYLUS : ‘ : ‘ 35 
 
 LECTURE “II——Tur -ADAM-STORY” AND THE’. EVIE 
 IMAGINATION’ é , ; ‘ My ales, 
 
 We now turn to the consideration of the story which 
 finally became the official Fall-story of the Christian Church, 
 that of Adam and Eve. It was pointed out in Lecture I that 
 this story, in itself and for the mind of the Yahwistic writer, 
 contained no doctrine of ‘ Original Sin’ and regarded ‘ the 
 Fall’ merely as an exterior punishment, not as the acquisition 
 of an interior taint or weakness. ‘This statement must now be 
 justified. 
 
 The story analysed. ‘Though capable of conscious com- 
 munion with God, the first men are not conceived as being 
 very much higher than the beasts, in respect of physical and 
 material conditions. There is no doctrine of ‘ Original 
 Righteousness’ ; but Adam and Eve, in their unfallen condi- 
 tion, are not strictly ‘ non-moral,’ for they know of at least 
 

 
 
 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 two duties—work and abstinence from the forbidden fruit. 
 For the Yahwistic writer, their sin lay in the illicit acquisition 
 of scientific knowledge ; cf. the myth of Prometheus. J isa 
 pessimist ; he thinks that civilisation is a mistake, and that 
 the increase of knowledge brings sorrow in its train. 
 
 This naive original significance, however, was obscured 
 for the Jews of the Maccabean period by the canonical status 
 and inspired character attributed to the Book of Genesis ; 
 hence, the religiously higher idea—that the essence of the 
 first sin consisted in the conscious transgression of a known 
 law—could be and was read into it. The pre-Christian 
 development of Fall-speculation, now firmly anchored to the 
 Adam-story, summarised : we notice in particular the growth 
 of (a) the idea that man’s mortality is directly due to the first 
 sin, and (b) the theory of ‘ Original Righteousness.’ The 
 theory of the inquinamentum (which reappears in the New 
 Testament), according to which Eve was the sole source of 
 human sin and misery, Adam being guiltless. 
 
 The two Fall-theories just discussed (that based upon 
 Gen. vi., and its successful rival based on Gen. iii.) belong to 
 popular religious thought. But, to gain a complete picture of 
 the theological milieu into which Christianity came, and of 
 the doctrinal background which the teaching of our Lord and 
 His Apostles presupposes, we must consider the theory of the 
 origin of evil held by official Rabbinical scholasticism—which 
 is still held by the Jewish Church at the present day. This is 
 the theory of the yéger ha-va‘, or ‘ evilimagination.’ Deriva- 
 tion of this conception from the words of Gen. vi. 5. 
 
 The‘ evilimagination ’ in pre-Christian literature, especially 
 Ecclesiasticus. Further information about this idea may be 
 derived from Talmudic sources. The conception of the yéger 
 ha-ra‘ in the Rabbis would seem to be almost identical with 
 that of ibidoin Jung,ifnotin Freud. Difference between this 
 idea and that of ‘ Original Sin.’ The yéger implanted by God 
 in each individual soul. 
 
 This was the view of the official theology—as distinct from 
 popular pietism. Butthe Adamic theory won such widespread 
 support that the Rabbis had to take some account of it ; hence 
 the idea of a forensic imputation of the first man’s demerit to 
 his descendants, 7.e. the idea of ‘ Original Guilt,’ as distinct 
 from that of ‘ Original Sin.’ This distinction, which will 
 be of crucial importance for the understanding of Christian 
 thought on the subject, explained. 
 
 Two attempts to combine the popular theory of Adam’s 
 Fall and ‘ Original Sin’ with the Rabbinical theory of the 
 yecer ha-va‘—the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, and the Ezra- 
 Apocalypse. Philo’s Platonism (really identical with what we 
 described as the Hindu answer to the problem of the origin 
 of Evil) forbids him to accept either the Fall or the ‘ evil 
 imagination.’ 
 
 Summary of the state of opinion within Judaism at the 
 time when Christianity came into existence. The Fall- 
 doctrine held 7m the Jewish Church, but not by the Jewish 
 
 Xiil 
 
XiV 
 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 Church as a whole. So far as the Elder Dispensation is con- 
 cerned, it was never more than a ‘ pious opinion.’ Any claim 
 to the position of a ‘ revealed ’ doctrine made on its behalf can 
 only rest on the fact of its embodiment into the scheme of 
 Christian doctrine. 
 
 LECTURE IIJI.—THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE NEW 
 
 TESTAMENT . : 
 
 The foregoing Lectures have described the source and 
 contents of the main theories as to the origin of Evil—the 
 angel-theory, the Adam-theory, and the idea of the yéger ha-va‘— 
 which prevailed within Judaism at the beginning of our era. 
 We now have to face a crucial question: how was it that one 
 of these theories (the Adam-theory) was taken over, to the 
 exclusion of the others, by Christianity, and welded so firmly 
 into the dogmatic structure of Christianity that succeeding 
 ages have regarded it as a chief pillar of the Church’s Faith ? 
 The question is somewhat of an enigma in view of the fact 
 that the direct authority of Christ cannot be claimed for this 
 doctrine, or indeed for any other theory of the origin of evil, 
 though His teaching assumes that mankind is in sore need of 
 redemption from sin. 
 
 The only New Testament passages which definitely teach 
 
 ‘ Original Sin’ and the Adamic theory of the Fall are con-. 
 
 tained in the writings of St. Paul (Jude and 2 Peter seem to 
 assume the ‘ angel-theory’). It is noticeable that St. Paul is 
 at no pains to prove the Adamic theory : he takes it for granted, 
 in parentheses and obizter dicta, which he could hardly have 
 done unless he had known it to be common ground between 
 himself and hisreaders. But, how could he have assumed it, in 
 this almost casual manner, as the common intellectual property 
 of all Christians, if it had not direct Dominical authority 
 behind it? We must admit that the passage of the Fall- 
 doctrine from Judaism into Christianity is involved in some 
 obscurity ; but the following appears to be the most probable 
 hypothesis : 
 
 (a) That the earliest adherents of our Lord, being 
 rough Galileans, and destitute of Rabbinical culture, 
 would know nothing about the yéger ha-ra‘, but would be 
 well acquainted with the popular apocalyptic literature : 
 and would therefore be likely, in the absence of direct 
 Dominical instruction to the contrary, to take the pseud- 
 epigraphic theory of a Fall and Original Sin for granted, 
 either in its ‘ angelic’ or its ‘ Adamic’ form. 
 
 (bo) That our Lord, in accordance with His policy of 
 assuming current Jewish theology wherever possible, tacitly 
 acquiesced in this, and left His followers to decide for them- 
 selves between the Fall-stories of Gen. iii. and Gen. vi. 
 
 (c) That at first the Watcher-story enjoyed some 
 popularity in Jewish-Christian circles: but that St. Paul’s 
 
 PAGE 
 
 93 
 

 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 influence eventually dispossessed it in favour of the Adam- 
 narrative, which thus became the official Fall-story of the 
 whole Christian Church. If this is so, St. Paul would seem 
 to have done Christianity a considerable service, in view of 
 the unedifying developments of which the angel-story from 
 its nature is capable. 
 
 It is to be noted that although the Adamic theory as 
 taught by St. Paul is mainly built upon the Biblical story, yet 
 two passages in the Pauline corpus appear to presuppose the 
 extra-Biblical legend of the inquinamentum (2 Cor. xi. 3 and 
 1 Tim. ii. 14) ; probably, however, this idea is merely used in 
 the spirit of Philonic allegorism, to give point to practical 
 exhortations. 
 
 We now turn to the task of reconstructing the Apostle’s 
 doctrine in detail. The /oci classici are to be found in Rom. v., 
 Vi., Vil. ; I Cor. xv.; Gal. v. The relevant portions of these 
 chapters imply that Adam’s sin communicated to his posterity 
 (a) physical mortality, and (b) a condition of ‘ suppressed 
 sinfulness,’ which is stimulated by knowledge of the Law to 
 break out into sinful acts. The remedy for this condition is 
 Baptism: analogies to this conception in contemporaneous 
 paganism. St. Paul knows nothing of ‘ Original Righteous- 
 ness’ or ‘ Original Guilt.’ 
 
 The seat or nidus of the hereditary infection is the ‘ flesh,’ 
 
 the ‘ body of this death,’ with its ‘ sinful passions.’ Is this 
 conception based upon a Platonic or Oriental dualism ? But 
 we have seen that the Fall-theory is necessarily the sworn foe 
 of dualism. If a source other than St. Paul’s own experience 
 must be found for the idea of the ¢dpdévnua tis capKds there is 
 no need to go further than the yéger ha-va‘, with which the 
 Apostle’s Rabbinical training must have made him familiar. 
 
 A complete treatment of the problem of sin must endeavour 
 to deal with the relation of evil in man to evil in Nature, orin 
 the world outside men. Many subsequent theologians have 
 shirked this question; but it is clear that the Apostle has 
 faced it in his own private thoughts. Not human nature alone 
 is permeated by Evil: the malign infection extends down- 
 wards into the sub-human creation, which ‘ groans and travails 
 together until now,’ and upwards into the supernatural sphere, 
 where it inspires the hateful energies of a ‘ spirit-world at war 
 with God,’ the malevolent ‘ world-rulers,’ ‘ principalities,’ and 
 ‘ powers.’ For the content of these ideas St. Paul is indebted 
 to the pre-Christian apocalyptists: but the form and the 
 implications which he has imposed upon them are profoundly 
 original. 
 
 Summary. The doctrines which we are studying come to 
 us on the authority of St. Paul and of the Church rather than 
 on that of Christ: if, however, our final examination of them 
 shows that they correspond to the facts of life, the circum- 
 stances of their entry into Christianity will constitute no 
 argument against them, and we shall be at liberty to conclude 
 that, whilst not strictly Dominical themselves, they are never- 
 theless implicit in the Dominical teaching as to the universal 
 
Xvi 
 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 need of redemption. Though it gathers into a single system 
 the ideas loosely scattered throughout the pre-Christian 
 apocalyptists, the Apostle’s doctrine is yet somewhat vague 
 and elastic, and therefore much more reasonable than some 
 of the more rigid products of later theology. Despite a few 
 rhetorical turns of phrase, no trace is to be found in his Epistles 
 of the impossible paradox that we are morally culpable for 
 possessing instincts which we cannot help possessing. Apart 
 from the synthetic work just mentioned, and the final expul- 
 sion of the Watcher-story, the most permanently significant 
 of the Apostle’s contributions to the growth of the Fall- 
 doctrine are (a) the close connexion established, or pointed 
 out, by him between Original Sin and Baptism, and (b) his 
 great conception of the unitary nature of Evil as pervading 
 the three planes of life, sub-human, human, and superhuman, 
 with its corollary of a final redemption embracing the whole 
 realm of animate and created being. 
 
 LECTURE IV.—THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 
 
 OF THE FIRST FOUR CENTURIES ’ : 
 
 The Pauline teaching sketched in Lecture III was bound, 
 when reflected upon, to raise certain great issues which have 
 dominated the subsequent history of these doctrines. These 
 issues are : ; 
 
 (i) Is the Adam-story historic truth or allegory ? 
 (ii) What was man’s unfallen condition—non-moral 
 innocence, or ‘ Original Righteousness’ ? 
 
 (iii) What exactly is the undesirable thing, state, or quality 
 alleged to have been communicated by the first man 
 to his descendants ? 
 
 (iv) What was the mode of this donimini Cane 
 physiological or merely social heredity, mystical or 
 physical identity ? 
 
 (v) What is the resulting state of human nature, with 
 which Redemption now has to deal ? 
 
 It must therefore be expected that the task of fixing the 
 outlines of the really ‘ Catholic’ or universal doctrine will 
 become more complicated as our research moves down the 
 centuries. In order to determine what precisely has been 
 believed ubique, semper, et ab omnibus, we shall have to 
 enquire, not merely whether the Fall-doctrine was or was not 
 held by the Christian Church during a given period, but also 
 (if we decide that it was) what answers were returned to these 
 crucial questions during the epoch under discussion. As 
 these ideas are ultimately based upon religious experience, 
 we shall find that the opinions held with regard to these five 
 issues tend to group and combine themselves into two well- 
 defined versions of the Fall-theory, corresponding to the 
 ‘ once-born ’ and ‘ twice-born’ types of religious temperament. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 165 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS XVil 
 
 The more or less straightforward path followed by the 
 evolution of the Christian Fall-doctrine after the Apostolic 
 age is sharply bisected by the figure of Augustine, which stands 
 as it were on the watershed between classical antiquity and 
 the Middle Ages. The remainder, therefore, of our historical 
 survey falls naturally into three sections, concerned respec- 
 tively with Christian opinion before Augustine, with the 
 teaching of Augustine himself, and with the subsequent 
 Western developments of Augustinianism. The first of these 
 sections, to which this morning’s lecture will be devoted, will 
 be of peculiar importance for the task of settling what really 
 has been believed ‘ everywhere, always, and by all,’ inasmuch 
 as in the primitive, pre-Augustinian Church we may reason- 
 ably expect to find nothing but the fundamental thought of 
 historic Christianity on this subject, free from the ‘ personal 
 equation ’ introduced by Augustine’s powerful individuality. 
 
 Only two, exceedingly faint and doubtful, traces of these 
 ideas are to be found in the ‘ Apostolic Fathers’; the 
 Apologists are more explicit, but their teaching is ambiguous 
 and confused. The first appearance within Christianity of the 
 conception of ‘ Original Righteousness,’ and of the suggestion, 
 destined to be elaborated by Duns Scotus, that the inherited 
 infirmity consists in the lack of the supernatural endowments 
 ofthe firstman. It would seem that, whilst St. Paul’s teaching 
 was accepted, in a vague and general manner, by the Christian 
 world, at least from the time of the canonisation of the Pauline 
 corpus onwards, it was held very much in the background of 
 the Church’s mind during the first post-Apostolic century : and 
 that the hypothesis of a multitude of personal demons 
 attacking the soul from without possessed much more vivid 
 reality for the earliest Christians, as the explanation of evil 
 suggestions, than the more abstract idea of a hereditary bias 
 influencing it from within. 
 
 The ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin emerged from this 
 temporary eclipse as the result of the impact of Gnosticism 
 upon the Church. Under the banners of this syncretistic 
 movement, the two ancient foes of Jewish-Christian mono- 
 theism—Hindu monism and Iranian dualism—once more 
 advanced to the assault ; and, as in the Maccabean period, the 
 Fall-theory was brought out of the Church’s armoury as the 
 tried shield against any theories which imply the eternity or 
 necessity of evil. The first systematic consideration of the 
 subject is found in Irenaeus; the surprising modernity and 
 reasonableness of his views on some of the five crucial issues. 
 
 With the two greatest anti-Gnostic champions of the 
 following century—Origen in the East and Tertullian in the 
 West—the two classical types of Fall-doctrine begin to dis-¢” 
 tinguish themselves. Some care must therefore be devoted | 
 to the examination of these writers. Origen will naturally be 
 considered first, as standing more directly in the succession 
 of the earliest Greek-Christian thought. 
 
 Origen’s two periods—the Alexandrine and the Caesarean. 
 
 In the former, following the lead of Clement, he allegorises 
 
 
 
XVlil SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 Gen. iii., in accordance with the exegetical methods traditional 
 
 at Alexandria, reading into it the theory, borrowed from 
 
 Plato’s Phaedrus, of a pre-natal fall of individual souls. 
 
 ‘ Original Righteousness’ is thus affirmed, but referred to a 
 
 transcendent and extra-temporal mode of existence, whilst 
 
 ‘ Original Sin’ becomes a weakness rather than a disease, a 
 ook privatio rather than a depravatio. 
 
 In the latter, he takes a more gloomy view of ‘ Original 
 Sin’ as a positive, quasi-physical pollution, to which, in 
 some inexplicable way, guzli attaches; here the conception 
 of ‘ Original Guilt’ creeps in by the side of ‘ Original Sin.’ 
 This change of view is probably due to the fact that at Caesarea 
 he became acquainted for the first time with the practice of 
 Infant Baptism, which seemed to necessitate some doctrine of 
 inborn depravity or guilt. He also shows signs of reverting to 
 a more literalistic exegesis of Gen. iii., and, for the time, 
 abandons the theory of individual pre-natal falls for that of a 
 collective Fall of humanity in Adam. But in both periods 
 alike he remains convinced that ‘ Paradise’ belongs not to 
 the material but to the supersensible world. This is an idea 
 which may prove fruitful in suggestions when we approach 
 the constructive part of our task. 
 
 The place of Tertullian in history as the father of Western 
 and Latin theology, and the precursor of Augustine. The 
 general texture and quality of his mind was unphilosophical, 
 legalistic, materialistic. He is not prepared to predicate of 
 unfallen human nature more than ‘integrity’ (which does 
 not amount to ‘ Original Righteousness’) ; but he adheres to 
 a rigidly literal interpretation of Gen. iii. The fundamental 
 element in his presentation of the Fall-doctrine is the belief 
 in the corporeity of the soul: from this is derived the 
 ‘ Traducianist ’’ view of the propagation of souls, on which a 
 crude form of the theory of ‘ seminal identity’ is based. It 
 is strongly asserted that ‘ Original Sin’ is a positive corruption 
 and not a mere infirmity: but there is no idea of ‘ Original 
 Guilt,’ as Tertullian, unlike Origen, objects to the practice of 
 Infant Baptism. 
 
 The two types of Fall-doctrine destined to be characteristic 
 of Eastern and Western Christendom—that which starts from 
 the conception of ‘ Original Sin’ as a privatio and that which 
 regards it as a depravatio—thus emerge in the writings of 
 these two great third-century teachers. Further develop- 
 ments in the East (Methodius, Athanasius, and the Cappa- 
 docians) and in the West (Cyprian, Ambrose, Ambrosiaster— 
 the two latter approximating to the full Augustinian doctrine) 
 briefly summarised. 
 
 Summary. From the evidence adduced it may be reason- 
 ably concluded that the Fall-doctrine was very generally 
 assumed in the Church of the first four centuries, on the 
 authority of the Old Testament as interpreted by St. Paul. 
 But it was not the centre of much discussion or interest; the 
 demon-theory bulked more largely in the imagination of the 
 ordinary Christian. Nor, in view of the fluidity of Christian 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS XIX 
 PAGE 
 thought at this epoch, can it be said to have been strictly 
 de fide. It was not embodied in the baptismal Creeds, or 
 regarded as part of the Gospel or the ‘ deposit of Faith’; it 
 was viewed rather as part of the prolegomena to the Gospel, 
 taken over from Judaism. The sense in which the Fall- 
 doctrine may be said to have enjoyed this vague general 
 acceptance does not go beyond the simple teaching of St. 
 Paul and, perhaps, of Irenaeus ; this view, which regards the 
 Fall as a praevaricatio rather than a lapsus, and ‘ Original 
 Sin’ as a weakness rather than an offence or pollution, is not 
 uncongenial to the ‘ once-born’ type of religious experience 
 and the sunny genius of Christian Hellenism. But the more 
 gloomy and fanatical temperament of Northern Africa was 
 already in search of a severer theory, appropriate to the 
 “twice-born’ mode of feeling. The Augustinian version, 
 which has dominated the West so completely that it is still 
 thought by many to be the only Fall-doctrine, had not yet been 
 constructed : but the materials for it were being accumulated. 
 
 LECTURE V.—THE ‘ TWICE-BORN’ VERSION OF THE 
 FALL-DOCTRINE FULLY DEVELOPED—AUGUSTINIAN- 
 ISM : ; : 4 : ‘ : O15 
 
 Christian Doctrine, in its ‘ orthodox’ or ‘ historical’ 
 presentation, is now conventionally divided into five great 
 sections—the doctrine of the Trinity, of the Incarnation or 
 the Person of Christ, of Grace or the Work of Christ, of the 
 Church, and of the Sacraments. But in the primitive Church 
 of the first four centuries, which claimed our attention in 
 Lecture IV, Christian doctrine, so far as it had been formulated, 
 consisted only of the first two of these sections—the doctrines 
 of God and of Christ. Broadly speaking, the Church and 
 the Sacraments were taken for granted as facts, and used 
 rather than speculated about: and the problems which come 
 under the head of the ‘ doctrine of Grace ’—Sin, Atonement, 
 Justification—received only cursory attention, nor were any 
 specific opinions in regard to them treated as de fide or insisted 
 on as terms of communion. The Fall-doctrine in particular, 
 though enjoying a vague general acceptance, was not thought 
 of as part of ‘ the Gospel,’ and was largely obscured by the 
 demonic theory. We have now to consider how ‘ the doctrine 
 of Grace,’ carrying a rigidly systematised and ‘ twice-born’ 
 version of the Fall-theory embedded in it, came to be added to 
 the doctrines of God and of Christ as a third great section of 
 the Christian intellectual scheme, as that scheme was con- 
 ceived in the Western Church. This enlargement of the area 
 of authoritative dogma was mainly due to the teaching and 
 influence of St. Augustine. 
 
 As the Fall-doctrine is based upon spiritual experience, it 
 is desirable, at each crucial moment in its development, to 
 examine the lives and temperaments of its greatest exponents, 
 
 
 
XX 
 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 in order to lay bare the causes which have moulded 
 their characteristic presentations of it. A brief review of 
 Augustine’s earlier life discloses three main factors which 
 naturally disposed him towards the sterner and more rigorous 
 type of Fall-theory: (1) his own passionate, introspective, 
 and ‘ twice-born’ genius, which had been deeply marked by 
 the convulsions of sin, remorse, and instantaneous conversion ; 
 (2) his contact with Persian dualism, the traditional foe of 
 Jewish-Christian monotheism, in its Manichean form, which 
 affected him first by attraction and then by repulsion ; (3) the 
 tradition and temper of the North African Church, which 
 made him heir to the more gloomy view of ‘ Original Sin’ first 
 adumbrated by Tertullian. 
 
 Augustine’s doctrine, which is the finished and classical 
 expression of the ‘ twice-born’ view, took shape in his mind 
 during the first ten years of his Christian and monastic life, 
 as the result of his reaction from Manicheism, long before 
 he had so much as heard of Pelagius. Its main points— 
 “seminal identity,’ ‘ original guilt,’ ‘ original sin’ viewed as a 
 depravation and not as a mere privation, the intrinsically evil 
 nature of ‘ concupiscence,’ and the idea of fallen humanity as 
 a massa peccati—appear in the treatise ad Simplicianum, as 
 early as the year 397. 
 
 Meanwhile, by a remarkable chance—or providence—the 
 ‘once-born,’ strongly ethical type of religious temperament 
 found a powerful representative in another monk, the Irishman 
 Pelagius, whose evangelistic methods presupposed an absolute 
 indeterminism and an optimistic view of human nature, which 
 was eventually worked out by himself and his friends, 
 Caelestius and Julian of Eclanum, into an explicit doctrine 
 of man and of sin now known as ‘ Pelagianism.’ Down to the 
 end of the fourth century the two monks, the Briton and the 
 African, typifying and inculcating respectively the extremest 
 forms of the ‘ once-born’ and ‘ twice-born’ views of sin and 
 redemption, were unknown to each other; but the stage was 
 being set for the great conflict between these two theories, 
 which has not even yet come to a final decision. 
 
 It will be convenient here to sketch the main principles 
 of Pelagianism. It was not a ‘formal’ heresy—nor, at the 
 date of its first appearance, was it a ‘ material’ heresy, as 
 no officially defined Fall-doctrine was yet in being. It was 
 rather an attempt to provide a rationalised, non-mystical 
 explanation of the Scriptural texts relating to Adam’s trans- 
 gression and the entrance of sin into the world. It started 
 from the fundamental Christian idea of God as infinitely good, 
 and from this deduced the immutable goodness of human 
 nature. Hence Adam’s sin only injured himself directly, 
 though it may be said to have injured his posterity indirectly 
 in so far as it provided a bad example for their imitation. 
 There is no physical propagation of any undesirable state or 
 quality, not even of a privatio or weakness ; every individual 
 represents at his birth a fresh start in the moral history of the 
 

 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 race, and throughout the whole of his life retains absolute 
 free-will, entirely undetermined by habit or character. So far 
 as there is any transmission of evil from one generation to the 
 next, it is merely through ‘social heredity,’ bad examples, 
 customs, laws, and the like. Infant baptism confers positive 
 graces, but not ‘ remission of sins,’ as infants have ex hypothesi 
 no sins or sinfulness to be remitted; and the eschatological 
 aspect of the problem, which now for the first time emerges 
 in the question, ‘ What is the fate, after death, of those who die 
 unbaptised ? ’ is dealt with, so far as infants are concerned, by 
 the hypothesis of Limbo. 
 
 The history of the Pelagian controversy summarised. 
 The North African bishops, headed by Augustine, succeeded 
 in forcing the stiff, ‘ twice-born ’ doctrine upon the West ; but 
 their triumph was largely due to the secular arm of the Roman 
 Government, and did not extend to the East, where the 
 Pelagians found a natural ally in Theodore of Mopsuestia. 
 Eventually the remnants of Pelagianism were involved in the 
 downfall of Nestorianism ; but Canons 1 and 4 of Ephesus, 
 which represent the only approach to a conciliar definition of 
 oecumenical authority on this subject, noticeably abstain 
 from an affirmation of Augustinianism, and content themselves 
 with a cautious condemnation of Caelestius. 
 
 A critique of Pelagianism. Whatever we may think of the 
 methods employed to suppress Pelagianism, its disappearance 
 was, on the whole, a blessing for Christianity. Though some 
 of its positions are infinitely more reasonable and humane 
 than the corresponding Augustinian tenets, it must yet be 
 remembered that its vicious doctrine of unlimited indeter- 
 minism abolished the essence of true religion by abolishing 
 man’s feeling of dependence on God, and, by exaggerating 
 every venial fault into a conscious mortal sin, turned 
 Christianity into a joyless and legalistic Puritanism. 
 
 This blessing was, however, dearly purchased by the 
 triumph of Augustinianism. We must now examine this 
 system in detail, as fully developed in St. Augustine’s anti- 
 Pelagian writings. As in the case of the pre-Augustinian 
 Fathers, our method will be that of considering St. Augustine’s 
 answers to the ‘ five crucial questions’ defined in Lecture IV 
 as naturally arising out of the Pauline doctrine. 
 
 (i) The literal or allegorical interpretation of Gen. 111. 
 After a momentary hesitation, Augustine decides for the 
 former. 
 
 (ii) Man’s unfallen state. The Rabbinical idea of 
 ‘Original Righteousness’ is carried to the highest pitch, 
 in order to intensify the heinousness of the Fall; Adam, 
 unfallen, is canonised as the ideal athlete, philosopher, and 
 saint. 
 
 (iii) The exact nature of the disastrous legacy of the Fall. 
 Augustine is the first to distinguish clearly between the 
 vitium and the veatus of ‘ Original Sin ’"—in other words, 
 
 XX1 
 
XXIl SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 between ‘ original sin’ as a psychological fact and ‘ original 
 guilt ’ as a forensic status. Of these: 
 
 (a) The vitiumconsists in ‘concupiscence,’ which is trans- 
 
 mitted in and through parentage, and is in itself evil. 
 
 (b) The reatus consists in legal responsibility for Adam’s 
 
 transgression, based on the theory of “seminal 
 identity.’ 
 
 (iv) The mode of transmission. As will be seen from (iii) 
 (a) and (b), Augustine alternates between ‘heredity’ and 
 identity. He never makes up his mind as between 
 ‘ Creationism ’ and ‘ Traducianism.’ 
 
 (v) The resulting state of human nature. Mankind is a 
 massa perditionis; but Augustine’s Platonism, for which 
 all being, in so far as it is true being, is good, arrests him 
 just short of the Calvinistic doctrine of total depravity, 
 and mercifully blunts the edge of the antithesis between 
 ‘nature’ and ‘ grace.’ Man was deprived of ‘ freedom’ by 
 the Fall, but still possesses ‘ free-will’—an elusive and 
 probably meaningless distinction. 
 
 To these we must add : 
 
 (vi) The eschatological issue, first brought out by the 
 Pelagian controversy, ‘ What happens after death to those 
 who die in original sin only, without having committed 
 actual sin?’ Augustine has no hesitation in consigning 
 this whole class, including unbaptised infants, to everlasting 
 flames. 
 
 A brief critique of the Augustinian doctrine. Its key- 
 conceptions are three—Original Righteousness, Original Sin, 
 and Original Guilt. As we have previously suggested, the 
 first and third of these are intellectually indefensible, at any 
 rate as Augustine phrased them and as they are embodied 
 in the Western post-Augustinian systems: and his presenta- 
 tion of the second seems strongly coloured by his early 
 Manicheism. If, then, it were true, as is often assumed, 
 that ‘ the Catholic doctrine’ of the Fall and of Original Sin is 
 identical with the Augustinian doctrine, Catholic Christianity 
 would indeed bein evil plight. But we have seen that Ephesus 
 abstained from affirming Augustinianism; and no other 
 Oecumenical Council has dealt with the matter. Augustini- 
 anism cannot in any case claim to satisfy the test of semper ; 
 but it will be well, for the sake of completeness, to enquire 
 whether there was ever a time when it was accepted ubique et 
 ab omnibus. 
 
 This last question must, it would seem, be answered in 
 the negative. The Christian East has never accepted the 
 Augustinian version of the Fall-doctrine ; the Greek-speaking 
 Church of the eighth century, as represented by St. John of 
 Damascus, seems to leave the whole question shrouded in 
 ‘reverential vagueness.’ We therefore conclude that ortho- 
 dox Christians as such are in no way committed to the 
 Augustinian position; and that the Church of the future 
 is likely to look to the Greek tradition, which expresses the 
 “once-born’ type of religious experience as its guide and 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS Xxiil 
 
 PAGE 
 norm in this matter, though in any complete ‘ re-statement ’ 
 of the Fall-doctrine room must be found for an expression 
 of the permanent values disclosed by the rarer ‘ twice-born ’ 
 
 type. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NoTE B.—CANONS OF THE CARTHAGINIAN 
 COUNCIL OF A.D. 418 : : : : ; Ok 
 
 LECTURE VI.—THE TRIUMPH AND DECLINE OF THE 
 AUGUSTINIAN DOCTRINE . i : ‘ 393 
 
 It was shown in Lecture V that the Augustinian version 
 of the Fall-theory, never having been adopted by Eastern 
 Christendom, does not satisfy the criterion of acceptance 
 ubique, semper, et ab omnibus, and cannot therefore be described 
 as ‘ the ecclesiastical doctrine’ or ‘ the doctrine of the Christian 
 Church as a whole.’ It might, however, be urged that the 
 non-acceptance of the Augustinian teaching by the East does 
 not necessarily invalidate its claim to be ‘the Christian 
 doctrine,’ inasmuch as the intellectual life of the Eastern 
 Church was (not exclusively through its own fault) compara- 
 tively stationary from the time of the Great Schism down to 
 the nineteenth century; and that it is unfair to dismiss a 
 theory which has so deeply affected the religious life of Western 
 Europe, both in mediaeval and modern times, without having 
 considered the developments which it received at the hands of 
 some of the greatest Christian thinkers since the Patristic age, 
 both Schoolmen and Reformers. Wedo not wish to argue the 
 question of the true meaning of omnes, or to assume (for the 
 purpose of these Lectures) any particular view as to the extent 
 of ‘ the Church’; our desire is to arrive at conclusions which 
 will possess as much objectivity and breadth of appeal as 
 possible. We will therefore meet the hypothetical objector on 
 his own ground, and examine the post-Augustinian history of 
 Fall-speculation in Western Christendom, in order to decide 
 whether or not, within this restricted sphere, the classical 
 “twice-born’ theory can reasonably claim acceptance ab 
 omnibus, and in the hope that this part of our historical survey 
 may provide suggestions which may be of use in the con- 
 structive part of our task. 
 
 We need not consider the Semi-Pelagian controversy, 
 which was concerned rather with the operations of ‘ grace’ 
 than with the nature of the Fall: it is to be noted, however, 
 that the second Council of Orange (A.D. 529), which brought 
 this controversy to an end, contents itself with affirming a 
 modified Augustinianism, which only predicates ‘ integrity’ 
 of unfallen man, abstains from affirming ‘ Original Guilt,’ 
 and asserts that whilst free-will was weakened by the Fall it 
 was not destroyed. Little of interest is to be gleaned from 
 the ‘ Dark Ages.’ Augustine continues to dominate the West 
 down to the beginning of the scholastic epoch, though Anselm 
 
 
 
XXIV SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 revives the idea that ‘ original sin’ consists mainly in the 
 lack of ‘ original righteousness,’ and Abaelard repudiates 
 ‘ original guilt.’ 
 
 The history of mediaeval thought on this subject is the 
 history of the gradual decline of the Augustinian view. This 
 decline manifested itself in two forms, associated respectively 
 with the Dominican and the Franciscan theologies, which 
 must be separately explained. 
 
 The Order of Friars Preachers was born in Provence, in 
 the midst of the struggle between Catholicism and the Albi- 
 genses or Catharists, who represented a recrudescence of 
 Manicheism. In accordance, it would seem, with a law already 
 noticed, that the invasion of Christendom by Oriental 
 dualism stimulates in the Church a revival of interest in, and 
 a tendency to intensify, the Fall-doctrine, Dominican thought 
 was naturally inclined towards the strict Augustinian teach- 
 ing. But, all unconsciously, it was constrained to modify 
 Augustinianism in order to preserve it. The teaching of St. 
 Thomas Aquinas may be taken as representative, and briefly 
 summarised: as before, we arrange it under the heads of the 
 * crucial issues ’ implicit in the Fall-doctrine. 
 
 The Thomist position. 
 
 (i) Man’s unfallen state. The Augustinian antithesis 
 between ‘ nature’ and ‘ grace’ reappears as a metaphysical 
 distinction between the natural and the supernatural 
 orders. Hence the distinction between the donum super- 
 naturale of ‘ Original Righteousness’ and man’s pura 
 natuvalia is emphasised and sharpened. 
 
 (ii) The nature of ‘ Original Sin’ The Fall was a fall 
 from the supernatural to the merely natural plane. It 
 follows that ‘ Original Sin’ consists in ‘ the lack of original 
 righteousness,’ and, logically, the pura naturalia should be 
 regarded as remaining unimpaired. St. Thomas, however, 
 feels obliged to retain the Augustinian idea of ‘ concu- 
 piscence’ as essentially evil, and hence he affirms that 
 “ concupiscence’ constitutes the matter, and the ‘ defect of 
 Original Righteousness’ the form, of Original Sin. Original 
 Sin involves guilt. But baptism annuls the guilt of con- 
 cupiscence, and leaves it as a morally neutral fomes peccati— 
 an important modification of the Augustinian view. 
 
 (iii) The mode of its transmission. The conception of 
 “seminal identity’ is translated into terms of motion; 
 Adam becomes an ethical primum mobile who ‘ moves’ his 
 descendants towards sin by begetting them. 
 
 (iv) The resultant state of human nature. The Augus- 
 tinian position is, if anything, emphasised; freewill is 
 verbally affirmed and constructively denied. 
 
 (v) The eschatological corollaries of Original Sin. 
 Augustine’s condemnation of the unbaptised to eternal 
 torments is tacitly dropped, and the more merciful con- 
 ception of Limbo substituted; this idea receives poetic 
 consecration from Dante, Inferno, Cant.iv. Here we have 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 a significant symptom of a tendency to revert to the earlier 
 view of ‘ Original Sin’ as a privatio rather than a depravatio. 
 
 The Franciscan position embodies a more definite and 
 decided revolt against Augustinianism, and shows a tendency 
 to return to the ‘ once-born’ view: of this, Duns Scotus may 
 be taken as the typical representative. His characteristic 
 opinions may be summed up as follows : 
 
 (i) ‘ Original Righteousness’ was a provisional state, 
 which would have been progressively confined by resistance 
 to temptations ; this idea points in the direction of a return 
 to the more primitive conception of the first man as un- 
 developed. This involves a milder view of the Fall, of 
 which the malice is expressly declared not to have been 
 infinite. 
 
 (ii) Hence ‘ Original Sin’ is a mere privatio consisting 
 solely in the lack of ‘ Original Righteousness,’ and con- 
 cupiscence is not sin at allin any sense. Scotus, however, 
 cannot shake himself so far free from Augustinianism as to 
 take the obvious next step of denying that this lack of 
 * Original Righteousness’ involves guilt. 
 
 (iii) Man, even as fallen, possesses full freedom of the 
 will; and a position as to the necessity of ‘ prevenient 
 grace’ is taken up which approximates to Semi-Pelagianism. 
 
 (iv) Limbo is conceived as a state not merely of no pain 
 but of positive pleasure. 
 
 Closely connected with this minimising version of the 
 Fall-doctrine are (a) the Scotist view of the Incarnation, 
 which holds that the Son of God would have in any case 
 assumed flesh, even if man had never fallen, and (db) the belief 
 in the exemption of Mary from Original Sin—a belief which 
 becomes the easier of acceptance the less ‘ Original Sin’ is 
 made to mean. 
 
 The allegiance of mediaeval thinkers was thus, broadly 
 speaking, divided between the modified Augustinianism of 
 St. Thomas and the almost anti-Augustinian view of Scotus. ? 
 It will be convenient to complete the history of the subject 
 so far as the Latin Church is concerned, before considering 
 the views of the Reformers. The decisions of the Council of 
 Trent represent a compromise between the modified Augus- 
 tinianism, championed by the Dominicans, and the minimising 
 view which the Jesuits had inherited from the Franciscans— 
 a compromise which was strongly in favour of the latter. The 
 subsequent condemnations of Baius and Jansen emphasised 
 the anti-Augustinian direction of Roman thought on this 
 subject, and the present Fall-doctrine of the Roman Church } 
 would appear to be largely Scotist, with the Augustinian idea of | 
 ‘Original Guilt ’ inconsistently adhering to it; the triumph} 
 of Scotism was consummated by the definition of the} 
 Immaculate Conception in 1854. 
 
 The history of the Augustinian Fall-doctrine within Latin 
 Christianity from Anselm to the present day might thus, on 
 the whole, be graphically represented by a steadily descending 
 curve. At the Reformation, however, and in the parts of 
 
 XXV 
 
XXV1 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 Christendom affected by it, the curve of Augustinian influence 
 suddenly soared up into a peak. Luther and Calvin were 
 responsible for an ultra-Augustinian doctrine of Man and Sin, 
 which is still popularly supposed to be the orthodox Christian 
 view, which was the basis of some of the more unlovely aspects 
 of Puritanism, and against which the conscience of England 
 and America has now largely revolted. Reasons for the 
 embodiment in Protestant theology of a rigid ‘ twice-born ’ 
 anthropology: (1) the Reformation itself was a colossal re- 
 \crudescence of the mystical, as opposed to the institutional, 
 elements in St. Augustine’s thought, and therefore demanded 
 a theory of man and sin which would make salvation ex- 
 \clusively God’s work and eliminate human effort and merit ; 
 (2) Luther himself, like St. Paul and St. Augustine, possessed 
 the ‘ twice-born ’ temperament in a high degree. 
 The Reformation made the Fall-doctrine, almost for the 
 first time, a matter of popular and not merely of theological 
 interest: compare many Calvinistic liturgical confessions, 
 which require the congregation to accuse itself of ‘ original ’ 
 as well as ‘ actual’ sin, with the Catholic Confiteor, which is a 
 confession of actual sin only. 
 
 The differences between Lutheranism and Calvinism on 
 this subject were inconsiderable, so that it is possible to deal 
 with the Protestant Fall-doctrine as a single body of ideas. 
 The foundation of the Reformers’ position was the denial of 
 the scholastic distinction between the donum supernaturale of 
 ‘Original Righteousness’ and the pura naturalia. Adam’s 
 supposed magnificent endowments were not conferred upon 
 him by way of a superadded adornment, as the Schoolmen 
 had taught, but belonged to him in right of his human nature. 
 It follows that the Fall was a fall not from the supernatural 
 to the natural plane (the scholastic teaching) but from the 
 natural to a sub-natural plane. Hence the Fall was the most 
 horrible catastrophe conceivable, and its result is to be found 
 in the ‘total depravity’ of human nature, which the Re- 
 formers depict in the blackest colours. All the actions of the 
 heathen, even apparently virtuous actions, are really sins. 
 The mere fact of the possession of ‘ concupiscence ’ is a mortal 
 sin, apart from and prior to its actual indulgence. ‘ Original 
 Guilt ’ is strongly affirmed, and, in the last analysis, ‘ Original 
 Sin ’ is the only real sin that exists, all actual sins being merely 
 epiphenomena revealing its malignant presence. It would 
 seem, in short, that it is criminal in the sight of heaven to be 
 born or to be a human being at all. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to point out that this conception 
 of human nature and sin rules out free-will: Luther is even 
 more emphatic on this point than Calvin. But theism, rigid 
 
 _, determinism, and the doctrine of ‘total depravity’ taken 
 “together inevitably make God the direct author of evil; and 
 this conclusion was accepted in set terms by Melancthon and 
 Calvin, who thus appear to land themselves in precisely that 
 unmoral Hindu monism which the Fall-doctrine was designed 
 to resist—a curious revolution of the wheel of thought. 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS XXVli 
 PAGE 
 The gloomy theory just described dominated Continental 
 Protestantism for two centuries, but has now shared the fate 
 of evangelical orthodoxy in general; the now dominant / 
 system of Ritschlianism has no place for any kind of Fall” 
 doctrine, Augustinian or other. The Anglican Articles were 
 doubtless meant by their compilers to rivet a decided Augus- 
 tinianism upon the English Church: but this interpretation 
 was Challenged by Jeremy Taylor in the seventeenth century 
 and Bishop Porteous in the eighteenth: and it would seem 
 that the relaxation of the terms of subscription in 1865 has set 
 the English Church free to handle the matter afresh. If we 
 set these facts side by side with the largely non-Augustinian 
 character of the present Roman Catholic Fall-doctrine, it will 
 be seen that the classical expression of the ‘twice-born’ 
 view has now all but disappeared from Christian thought, and 
 therefore fails to satisfy the Vincentian canon, even within 
 the restricted area of Western Christendom. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE C.—CONGREGATIONAL CONFESSIONS OF 
 ORIGINAL SIN IN THE CHURCHES OF THE REFORMATION 443 
 
 LECTURE VII.—‘ ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED . 447 
 
 As a result of the extended historical survey contained in 
 the last six lectures, we are now in a position to attempt a 
 definition of the ‘Catholic’ doctrine of the Fall and of 
 Original Sin—understanding by the term ‘the Catholic 
 doctrine ’ (as previously explained) the irreducible minimum of 
 Fall-doctrine which has been disclosed by our examination of 
 the history of Christian doctrine. This may be expressed in 
 the form of seven propositions, as follows : 
 
 (i) God is infinitely good, and therefore the world as He 
 made it must have been purely good, including no element of 
 evil at all. 
 
 (We note that the idea of Creation is here presupposed.) 
 
 (ii) The origin of evil is therefore to be sought in the 
 voluntary vebellion of some finite and created will or wills, 
 such rebellion having taken place prior to the appearance of 
 the human species on this planet. 
 
 (The ultimate ‘ Fall’ may, therefore, be conceived 
 either in accordance with Origen’s suggestion of a pre- 
 natal fall of individual souls, or as a pre-cosmic ‘ fall of 
 the angels,’ such as was inferred by an uncritical exegesis 
 from Rev. xii. 7 ff—the passage about the war between 
 Michael and the ‘ dragon.’) 
 
 (iii) Man, at his first entry into this world, was in moral 
 and intellectual stature a babe, created frail, imperfect, 
 ignorant, and non-moral, but endowed with self-consciousness 
 and the power of self-determination, which constituted his 
 starting-point for progress and upward evolution. 
 
 
 
 
 
XXVIl1 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 (The ‘irreducible residuum’ does not contain the 
 Rabbinical and non-Scriptural idea of ‘ Original 
 Righteousness,’ the abandonment of which abolishes the 
 apparent conflict between the Fall-doctrine and the 
 evolutionary view of human history.) 
 
 (iv) The growth of man’s moral ideas brought in its train 
 some action whereby man aligned himself with the revolting 
 power, partially identified himself with the forces of Evil, 
 and entered upon a path largely divergent from that straight 
 upward voad which God had meant him to follow. 
 
 (In other words, the first sin was not so much a‘ Fall’ 
 as a failure to climb, or, more exactly, to climb as directly 
 and perpendicularly as God desired. It will therefore be 
 well to avoid using the term ‘ Fall’ with reference to the 
 first human sin, and to keep it for designating the ultimate 
 pre-cosmic revolt, whatever that may have been. The 
 term ‘ Fall,’ again, is non-Biblical.) 
 
 (v) Ever since this first transgression, human nature has 
 displayed an inherent moral weakness or bias towards sin. 
 
 (It is to be noted that this proposition abstains from 
 asserting that the first transgression was the cause of the 
 innate bias towards evil.) 
 
 (vi) This innate bias or tendency towards evil is the 
 effect and symptom of ‘ weakness of will,’ or defective control 
 of the lower emotional and instinctive nature by the higher self. 
 
 (We have already seen, in Lectures V and VI, that 
 Catholic or universal acceptance cannot be claimed for 
 the specifically Augustinian or Western ideas of ‘ seminal 
 identity,’ ‘ Original Guilt,’ and the intrinsic sinfulness of 
 “concupiscence’; all these ideas, consequently, go by 
 the board. And the term ‘ Original Sin’ itself is non- 
 Biblical, and inextricably associated with the idea of 
 ‘Original Guilt’; we shall therefore avoid it for the 
 future, and use instead the term ‘ inherited infirmity.’) 
 
 (vii) This quality of ‘ weakness of will’ inheres in the 
 human stock as a hereditary character transmitted from parent 
 to offspring through biological and not merely through social 
 heredity, 
 
 Two corollaries which seem to follow from this general 
 position should be mentioned: (a) the ‘inherited infirmity,’ 
 being inherited and not wilful, cannot be thought of as 
 deserving God’s ‘wrath’; (b) thereis much to be said for the 
 Pelagian and scholastic conception of Limbo—the Augus- 
 tinian idea that unbaptised infants deserve hell is in any case 
 intolerable. 
 
 Of these seven propositions, the first five deal with what is 
 generally known as the ‘ Fall,’ and the last two with ‘ Original 
 Sin,’ so called. But we have seen that the former idea was 
 historically, and always must be, an inference from the latter. 
 To-day, therefore, we will restrict ourselves to the task of 
 deciding whether the ‘inherited infirmity’ is a psychological | 
 reality or not, leaving more metaphysical questions as to the : 
 origin of sin for our final lecture. 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 What is meant by the statement that the will is ‘ weak’ ? 
 This assertion is meaningless if the will enjoys unlimited 
 freedom, and equally meaningless if it is absolutely determined. 
 ‘Weakness’ must therefore imply the conception of ‘ partial 
 determinism ’—or ‘ partial indeterminism,’ which comes to the 
 same thing. This conception is intelligible enough; the only 
 question is whether it is true or not. To decide this, we must 
 examine the structure and working of human personality 
 in the light of recent knowledge. An apology should doubt- 
 less precede any fresh discussion of the world-old problem of 
 ‘ free-will’ ; it may, however, be possible to speak, nove, non 
 noua. 
 
 We proceed to sketch, in summary form, that picture of the 
 soul which recent psychology has built up, making free use of 
 symbol and metaphor. 
 
 (a2) The three areas of the soul—generally spoken of as 
 
 ‘though they were three storeys in a building—the conscious, 
 preconscious, and unconscious. The preconscious contains 
 the ‘sentiments’ or ‘complexes,’ conglomerates of ideas 
 and images which are charged with psychic energy and 
 toned with feeling. The unconscious is largely unexplored, 
 but may contain ‘ complexes’ which have been ‘ repressed ’ 
 owing to their incompatibility with the dominant purposive 
 organisation of the soul. 
 
 (o) The instincts : these are paths or channels conducting 
 the energy of the soul from its obscure source in the uncon- 
 scious, either directly into action or into the ‘ complexes’ 
 where it is stored until evoked by the appropriate stimulus. 
 Whatever the correct number and classification of the 
 primary instincts may be, there are three of special import- 
 ance and power—those connected with the maintenance and 
 assertion of the self, with sex, and with the ‘herd’; and 
 the corresponding ‘ complexes’ constitute the chief springs 
 of human action. 
 
 The main outlines of this structure are universally admitted 
 to be fixed by heredity ; if, therefore, there is such a thing as 
 the ‘inherited infirmity ’ assumed by traditional theology, it 
 should be discoverable somewhere in this framework. But the 
 alleged ‘infirmity’ has to do with moral action; we must 
 therefore scrutinise the ‘moral sentiment’ with some care. 
 This is built upon the ‘herd-complex’; but two cautions 
 must be borne in mind during our further investigation : 
 (i) we are not now concerned with the question of hereditary 
 criminality : this is a ‘ varietal character,’ and the ‘ infirmity ’ 
 postulated by theology is generic and universal ; (ii) the same 
 individual may belong to many ‘ herds’ and so possess many 
 herd-complexes : the only herd-complex which interests us is 
 that which centres in the idea of ‘human society.’ Inspection 
 shows us that this is normally far weaker than either the ego— 
 or the sex-complex; we therefore identify the ‘ inherited 
 infirmity ’ of theology with ‘ inherited weakness of herd-complex.’ 
 This is the privatio, revealed by the ‘ once-born’ type of 
 religious experience, and exaggerated by the ‘ twice-born ’ type 
 
 XX1X 
 
XXX SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 PAGE 
 
 into a positive depravatio; it does not, strictly speaking, 
 amount to a tendency towards ‘sin’ as such, but rather to a 
 tendency, experienced under al/ circumstances, towards action 
 which under given circumstances is sin. But this negative 
 conception of the ‘ inherited infirmity ’ implies no extenuation 
 of the melancholy results to which it leads. 
 
 The existence of a hereditary condition which tends to the 
 indulgence of self-regarding and sensual impulses in despite of 
 ‘conscience’ or the ‘moral sentiment’ would thus seem to 
 have been verified. But this line of thought, if followed out 
 consistently, proves too much for our purposes: for it lands 
 us, not in ‘ partial determinism,’ but in a determinism just as 
 ‘absolute’ as that which results from the older mechanistic 
 view of the mind. In the preceding description of the 
 vationale of conation and action, hardly anything was said 
 about the conscious ego, which occupies—or rather is—the 
 uppermost storey of the house of personality; and modern 
 psychology, especially of the medical type, is largely epi- 
 phenomenalistic, regarding the feeling of effort and struggle 
 as an illusion, and consciousness as the passive mirror of events 
 which it has had no share in causing. If we acquiesce in this 
 tendency to ignore the conscious ego as a real factor in the 
 causation of conduct, we shall have failed to vindicate what 
 our historical survey has taught us to regard as the basic 
 Christian doctrine of human nature; Augustinianism, having 
 been driven from the field of theology by means of the 
 Vincentian canon, will have returned in triumph with the 
 assistance of Freud. 
 
 The situation in regard to the question as to whether a 
 true spontaneous causality, acting within limits fixed by 
 heredity and environment, can be ascribed to the ego or not, 
 has not essentially altered since Kant. Determinism is the 
 necessary methodological postulate of science; but freedom 
 is the no less necessary assumption of moral education, and, 
 it may be added, of psycho-therapeutic practice as distinct 
 from theory. Wedo not pretend to be able to solve a problem 
 which is probably insoluble; but we may point out that 
 determinism is only necessary to a psychology which studies 
 the mind objectively and ab extra, whilst the consciousness of 
 ability to exert or not to exert effort is, from the subjective 
 and introspective point of view, a datum of immediate experi- 
 ence. The doctrine of ‘ partial determinism,’ which, whilst 
 admitting that conduct is the result of the interplay of stimulus, 
 complex, and instinct, nevertheless claims that consciousness 
 has, within limits, a real power of guiding the flow of psychic 
 energy into this complex rather than that, and of gradually 
 modifying the contents of the preconscious and unconscious by 
 voluntary ‘sublimation,’ would seem to be the only one which 
 does justice both to man’s moral and to his intellectual 
 experience. 
 
 ADDITIONAL Note D.—ORIGINAL SIN, ESCHATOLOGY, AND 
 FOREIGN MISSIONS . ‘ : : ‘ 2 - 486 
 

 
 SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 LEcTURE VIII.—THE ULTIMATE ‘ FALL’ : : 
 
 We have seen that the belief in a ‘ Fall’ is now, and— 
 despite the quasi-historical facade which has clung to it for 
 twenty centuries—always has been, an inference from the 
 fact of man’s ‘inherited infirmity,’ when considered in the 
 light of the belief in the infinite goodness of his Creator: it 
 is not a premise given by history. The doctrine of the Fall 
 is logically dependent on the doctrine of ‘ Original Sin’ (so 
 called), and not vice versa; it is a pinnacle, not a foundation, 
 of the Faith. It follows that Catholic Christianity as such is 
 committed to no more than the bare assertion that there was 
 
 a Fall—that is, a primal rebellion of a created will againsty/ 
 
 God; any attempts to fix the exact nature of this event 
 belong to the realm of speculation. But, though this antece- 
 dently contingent catastrophe, which our monotheistic belief 
 and the fact of the ‘inherited infirmity,’ taken together, 
 compel us to postulate, lies far back beyond the beginnings of 
 recorded history, it may be possible to arrive at some dim 
 conception of its nature by a Method of Residues, ruling out 
 various hypotheses which appear to be inconsistent either 
 with scientifically ascertained facts or with our fundamental 
 axiom, which is the reality of the God revealed in the Bible 
 and through Christ. 
 
 When we have had occasion to mention the ‘ Fall’ hitherto, 
 we have spoken of it as though it were an event in time, 
 capable, if we only had the requisite knowledge, of being dated 
 in a given year B.c. But a priovt reasoning, when applied to 
 the reconstruction of past events in time, lies under a not 
 undeserved suspicion. And as we have no evidence for a Fall 
 other than what can be derived from a priori reasoning, it is 
 natural to enquire in the first instance whether a temporal 
 conception of the Fall is rigorously necessitated by our two 
 premises, the goodness of God and the sinfulness of men. ., 
 May it not be easier to conceive the Fall as an extra-temporal ' 
 fact, the transcendental ‘ ground,’ rather than the historical ; 
 ‘cause,’ of the ‘inherited infirmity ’ and of all other forms of 
 concrete evil ? The simplest method of answering this question 
 will be to examine the two classical attempts which have been 
 made to lift the Fall out of the time-series—those associated 
 with the names of Kant and Hegel. If these philosophic 
 giants have failed to accomplish this feat, we may reasonably 
 conclude that it is in the nature of things impossible. 
 
 Kant’s discussion of the idea of the Fall is contained in his 
 treatise, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. 
 The empirical universality of evil is admitted, though it is 
 regarded as an inseparable accident rather than as an essential 
 constituent of human nature. It arises out of the adoption by 
 man of ‘law-contradicting maxims’ (geselzwidrige Maxime) 
 as motives of action in place of the maxims dictated by the 
 morallaw. These law-contradicting maxims are suggested by 
 the sensual nature, which, though not evil in itself, is the 
 
XXXli SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 source of evil in so far as it demands satisfaction regardless of 
 moral restraints. The fact that the sensual maxims do secure 
 universal acceptance is explained by the supposition of an 
 ‘inclination to evil’ (Hang zum Bosen). Thisisinborn. But 
 Kant, taking the Lutheran theology of his country for granted, 
 assumes that moral and religious experience informs us that we 
 are blameworthy for possessing this ‘inclination to evil’; in 
 other words, he assumes that religion as such is committed to 
 the idea of ‘ Original Guilt.” The inbred propensity to evil 
 must, accordingly, be somehow traceable to our own act. 
 
 But he sees the impossibility of basing the (supposed) 
 blameworthy hereditary condition upon the theory of ‘ seminal 
 identity ’ with Adam: in the case of each individual, there- 
 fore, it must be traceable to the individual’s own act, and each 
 man must be the Adam of hisown soul. But we have possessed 
 the inborn bias to evil from the moment of birth; how or 
 when, then, did we commit the act which produced it? To 
 solve this difficulty the dualism set up by Kant’s general 
 metaphysical position between the phenomenal and the 
 noitimenal selves is invoked. The ‘phenomenal ego’ is 
 temporal and determined, and the ‘ noitimenal ego ’ is timeless 
 and free. It is, therefore, to the latter that the fundamental 
 act of wrong choice must be assigned. The ‘ Fall’ in the case 
 of each individual is a ‘ timeless act ’ whereby his ‘ noimenal 
 self’ adopts the ‘ law-contradicting maxims’ as principles of 
 
 ;action. Instead of a single collective Fall in time, we have a 
 
 multiplicity of individual and extra-temporal falls—an idea 
 ‘which bears some resemblance to Origen’s earlier theory of a 
 multiplicity of pre-natal falls. 
 
 This conception, when stripped of technical terminology, 
 is open to grave objections. Strictly speaking, a ‘ timeless 
 act’ appears to mean nothing: for an ‘act’ must involve 
 some change, if not in the world external to the agent, at least ; 
 in the agent himself, and change implies succession and time. 
 But if the word ‘ act ’ really means‘ state,’ we are left with the 
 hypothesis of an eternal and presumably necessary evil prin- 
 ciple existing in all notimenal selves, or all selves considered 
 as notmenal, In other words, Kant’s theory seems to be 
 either meaningless or Manichean. 
 
 Hegel’s reinterpretation of the Fall-doctrine is expounded 
 in the Philosophie der Religion, 3. Theil (Die absolute Religion), 
 § II (Das Reich des Sohnes). It finds the source of evilin the 
 separateness of the individual soul from the rest of the uni- 
 verse—in other words, in individuality and self-consciousness, 
 From this it follows that sin is a necessary phase of the 
 soul’s evolution, and, though undesirable in itself, is less 
 
 evil than innocence. We have already met with this theory 
 ‘in the course of our historical review ; it is nothing other than 
 a form of that Gnosticism which stimulated the revival and 
 development of the Fall-theory by Irenaeus in the second 
 century. It both involves and presupposes that conception 
 of an unmoral and impersonal Absolute which lies at the root 
 of the religious thought of India, but is totally irreconcileable 
 
 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS XXXiil 
 
 with the conception of God characteristic of Semitic religion 
 and of the Bible. 
 
 We conclude, then, that the instinct of the Maccabean } 
 Jews was right, and that it is impossible to lift the Fall out | 
 of the time-series without falling either into Manicheism or 
 unmoral monism. Whether we like it or not, so much would j 
 appear to be certain (given our premises), namely, that ‘ the 
 Fall,’ whatever else it may have been, must have been an event 
 in time. We now approach a second question raised by Kant, 
 and by Origen before him, namely this: Is it necessary to 
 suppose a single collective Fall, or will a multiplicity of 
 individual falls suffice? The latter would have to be con- 
 ceived as pre-natal, inasmuch as (according to the conclusion 
 just reached) they would have to be in time and yet outside 
 our present phenomenal lives. This theory of pre-natal falls 
 enjoys a certain popularity in connexion with Theosophy, and 
 it will therefore be worth while to examine its classical 
 presentation as embodied in Julius Miller’s ‘ Christian 
 Doctrine of Sin.’ This examination, however, reveals two 
 fatal objections: (1) Miiller’s theory makes heredity to be 
 a mere illusion, produced by a mysterious pre-established 
 harmony of the pre-existing psychic monads; (2) it assumes 
 an intolerably pessimistic (again, almost Manichean) view of 
 this world and of human life as lived within it. We are, 
 therefore, driven back upon the hypothesis of a single, collective 
 Fall in time: Coleridge’s suggestion of a Fall of the race-soul 
 presents certain attractions. 
 
 This probably represents the furthest point in our regressive 
 quest of the origin of evil that can be reached by a priori 
 reasoning. We must, therefore, consider if the hypothesis 
 formulated above can be given further substance and articula- 
 tion by the consideration of a posteriort evidence provided by 
 the history of the world and of our species as now known to us. 
 Such evidence would seem to make it certain that the origin 
 of evil cannot be found in ‘ the first human sin.’ For: 
 
 (i) The continuity of man’s upward evolution, both 
 physical and psychic, from the brute, makes it very doubtful 
 whether there ever was a single action which could be 
 described in an absolute manner as ‘ the first sin’; instinct 
 can only gradually have given birth to conscious self- 
 determination, and non-moral reactions must have shaded 
 by imperceptible degrees into moral behaviour. 
 
 (ii) Even if it were possible to fix upon some act of 
 individual or group which could be labelled with certainty as 
 the ‘ first known sin,’ this could not be identified with ‘ the 
 Fall’; for (a) it must have occurred far too long after the 
 emergence of man as a distinct zoological species to have 
 affected the whole stock; (b) such an identification would 
 presuppose thetransmissibility of acquired characters, ahypo- 
 thesis which is far too uncertain to be built on with safety. 
 
 In any case, sin presupposes the moral sentiment, and this,’ 
 as we have seen, is the outgrowth of ‘ herd-instinct ’ ; it | 
 follows that the ‘ first known sin ’ would be, not the cause, but ! 
 
 ~~ 
 
XXXIV SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS 
 
 ho 
 
 ~ 
 
 the first known effect of that deficiency in ‘ herd-instinct ’ with 
 which we have identified the ‘ inherited infirmity ’ of theology. 
 The Rabbis were right when they said that Adam fell because 
 he already had the ‘ evil inclination ’ within him. 
 
 The cause of evil in man would thus seem to be historically 
 prior to man. Can we assume that the defect of ‘ herd- 
 instinct’ was simply inherited by man from his animal 
 ancestors ? Apparently not: there is no reason for supposing 
 that the ‘sub-men’ were less loyal to their packs or hordes 
 than wolves or hyenas now. The fact is that the defect of 
 herd-instinct in man is relative to the enormous growth of self- 
 consciousness which distinguishes him from the brutes; the 
 corporate instinct in him has not kept pace with the increasing 
 demands of the complex societies which his expanding intellect 
 has created. What is wrong with man is that he has just 
 enough ‘ herd-instinct ’ for an anthropoid, but not enough for 
 a man; he is suffering from arrested development of ‘ herd- 
 instinct.’ But what arrested the development ? At present 
 we can only assume that some unknown and positively 
 malignant factor intervened in the crisis of the birth of the 
 race. (It must be expected that our conclusions will become 
 less and less precise, the further we penetrate back into the 
 tunnel of the past.) 
 
 Perhaps we may gain light upon the nature and source of 
 this positive evil factor, which seems to have been revealed 
 as lying behind the negative defect of ‘weakness of herd- 
 instinct,’ if we consider man’s context—that is, the rest of 
 organic nature. Evil in sub-human nature (which mainly 
 takes the form of ‘cruelty’ or ‘selfishness ’) is positive and 
 not merely negative, and objective in character, not subjective 
 (z.e. to us, looking on as spectators, it appears as that which 
 ought not to be, but to the beasts which work it in blind 
 obedience to instinct it doubtless appears as natural). The 
 cat has no qualms of conscience about playing with the mouse. 
 Nevertheless we cannot but feel that we should not have 
 created a universe containing the cobra and the bacillus of 
 diphtheria, had we occupied the position of Demiurge; why, 
 then, should God have doneso? The answer can only be that 
 
 He did not do so; the evil which exists in organic nature, — 
 
 apparently coeval with it and worked into its very tissue, 
 cannot be due to the all-loving Creator. Weare thus led tothe 
 hypothesis of a pre-cosmic vitiation of the whole Life-Force, 
 at the very beginning of cosmic evolution: this, it would 
 seem, and not the failure of primitive man to escape from 
 already existing evil, is the true and ultimate ‘ Fall.’ Such 
 a view of the Fall and its effects is much vaster and more 
 awe-inspiring than that which makes it a purely human 
 affair; and it proportionately increases the amplitude and 
 magnificence of Redemption. 
 
 To avoid both dualism and an infinite regress, we must 
 suppose that the Life-Force corrupted itself—which means 
 
 ” that we must conceive it as having been, at its creation, 
 
 personal and free—a self-conscious anima mundt, like the ‘ only 
 begotten universe-god ’ of Plato’s Timaeus. The Father of all 
 
 Paar Manan 
 
 
 
SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS XXXV 
 
 PAGE 
 things must have created this World-Soul good; but at the 
 beginning of time, in some transcendental and incompre- 
 hensible manner it turned away from Him and towards Self, 
 thus staining its own essence and, perhaps, forfeiting self- 
 consciousness, which it has only regained after aeons of myopic 
 striving, in sporadic fragments, which are the separate minds 
 of men. This interior perversion of its being—this orientation 
 away from God, and in the direction of ruthless self-assertion— 
 manifested itself in the struggle for existence, so soon as the 
 anima mundi was able to express itself in organic forms at all ; 
 it appears in the cruelty which ravages the animal world, in 
 the unknown factor which hindered the due development of 
 ‘herd-instinct ’ just when the anthropoids were becoming men, 
 and in the mysterious outbreaks of fiendishness which we call 
 ‘ criminality.’ 
 
 The conception just outlined has some affinities with the 
 thought of Plotinus, who makes the World-Soul the third 
 member of his Trinity. But we diverge decisively from him 
 in regard to two points, viz.: (i) the World-Soul for us is a 
 created being, not an element in a part of, or a necessary 
 emanation from, the Godhead; (ii) whereas Plotinus finds 
 (what corresponds to) the ‘ Fall’ in the detachment of the 
 human soul from the World-Soul, we find the Fall in the 
 voluntary deviation of the World-Soul from conformity with 
 the will of the Creator. Yet, though we cannot identify the 
 created anima mundi with the eternal Logos of God, Who is the 
 “express image of His substance,’ we must recognise an intimate; 
 relation between the Life-Force of the universe and the Divine 
 Person Who ‘ upholds all things by the word of His power.’, 
 This relation was meant to consist in the penetration, inspira- 
 tion, and guidance of the created by the Uncreated power ;. 
 and the rebellion of the former has not banished the patiently | 
 working influences of the latter. Before man was, the Spirit of 
 Christ was striving with the evil in nature: and since the} 
 emergence of man, the Word of God has worked in saint and 
 sage to counteract the languor of the ‘inherited infirmity,’ 
 finally assuming flesh as one of our own race to inaugurate the 
 final act of salvation, whereby, in the perfected Kingdom of 
 God, not only men, but superhuman and sub-human beings, and 
 the basic World-Soul itself, will be redeemed from the bondage 
 of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTES: 
 E.—Dr. F. R. TENNANT’S ALTERNATIVE THEORY OF THE 
 ORIGIN OF SIN ; : ‘ : : : 530 
 F.—FORMULARIES 4 4 ; : ; ' ; 537 
 G.—INFANT BAPTISM . : 3 : : : - 550 
 H.—PASSAGES BEARING ON THE FALL-DOCTRINE FROM 
 PRE-AUGUSTINIAN WRITERS NOT MENTIONED IN 
 Lecture -LVi).*: ; : : : : : 554 
 INDICES: 
 I.— REFERENCES ¢ : : : ; : : 561 
 II.—AUTHORS ; ; . : 4 ° : ‘ 564 
 III.—SvuBJECTS ; ; 7 A A ; : : 568 
 
+ age 
 
 AY aie <A 
 ‘stis ay me : - at" 
 oN 
 
 Haris 
 
 Tk “Efe 
 
 r 
 i as “ t 
 
 i. Hi ie 
 
 Ying af ‘A 
 
 we il 
 
 vu 
 
 es he 
 
 Veg Mm) Vath 5 AA 
 
 iN ig 
 
 eh hes 
 
 a s hee 
 6a wei enn } 
 a ou iwi ven 
 
 ' 14 a t . 
 oe ea - the y ‘ oe debi! we vA bs i 
 Oey a ee Oh i hs nae ie 
 hats Neh er et a 
 
 Yat F : 7 
 bianicgs Gy Pa AL we, 
 
 f _' 
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 a, 
 
 
 
ABBREVIATIONS 
 
 Authorised Version. 
 
 Church Quarterly Review. 
 
 Dictionary of the Bible (Hastings). 
 
 Dictionary of Christian Biography (Smith and Wace). 
 
 Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (Vacant-Mangénot). 
 
 Encyclopaedia Biblica. 
 
 Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Hastings). 
 
 International Critical Commentary. 
 
 Jewish Encyclopaedia. 
 
 Jewish Quarterly Review. 
 
 Journal of Theological Studies. 
 
 Real-Enzyklopadie fir prot. Theologie u. Kirche® (Herzog-Hauck, 
 1896-1913). 
 
 Patrologia Graeca (Migne). 
 
 Patrologia Latina (Migne). 
 
 Revised Version. 
 
 Textus Receptus of the New Testament. 
 
 Westcott and Hort’s Text of the New Testament. 
 
i 
 
 ERRATUM 
 
 Page 354 ”. 3: for hist. ane. read hist. anc. 
 
 
 
I, 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 
 
Our life is a false nature—’tis not in 
 
 The harmony of things,—this hard decree, 
 This uneradicable taint of sin, 
 
 This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree, 
 
 Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be 
 The skies which rain their plagues on men like dew— 
 
 Disease, death, bondage, all the woes we see— 
 And worse, the woes we see not, which throb through 
 The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new. 
 
 Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, iv. 126. 
 
 
 
LECTUREGE 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 
 
 Wisdom ix. 16. Hardly do we divine the things that are on earth, 
 And the things that are close at hand we find with 
 labour, 
 But the things that are in the heavens who ever yet 
 traced out ? 
 
 THE problem of evil is at once the most momentous, most 
 terrible, and most intractable question which has ever 
 vexed the thoughts of man. This vast and multiform 
 enigma, written visibly upon the nature of things, has 
 seemed in every age to cry aloud at least for such a measure 
 of explanation as shall make its continued presence en- 
 durable, both in thought and life. Whether it meets us 
 in the sub-human world as physical evil, pain and suffer- 
 ing, the blind cruelty of Nature ‘red in tooth and claw 
 with ravin,’ or in the works of man as aesthetic evil and 
 ugliness, such as broods over the dreary streets of some 
 squalid industrial town, or in the mind of man himself as 
 intellectual evil, error or superstition, or in the central 
 citadel of personality as moval evil, uncleanness, and sin, 
 we instinctively feel ourselves in the presence of a single 
 Protean power, which in all its manifold shapes is one in 
 essence, springing from a single fount which lies beyond our 
 ken. It may still have been possible, exactly ten years 
 ago,! at the beginning of the fateful year 1914, for men to 
 dismiss the problem of its genesis with a light-hearted 
 soluitur ambulando, and to console themselves for the 
 impossibility of accounting for the origin of evil by the 
 assurance of its necessary and speedy extinction, as the 
 result of an irresistible upward trend of moral evolution 
 
 1 The introduction to this first lecture is printed exactly as delivered. 
 
4 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 assumed to be in automatic conformity with the ascending 
 curve of material, mechanical, and scientific advance. But 
 the events through which humanity has lived since then 
 have for ever dispelled such a credulous optimism. The 
 countless graves in which the most vigorous of the race now 
 sleep, and the living legacy of mutilation, -blindness, and 
 madness which the great catastrophe has left behind it, 
 have decisively refuted the dogma of a necessary moral 
 progress implicit in mental evolution. Nor is it now 
 possible to fall back upon the conception of an unlimited 
 freedom of the will, and to regard evil as neither requiring 
 nor being capable of any further explanation than the 
 arbitrary and incalculable choice of conscious, self-determin- 
 ing agents, in the light of the melancholy, if less immediately 
 disastrous, sequence of events which has unrolled itself 
 since the peace. Humanity, as it feels itself slowly drawn, 
 against its will, by the ever-quickening current of uncon- 
 trollable race-hatreds towards the Niagara of another 
 disaster even more dreadful than that from which it has 
 just emerged, has good occasion to utter from its heart the 
 cry of the Apostle ‘ Who shall deliver me from the body of 
 this death ?’1 If our race is to be saved from the inexplic- 
 cable madness which from time to time impels it to destroy 
 both itself and its achievements, it needs in the first instance > 
 light and knowledge—light upon the mysterious source and 
 potency of Evil, and knowledge of its own wayward nature ; 
 and whither should it look for light and knowledge but to 
 Religion, its ancient kindly teacher, so long neglected during 
 the days of prosperity, yet claiming still to be its heaven- 
 descended guide? No complete solution of the problem 
 of Evil is attainable with our present faculties, still less a 
 logically perfect Theodicy, or vindication of the ways of 
 God tomen: but Religion, if it is what it claims to be, must 
 provide us at least with an indication, sufficient for the 
 practical purposes of life, of the direction in which the 
 solution lies. 
 
 If we study the history of Religion, we shall find in it 
 three classical answers to the problem of Evil, which in 
 their most typical forms are known to us as evolved by the 
 
 1 ‘Rom. vil. 24. 
 
THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 5 
 
 creative thought of three races, each corporately gifted in a 
 singular degree with that sensitiveness to the influences of 
 the Divine and that thirst for immediate contact with and 
 possession of Ultimate Reality which in the individual are 
 the hall-marks of spiritual genius. Perhaps the most 
 ancient of these reasoned answers is that which, ever since 
 the composition and canonisation of the Upanisads,! has 
 characterised the deepest philosophic and religious thought 
 of the Hindu branch of the Aryan race; it consists in the 
 affirmation that Evil is appearance, the inevitable con- 
 comitant of individual, finite, and relative existence, and 
 that the Absolute, the eternal One which is the timeless and 
 changeless substrate of the fleeting phenomenal Many, lies 
 as infinitely far beyond the opposition of good and bad as 
 it transcends the distinction of personal and impersonal, 
 and even the final antithesis of Being and Non-Being, in 
 the incomprehensible depths of its all-embracing inanity. 
 This view of God, the World, and Evil may be compendi- 
 ously described as‘ unmoral’ or‘ praeter-moral’monism. As 
 generally expounded in the Vedanta philosophy (that is, 
 the system of thought which is partly contained in, and 
 partly has been educed by commentators from, the 
 Upanisads) it does not deny an imperfect and subordinate 
 degree of reality to the phenomenal world,” but, as developed 
 to its extremest pitch in the teaching of Buddhism, it 
 involves as a necessary corollary the doctrine of Maya or 
 illusion, that is, the belief in the complete non-reality and 
 non-entity of phenomena, including the individual self. 
 From this doctrine follows the profoundly pessimistic theory 
 of redemption offered to mankind by the pure and lofty 
 genius of Gautama—a theory which sees salvation only in 
 the dissipation of the illusion of self-hood, with its con- 
 
 1 For the gradual revolution, marked by the growth of these books, 
 and covering the period from the eighth to the sixth century B.c., which 
 substituted the idea of the one supreme impersonal Being, called Brahman, 
 for the animistic pantheon of the Vedas, see J. N. Farquhar, A Primer of 
 Hinduism (1911), cc. IV, V (‘ The Philosophic Period ’) ; cf. also Hastings, 
 ERE, art. ‘ Upanisads’ and P. Deussen, Philosophy of the Upanishads 
 (Edinburgh, 1906). 
 
 The most important Upanigads have been translated by F. Max Miller, 
 
 Sacred Books of the East, vols. i., xv. 
 2 F. Max Miller, The Vedanta Philosophy, pp. 126-132. 
 
6 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 comitant extinction of desire, and escape from the weary 
 burden of Karma, achieved through successive cycles of 
 reincarnation and death; and bids men concentrate their 
 hope upon the supreme moment when the soul attains 
 Nirvana by stripping itself of the last shred of individual 
 passion and self-consciousness, and slides like a drop into 
 the ocean of the infinite Nothing, which is the All. 
 
 Second in order of time is the answer given by the other 
 branch of the Eastern Aryan family, the Iranian Persians, 
 in whose national religion, as elaborated by the Magi 
 (though not as originally promulgated by Zarathushtra?’), 
 the mysterious power of Evil, vaguely felt as all-pervasive, 
 is personified as a malevolent God, Angra Mainyu or Ahriman, 
 locked in Titanic conflict with Ahura Mazdah, the God of 
 wisdom, goodness, and light. This is the answer of dualism, 
 which regards Good and Evil, light and darkness, as equally 
 rooted in the structure of reality, not as mere appearances, 
 but as coaeval hypostases or substantive beings, existing 
 from eternity in their own right, and dividing the realm of 
 phenomenal being between them. So far as this Magian 
 dualism was able to evolve a theory of redemption at all, 
 it did not progress beyond the crude conception of an 
 unexplained future victory of the good God over the oppos- 
 ing power of evil, or of the ultimate collapse of the latter as 
 
 1 I here follow the great authority of J. H. Moulton, according to 
 whose Early Zoroastrianism (1913), p. 201 ff., Zarathushtra’s own doctrine 
 of evil, as expressed in the Gathas, ‘ amounted only to a strengthening of 
 the Iranian doctrine of Truth as the highest virtue, with Falsehood as 
 the sum of all evil. To that source of every wrong the Prophet attached 
 a descriptive title, Angra Mainyu, which, however, he did not make into 
 arealname. It seems a reasonable conjecture that the Magi commended 
 their own dogma of a division of the world between good and evil powers— 
 a mere relic of animism, which gave birth to a dreary ritual of apotropaic 
 spells—by adapting the Gathic titles of Ahura Mazdah and Angra Mainyu’ 
 (p. 202). A. V. Williams Jackson, on the other hand, thinks that Mazdean 
 dualism is ultimately the product of Zarathushtra’s own genius (‘ Die 
 iranische Religion,’ in Grundriss dey Iran. Philologie, ii. (1900), pp. 627- 
 631). In any case, however, the idea that there exists an evil Creator, 
 independent of and hostile to the Good Spirit, is so thoroughly engrained 
 into the later Avestan system as amply to justify the expression ‘ Persian’ 
 or ‘ Mazdean’ dualism, which will frequently occur in the text ; see L. C. 
 Casartelli, Philosophy of the Mazdayasnian Religion under the Sassanids, 
 E. tr. (Bombay, 1889), pp. 50-54; and F. Cumont, Oriental Religions 
 in Roman Paganism, E. tr. (Chicago, 1911), p. 151, ‘ Persia introduced 
 dualism as a fundamental principle in religion.’ 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 7 
 
 brought about by the malignant natural forces which are 
 its own creations and instruments.1 The means whereby 
 man may assist Ahura Mazdah in his aeonian battle with 
 Angra Mainyu, and prepare himself for eternal blessedness 
 after death, consist in manthras or spells and purificatory 
 rites of the most mechanical and materialistic description ; 
 though the noblest form of the Iranian religion, Mithraism, 
 deduced from the idea of the struggle between the good and 
 the evil Gods, and of the obligation incumbent upon man 
 to take an active part in the war on the side of good, an 
 austere and exalted morality,? which, in the second and third 
 centuries of our era made the religion of the ‘ unconquered 
 Sun’ the most formidable rival of the religion of Christ, 
 and all but secured for it the domination of Western 
 Europe.® 
 
 Last of all, opposed in the sharpest possible manner to 
 both of these theories, and destined to wage for twenty 
 centuries unremitting warfare upon them, emerges the third 
 classical answer which Religion has given to the enigma of 
 Evil: the answer which was born of the spiritual experience 
 of the Semitic race, flowering in the lofty ethical monotheism 
 to which the people of Israel ultimately attained, the answer 
 which, against all views, whether monistic or dualistic, 
 involving the eternity or necessity of evil, proclaims its 
 temporal character and contingency. This answer is what 
 we are accustomed to call the doctrine of the Fall and of 
 Original Sin. As developed by the Christian Church, which 
 claims to be Israel’s true representative and heir, it boldly 
 asserts that Evil in all its forms—physical, aesthetic, 
 intellectual, and moral—though to a certain limited degree 
 and in certain spheres from a human point of view apparently 
 inevitable, is yet from God’s point of view contingent ; that 
 
 1 Plutarch, de Is. et Osir. 47: €mevor 5é xpdvos etpappevos, €v @ Tov *Apes- 
 pdviov, Aoumov émayovra Kal ALpov, b1d TovTwv avayKyn POapfvar wavTamace Kal 
 adaviabfvar k. T. A. 
 
 2 Cumont, Oviental Religions, p. 157 f. 
 
 ® In 307 A.D., six years before the liberation of Christianity by the 
 Edict of Milan, the emperors Diocletian, Galerius, and Licinius met at* 
 Carnuntum on the Danube, and dedicated a sanctuary there to Mithra, 
 ‘the protector of their empire’ (fautori imperii sui) (Corpus Inscr. Lat. 
 ITI. 4413; cf. Cumont, Monuments et textes relatifs aux mystéves de Mithra, 
 i. p. 281). 
 
8 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 it might not, and need not, have been at all; that its origin 
 is to be found in the self-determined rebellion, in some 
 ‘dark backward and abysm of time,’ of a finite, created 
 will or wills against the all-holy will of the infinite Creator ; 
 and that this remote primaeval catastrophe has marred the 
 fair order of the universe and vitiated the stream of life in 
 brute and man and whatever there may be of discarnate 
 intelligence superior to man, in such a way that the tares of 
 pain and ugliness and sin are, in the world as we know it, 
 inextricably intermingled with the fair harvest which the 
 creative fecundity of the Divine Spirit has brought forth 
 in the wonders of nature and the triumphs of human 
 achievement. This is the traditional Christian solution, 
 or adumbration of a solution, of the problem of Evil. If 
 it is true, it would appear to embody precisely that informa- 
 tion as to man’s wayward nature and the relations in which 
 he stands towards the moral order of the universe which he 
 needs, and has never needed more than now, in order to 
 re-shape his course in accordance with reality in a world of 
 confusion and change. It may therefore be hoped that the 
 critical examination of these doctrines in respect of their 
 origin, content, and validity which the present lectures 
 purpose to undertake will be justified, not merely by the 
 theoretical interest which attaches to them in the mind of the 
 professed theologian, but by their profound and intimate 
 bearing, which affects theologian and layman alike, upon 
 the possibility of a moral re-orientation of mankind. 
 
 There is, however, a second reason, of no less weight for 
 the reflective Christian, which, as I venture to think, justifies 
 the choice of these mysterious doctrines as the subject of 
 our enquiry. Even if the question of the source of evil were 
 not suggested by the present condition of the world, it would 
 still be pressed upon our attention by the exigencies of 
 modern religious thought. There was a time when the 
 scheme of orthodox dogma appeared to all as an unshakeable 
 adamantine framework, reposing upon the two pillars of the 
 Fall and of Redemption. These two complementary con- 
 ceptions—that of the great apostasy, which defaced the 
 image of God in man, and that of the great restoration through 
 the Incarnation and the Atonement, which renewed it—were 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 9 
 
 universally taken for granted as the twin focal points which 
 determined the ellipse of traditional theology: and the 
 imagination of Christians loved to play around the paral- 
 lelism of Adam and Christ—‘ the first man, of the earth, 
 earthy,’ ‘the second man’ who is “ of heaven ’1—of the virgin 
 Eve and the Virgin Mary,” of the death-bringing Tree of 
 Knowledge and the life-giving Tree of the Cross. This idea 
 of the double foundation of the Christian Faith is tersely 
 summed up in Pascal’s aphorism—‘ Toute la foi consiste en 
 Jésus-Christ et en Adam: et toute la morale en la concu- 
 piscence et en la grace.’ * But the days when this conviction 
 reigned unchallenged were days when most men believed 
 that they dwelt in a comparatively small, geocentric universe, 
 not more than five thousand years old, which had been con- 
 structed in six literal days, and still contained the terrestrial 
 paradise with its flaming Cherubim and its wonderful trees, 
 concealed by divine power in some inaccessible region of the 
 earth. Since then, the world in which we live has expanded 
 like a wizard’s creation, at the touch of the magic wand of 
 Science: the imagination is staggered by the illimitable 
 leagues of interstellar space and the uncounted aeons of 
 geologic time; biology proclaims the unbroken continuity 
 of man’s descent from the brutes, and anthropology can find 
 no room for the idea of his paradisal perfection. It is not 
 too much to say that, whilst for professed and genuine 
 Christians the second great pillar of the faith, the doctrine 
 of Redemption, remains unshaken, founded upon direct 
 
 fet. COT, XV. 47. 
 2 For the beginnings of this idea in the Christian Fathers of the second 
 century, see below, Lecture IV, p. 174. 
 3 Cf. Iren. adv. haer. V, 19. 1, and also the second and third stanzas 
 of the great Passiontide hymn Pange lingua (Venantius Fortunatus, 530- 
 609 A.D.) : 
 ‘de parentis protoplasti fraude facta condolens 
 quando pomi noxialis morte morsu conruit, 
 ipse lignum tunc notavit, damna ligni ut solveret, 
 
 hoc opus nostrae salutis ordo depoposcerat, 
 multiformis perditoris arte ut artem falleret, 
 et medellam ferret inde, hostis unde laeserat.,’ 
 
 with the parallels quoted by A. S. Walpole, Early Latin Hymns, p. 168. 
 
 4 Pensées sur la Religion, Art. XVI, ii. 
 5 Cf. S. Thomas Aq., Summa theol. iia iiae, q. clxiv. a. 2, ad 5. 
 
10 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 experience of the redeeming love of God in Christ, even they 
 have the uneasy feeling that the first pillar, the doctrine of 
 the Fall, has been irretrievably undermined, and totters on 
 its base, no longer capable of bearing its former share of the 
 super-incumbent weight. There are, indeed, those who urge 
 that it is now a source of weakness rather than of strength 
 to the fabric which it supported for so long, and should be 
 razed to the ground. Whether this be so or not, it will be 
 admitted that there is urgent need for a re-investigation of 
 the question, and, if not for an abandonment of the tradi- 
 tional doctrine, at least for a ‘ re-statement’ of it, in the 
 strict and legitimate sense of that term. 
 
 Before, however, we can approach the task of evaluating 
 the doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin, with an eye to 
 the possibility of such re-statement, another, much more 
 difficult and delicate, operation must be performed, namely, 
 that of defining what precisely they are. It is noticeable 
 that Dr. F. R. Tennant, in his monumental discussions of 
 this subject, from time to time alludes to what he calls ‘ the 
 ‘ecclesiastical doctrine ’ with regard to the Fall and Original 
 Sin, without explicitly defining either the denotation or the 
 connotation of this phrase A careful examination of the 
 contexts in which the phrase occurs seems to justify the 
 inference that it is meant to denote either the doctrine 
 contained in the Thirty-Nine Articles, or else the highest 
 common factor of the doctrines contained in the Anglican 
 Articles, the Decrees of the Council of Trent, and the 
 Confessions of Augsburg and Westminster.? 
 
 1 As, for instance, in The Origin and Propagation of Sin, 1902 (Hulsean 
 Lectures), pp. 3, 4,5; Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin, 
 1903, Pp. 2, 104, 272, 274, 282, 299 (note 3), 343; art. ‘ Original Sin’ in 
 ERE ix. pp. 558, col. b, 560, col. b, 564, col. a. 
 
 2 Itis, in fact, implied (Origin and Propagation, p. 5) that ‘ the doctrine 
 of original sin’ (italics mine)—which presumably is the same thing as 
 “the ecclesiastical doctrine ’—is for all practical purposes identical with 
 the Augustinian teaching; and Appendix A, op. cit., p. 151, which is 
 entitled ‘ The Doctrine of Original Sin in Christian Confessions,’ confines 
 itself to extracts from the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Decrees of Trent, and 
 four Protestant Confessions. It is remarkable that the teaching of the 
 Eastern Orthodox Church is only alluded to in the vaguest possible manner 
 (. . . ‘it would appear that on several points the teaching of the Greek 
 Church with regard to the Fall and original sin is in agreement with that 
 of Rome’); and yet the Holy Eastern Church by itself constitutes a 
 fifth of Christendom. 
 
 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 11 
 
 If, however, we wish to consider the matter in a spirit 
 of scientific impartiality, it will be impossible to assume, 
 without previous enquiry, that any one of the types of 
 teaching embodied in these Western and comparatively 
 recent formularies, or even the highest common factor of 
 them taken together, necessarily represents ‘ the ecclesias- 
 tical doctrine,’ if this phrase be taken in its natural sense of 
 ‘the doctrine of the Christian Church as a whole.’ Though 
 it is not necessary for our present purposes to lay down any 
 detailed theory of ‘ the Church’ or to fix its exact limits, we 
 shall hardly be challenged if we assume that the Universal 
 Church of God is something far more vast and spacious than 
 the Church of England, the Church of Rome, the Lutheran 
 or the Calvinistic communions, and that no existing con- 
 fessional document is likely to contain more than a partial 
 and provincial expression of its fundamental mind. But, 
 when we enquire for an accurate index of that fundamental 
 mind, a clear statement of the irreducible essence of Fall- 
 doctrine to which historic Christianity as such is committed, 
 we are faced by a remarkable absence of universally authori- 
 tative definition. Neither the Nicene nor the Apostles’ 
 Creed contains any direct allusion to the subject, nor can 
 any positive and detailed information be gathered from the 
 decrees of the undisputed Oecumenical Councils.1. The only 
 means, therefore, which will enable us to collect and fix the 
 diffused essence of the Christian doctrines of Man and of Sin 
 must be found in a comprehensive survey of the history of 
 these ideas, combined with an application of the canon laid 
 down some fifteen centuries ago, by St. Vincent of Lerinum, 
 that that alone is to be accounted truly Catholic which has 
 been believed ‘ everywhere, always, and by all.’? Let me 
 hasten to add that I propose in the first instance to employ 
 this criterion, that of universal consent, as a means, not of 
 establishing the objective truth of these doctrines, but merely 
 
 -1 For a discussion of the significance which may be attributed to the 
 censure pronounced upon the adherents of Caelestius by the Council of 
 Ephesus, see Lecture V, pp. 354, 387. 
 
 2 commonitorium, ii. 6: ‘in ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere 
 curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus 
 creditum est. hoc est etenim vere proprieque catholicum, quod ipsa vis 
 nominis ratioque declarat, quae omnia fere universaliter comprehendit.’ 
 
12 ‘THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of defining their exact content. When that content has 
 been finally determined—when we know what the doctrines 
 actually are—then, and not till then, can we address: our- 
 selves to the task of deciding whether they correspond to 
 the facts of nature and life or not. The first six lectures, 
 therefore, of this course will be historical in nature, intended 
 to ascertain the origin and fix the essence of these ideas, 
 and the last two, theological or philosophical, devoted to a 
 discussion of their validity and truth. 
 
 THE PROBLEM IN THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 As the Christian Church claims to be continuously 
 identical with the ancient Israel, and as the Jewish Scriptures 
 are embodied in the Christian Bible, our historical survey will 
 naturally begin with the Old Testament ; by which term I 
 understand, for the purposes of this lecture, the total corpus 
 of Hebrew and Jewish literature contained in the longer or 
 Septuagintal Canon, a definition which includes the books 
 commonly called Apocrypha. The period of a thousand 
 years over which the dates of these documents range may 
 naturally be divided into three sub-periods, pre-Exilic, 
 Exilic, and post-Exilic ; and it will be convenient to arrange 
 our consideration of the growth of the Fall-doctrine in three 
 corresponding sections. 
 
 (a) It is not too much to say that the first of these periods, 
 that which ends with the Babylonian captivity, contains no 
 trace whatever of the existence of a belief in a ‘ Fall’ (as the 
 term is used in technical theology) or in ‘ Original Sin’ ; the 
 Paradise-story of Gen. iii, as we shall see in our next lecture, 
 forms no exception to the truth of this statement.! It is not 
 difficult to see why this must necessarily have been so. 
 These ideas—especially that of a hereditary bias towards 
 evil—even when held in the vaguest and most popular form, 
 and without any scholastic exactness of definition, are yet 
 of a somewhat artificial and abstract nature. They pre- 
 suppose considerable powers of generalisation and induction 
 from the facts of history and also of introspective self- 
 
 1 See Lecture II, p. 50 f. 
 
 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 13 
 
 analysis. Hence they are not likely to have arisen at a very 
 early date in the history of the Chosen People. The idea of 
 ‘ Original Sin,’ even in the crudest form, can only come into 
 being as the result of meditation on the fact of Actual Sin ; 
 it can only be born in the mind of one who has felt within 
 him the fierce wrestling of conscience and desire, swaying to 
 and fro in the agonies of the moral struggle. Now the idea 
 of Actual Sin itself, in its precise sense of the free and 
 deliberate transgression of a known moral law, does not 
 belong to the earliest strata of human thought as revealed 
 by anthropological research. The most primitive peoples 
 known to us conceive of evil, not so much in its ethical sense 
 as a value, or negation of value, affirmed of actions, motives, 
 or the will or character which prompts them, but rather in 
 a quasi-physical sense, as a subtle contagion, an impalpable 
 foetor, which exhales from uncanny persons and things, 
 from material substances, such as shed blood, corpses, and 
 objects placed under a religious ban, or from organic pro- 
 cesses such as those of generation, birth, and death. At this 
 early stage of thought, there can be no question of a ‘ Fall’ 
 or definite event giving rise to evil. For the distinction 
 between bad and good mana, as inhering in uncanny things 
 or persons, is not absolute, but relative to the circumstances 
 of the percipient ; the emotions aroused by the uncanny 
 are strictly ‘ambivalent,’ and may manifest themselves 
 either as veneration or as horror.! As, therefore, there is no 
 such thing for the savage as objectively or absolutely bad 
 mana, the question of its origin does not and cannot arise. 
 It is only by slow and painful degrees that the strictly 
 ethical idea of good and evil has been educed from the 
 
 1 Cf. the double meaning of the Latin word sacer (‘ sacred’ and ‘ ac- 
 cursed’). For detailed exposition of the meaning of mana, in its general- 
 ised significance as a category employed by the science of Comparative 
 Religion, see ‘ The Canception of Mana’ in The Threshold of Religion, 
 R. R. Marett (1914); also the article ‘Mana,’ by the same author, in 
 Hastings, ERE viii. p. 375. The idea of bad mana, owing to its vague- 
 ness, and (as explained in the text) owing to its relativity, cannot be 
 claimed as identical with the later and more artificial theologumenon of 
 ‘ Original Sin’; but lingering traces of it seem to have worked sub- 
 consciously in the minds of some Christian patristic writers on hamarti- 
 ology, notably Origen and St. Augustine; v. infra, Lect. IV, p. 226, and 
 
 cf. V, p. 366. 
 
14 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 ambiguous notion of beneficent-noxious mana. Amongst 
 the Greeks, the great tragedians allow us to see the process 
 actually at work; the Antigone of Sophocles, for instance, 
 contains both conceptions, the ethical and the quasi-physical 
 side by side. The sin of Oedipus, which was ex hypothest 
 unconscious and involuntary, is only a sin if evil is thought 
 to be a substantive miasma or pollution inhering in a person, 
 rather than a value which the mind attaches to his acts; 
 whilst the heroism of Antigone is goodness in the modern or 
 ethical sense, being obedience to those eternal laws of which 
 she herself says: 
 
 For their life is not of yesterday or to-day, but from all 
 time, and no man knoweth when they first appeared. 
 
 And, as with Greece, so it was with Israel. Like its 
 neighbours, Israel started on its career with what may be 
 called a merely zymotic theory of evil, which is clearly 
 visible in the story of Achan and the Babylonish garment, 
 and survives embalmed in much of the ceremonial of the 
 Priestly Law.” It was the work of the great prophets of 
 Israel’s classical period to dislodge this barbarous concep- 
 tion from the national mind, to replace it by the spiritual 
 and ethical idea, and to proclaim that the Lord requires 
 nothing of man save ‘ to do justly, and to love mercy, and 
 to walk humbly with his God.’ * But this was a task more 
 than sufficient to absorb the whole even of their volcanic 
 energies, and they would not have had time, even if they had 
 
 1 Soph. Ant. 456, 457: 
 od ydp TL viv ye KaxXOés, GAN’ det ToTE 
 Cf ratra, Kovoeis otdev €€ drov ’ havy. 
 
 2“ Exactly the same penalty is imposed for infringements of ritual 
 (Ex. xxx. 33, 38; Lev. xvil. 4, 9, 14; xix. 8) as for grave moral offences 
 (Lev. xviii. 29). Death is the penalty, alike for murder (Num. xxxv. 31) 
 and for Sabbath-breaking (Ex. xxxi. 15; xxxv. 2). Purification from 
 sin is prescribed after purely physical defilement, as through contact 
 with a corpse, and even for a house which has been affected by leprosy 
 (Lev. xiv. 49, 52; Num. xix. 12, 13, 19, 20 [the Heb. in these passages for 
 cleanse, purify is properly to ‘free from sin’]). A sin-offering is also 
 sometimes enjoined for merely ceremonial uncleanness (e.g. Lev. v. 2, 6; 
 Num. vi. 9-11). ... The principle of ceremonial cleanness and un- 
 cleanness, it may be noticed, was the point on which our Lord broke 
 most decisively with the Mosaic law’ (S. R. Driver, art. ‘ Law (in Old 
 Testament) ’ in HDB iii. p. 72. 
 
 ® Micah vi. 8. 
 
 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 15 
 
 possessed the inclination, to raise the question of the origin 
 of moral evil; whilst the hypothesis of an inbred tendency 
 to sin, with the element of qualified determinism which it 
 most always involve, would have been profoundly uncon- 
 genial to them as apparently offering an easy excuse for 
 continuance in evil-doing to the indolent and the hypo- 
 critical. The insistence upon individual freedom and 
 responsibility which lies at the roots of the prophetic teach- 
 ing rises to its highest point in the rigid ethical atomism 
 of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, as expressed in such sayings as: 
 
 In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have 
 eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. 
 
 But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man 
 that eateth the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge 2; 
 
 and 
 
 The soul that sinneth it shall die. The son shall not bear 
 the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity 
 of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon 
 him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him ?: 
 
 —utterances which, if pressed to their logical conclusion, 
 would seem to amount to a denial by anticipation of the 
 later doctrine of Original Sin, at any rate in its pea 
 Augustinian form. 
 
 (0) In the course of our second period, that of the Exile, 
 a change begins to appear in Hebrew thought on the sub- 
 ject of sin. The great catastrophe had burnt the ethical 
 teaching of the prophets deeply into the mind of Israel, 
 had produced a poignant sense of sin, both national and 
 individual, and had fostered a mood of sombre introspective- 
 ness in which the soul seeks refuge within itself from the 
 
 1 The passage Jer. xvii. 9: ‘ The heart is deceitful above all things, 
 and it is desperately sick ; who can know it ?’ does not affirm a radical 
 evil in human nature; it is merely a practical aphorism, warning the 
 prophet’s hearers that ‘ No man ever knows fully his neighbour’s thoughts 
 and motives, nor whether he will remain faithful to his engagements’ 
 (L. E. Binns, The Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, 1919, p. 140). 
 
 2 Jer. xxxi. 29; cf. Ezek. xviii. 2. 
 
 8 Ezek. xviii. 20. Although the whole of Ezekiel’s prophetic ministry 
 falls chronologically within the period of the Exile (it may be dated 592- 
 570 B.C.) I have quoted this passage in my survey of the pre-Exilic 
 period, because of its logical connexion with the teaching of Jeremiah. 
 
16 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 disappointments of the unfriendly world without, only to be 
 confronted by the spectacle of weakness and disharmony 
 within. It would seem, however, that the first essays of 
 the Exilic period in the task of explaining evil were prompted 
 by the desire to mitigate, by elucidating, the fact of suffering 
 or pain, and therefore approached the problem primarily 
 on its physical side. The facile optimism of Deuteronomy, 
 which regarded happiness as the unfailing reward of virtue, 
 and suffering as the invariable punishment of sin, indissolubly 
 linked together within the bounds of this present life, had 
 been refuted by history 1; and, with the final adoption by 
 Israel of a genuine monotheism, which regarded Yahweh, 
 no longer as a local and limited tribal deity, but as the 
 unique sovereign and creator of the universe, the problem 
 of undeserved suffering called all the more insistently for a 
 fresh solution. Abruptly challenging Mazdean dualism, 
 which must have appeared as a simple and tempting solu- 
 tion to many of the exiled Jews, the audacious thought of 
 Deutero-Isaiah attributes evil to the direct appointment 
 of God. ‘I am Yahweh, and there is none else. I form 
 the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create 
 evil: I am Yahweh, that doeth all these things.’? Here 
 there can be little doubt that both physical and moral evil 
 are meant. But the genius of Hebrew religion, faithful to 
 the lessons which it had learnt from the great pre-exilic 
 prophets, could make no terms with a solution which 
 by representing God as the author of evil sacrificed His 
 righteousness in order to save His power. It was felt that 
 somehow man, and not God, must be in the last resort 
 responsible for evil, at any rate for the evil which appears 
 in human history ; and the hypothesis of a direct causal 
 relation between sin and suffering inevitably re-appeared, 
 
 1 It is here assumed, in accordance with the generally accepted ‘ criti- 
 cal theory’ of the Pentateuch, that the composition of Deuteronomy was 
 subsequent to the teaching of (the first) Isaiah, and cannot in any case be 
 attributed to Moses; see p. 10, n. 5. 
 
 2 Isaiah xlv. 6, 7; cf. xxxi. 2, and Amos iii. 6. There are several 
 earlier passages of the Old Testament in which Yahweh is represented 
 as prompting men to particular evil actions (Ex. vii. 3; Judg. ix. 23; 
 r Sam. ii. 25, xix. 9; 2 Sam. xxiv. 1); but Deutero-Isaiah would seem 
 
 to be the first Hebrew writer to affirm the Divine authorship of evil as a 
 universally valid proposition. 
 
 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 17 
 
 as in the discourses of Job’s friends and comforters. The 
 author of Job rejects the naive theory of a necessary 
 connexion between sin and suffering in this life; but, in 
 the course of his meditations on this intractable problem, 
 he is led to admit the empirical universality of sin to such 
 an extent as to suggest something like an a friort necessity 
 for it, rooted in the nature of man. And here we come 
 upon the first dim traces of the ideas of which we are in 
 search. ‘Can a mortal be just before God? or can a 
 man be pure before his Maker?’ Or, again, ‘Who can 
 bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.’2 Or— 
 even more emphatically—‘ What is man that he should be 
 clean? And he that is born of a woman, that he should be 
 righteous ? Behold, he putteth no trust in his holy ones ; 
 yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight.’? ‘ How then 
 can man be just with God? Or how can he be clean that 
 is born of a woman ?’ 4 
 
 This is not yet a doctrine of original sin, but it is well on 
 the way towards one. It would seem that the sinfulness 
 which the author of Job admits to inhere in man is regarded 
 by him as a necessary consequence of man’s finitude and 
 creaturely character; there is no thought of a ‘ Fall’ from 
 a supposed condition of original perfection. Moral frailty 
 is the inevitable corollary of physical weakness and limita- 
 tion. It is to be noted that ultimately this solution of the 
 problem of evil is the same as the Second Isaiah’s, because, 
 if sin is due merely to man’s physical frailty, the ultimate 
 responsibility for it lies with the Creator who made him 
 frail; and, indeed, the book of Job, for all its poetic sub- 
 limity, is a self-confessed failure considered as a theodicy. 
 It seemed as though Jewish thought was involved in an 
 endless circle, perpetually finding itself drawn back into the 
 position from which it most desired to escape, namely that 
 which makes God the ultimate author of evil. There was 
 
 1 Jobiv. 17 (tr. Driver and Gray, ICC). 
 
 2 Job xiv. 4. Driver and Gray translate: ‘ Oh that a clean thing could 
 come out of an unclean! not one can.’ Some critics regard this verse as 
 a marginal gloss which has crept into the text: see op. cit., Philological 
 Notes, p. 89. 
 
 3 Job xv. 14, I5. 
 
 4 Job xxv. 4. 
 
18 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 only one way out of the difficulty. The conflict between 
 the hypotheses of an inherent tendency to evil in man, 
 and of the infinite goodness of God who created man, 
 could only resolve itself by the assumption that human 
 nature as it actually exists is not what God meant it 
 to be, and that some historical catastrophe must be pos- 
 tulated in order to account for this otherwise inexplicable 
 fact. 
 
 (c) This train of thought—in which the perception of 
 the empirical universality of sin gives rise to a theory of 
 inherited liability to sin, and this again when reflected on 
 compels the assumption of a primal sin as its source—did 
 not attain to complete definition and articulation until the 
 third or autumnal period of Israel’s history, the age known 
 by the great name of the Maccabees. It is not on that 
 account to be lightly set aside or disparaged. What Pro- 
 fessor F. C. Burkitt has called ‘ the heroic age of Jewish 
 history ’ + had a providential function to discharge in fashion- 
 ing and assembling much of the conceptual material which 
 was to be built into the fabric of Christian theology, even 
 before the birth of Christ, just as David before his death had 
 accumulated timber and squared stones to be used in the 
 construction of Solomon’s temple. We need only instance 
 the doctrines of the Logos, of the heavenly Son of Man, of 
 the Church and the Communion of Saints, of the Resurrec- 
 tion and the Last Things, as ideas which our Lord and His 
 Apostles did not create but took over as parts of an already 
 existing theology. It was in the characteristic mind of this 
 age, so strangely blent of touching piety and repulsive 
 fanaticism, that the Jewish theories of the origin of evil 
 assumed a relatively final shape. 
 
 We cannot here attempt to reconstruct the state of 
 religious thought and feeling during the obscure beginnings 
 of this epoch ; it must suffice to quote three testimonies to 
 the deepening sense of sin, with its reflex tendency to stereo- 
 type and fix, by a kind of corporate auto-suggestion, the 
 floating idea of hereditary sinfulness in the mind of the 
 Jewish Church. These shall be taken from the hallowed 
 and familiar words of three Psalms, dating from the Persian 
 
 1 Jewish and Christian A pocalypses, p. 15 (1913). 
 
 = a ee a 
 
 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 19 
 
 and early Greek periods.! ‘If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme 
 to mark what is done amiss, O Lord, who may abide it ? ’ 2 
 ‘Enter not into judgment with thy servant, for in thy sight 
 shall no man living be justified ’’—two utterances which 
 seem to show that the empirical universality of sin has 
 already been elevated to the rank of a dogma. The next 
 step, that of ascribing this universality of actual sin to the 
 presence of a hereditary taint or weakness, is taken in the 
 most pathetic of all outpourings of repentant grief, the 51st 
 Psalm: ‘ Behold, I was shapen in wickedness, and in sin 
 hath my mother conceived me’ 4—a saying which bears 
 the same unmistakeable significance, whether an individual 
 sinner or the personified community be regarded as the 
 speaker. The time was ripe for the last step in the process, 
 that of tracing the hereditary taint back to a primal sin, the 
 uncaused cause or primum mobile of the whole disastrous 
 concentration. Asa matter of fact, though in all probability 
 the Psalmists knew it not, this step had already been taken. 
 Already during the fourth century before Christ an unknown 
 thinker had reasoned with himself to this effect—' Human 
 nature everywhere contains an innate bias towards evil. 
 This is clearly contrary to the intention of God, who must 
 have created man in a state of goodness ; therefore, there 
 must have been a primitive catastrophe, through which evil 
 invaded human life from without, from the unseen world of 
 spirits.’ 
 
 This nameless philosopher, whose thoughts we have thus 
 speculatively reconstructed, was the person designated in 
 Hexateuchal criticism by the symbol R!*—in other words, 
 the redactor who wove the Prophetic and Priestly strands 
 of the Hexateuch into the single history which we possess 
 to-day.° Oppressed by the need for a final and specific 
 
 1 This dating is taken from Briggs, The Book of Psalms, ICC. (1907) ; 
 he assigns Pss. lh. and cxliii. to the Persian, cxxx. to the early Greek 
 period. But the argument in the text will not be affected if all three are 
 assigned to the Greek period. 
 
 2 Ps. cxxx. 3, RV., ‘ If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, 
 who shall stand ?’ 
 
 eOlss Gxtili! 2. 4u. 5. 
 
 5’ Though no reader who is in any degree conversant with the present 
 
 state of Biblical knowledge will require a detailed disproof of the Mosaic 
 authorship of the earlier books of the Old Testament as they stand, it may 
 
20 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 event to explain the origin of evil, he searched through the 
 ancient traditions which lay before him, and fixed upon the 
 mysterious legend of the fallen angels narrated in Genesis vi. 
 This story, it would seem, was the first Jewish Fall-story, 
 not in the sense that it is more ancient in origin than the 
 Paradise-story contained in Genesis iii., but in the sense 
 that it was the first to be fixed upon as containing an explana- 
 tion of the origin of evil in man. To it, therefore, some 
 words of explanation and criticism must be devoted. 
 
 THE STORY OF THE FALLEN ANGELS 
 
 The first eight verses of Genesis vi. are taken from the 
 Yahwistic source, and have been placed in their present 
 position to form an introduction to the Flood-story, which, 
 as is well known, is composed of alternate sections of the 
 Yahwistic and the Priestly narratives. In them we are 
 told that certainly heavenly beings described as the bené 
 
 
 
 nevertheless be well to state explicitly that in this and the following 
 Lecture I assume the outlines of the ‘ four-document’ critical theory of 
 the Hexateuch, elaborated in its present form mainly by Kuenen and 
 Wellhausen. This, very briefly summarised, regards the Hexateuch as a 
 composite structure, built up in the main out of four primary elements, 
 namely, (1) the ‘ Yahwistic’ narrative, so called from its use of the divine 
 name YHWH, and usually designated by the symbol J: this may be 
 roughly dated c. 850 B.c.; (2) the ‘ Elohistic’ narrative, covering the same 
 historical ground, but distinguished by its preference for the title, ’eldhim 
 to denote God, and compiled, in all probability, about a century later than 
 J; this is referred to by the symbol E (the conflate history of the world 
 and of Israel into which these two narratives were compounded towards 
 the end of the eighth century B.c. is known as JE, or the ‘ Prophetic 
 History’); (3) the Book of Deuteronomy, the central portion of which 
 is regarded by most critics as the basis of Josiah’s sweeping Reformation 
 (2 Kings xxiii.), together with certain elements akin to Deuteronomy con- 
 tained in other books, the whole being known as D ; (4) the great Priestly 
 Document, which includes both an ecclesiastically coloured history and a 
 collection of legal codes, and was reduced to its present form during and 
 after the Exile (this is known as P). The final combination of JE, D, 
 and P into the Hexateuch as we possess it may be assigned to the fourth 
 century B.c. As both of the Genesis-passages which we shall have to 
 examine are derived from J, it will not be necessary to go further into 
 the refinements of Pentateuchal criticism, with regard to which much 
 diversity of opinion still prevails amongst scholars (see The People and the 
 Book, 1925, Essay V1). 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION aq 
 
 ha-’ elohim—the ‘sons of the gods ’+~(a trace of original 
 polytheism which reveals the great antiquity of the narrative) 
 saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and con- 
 tracted marriages with them (vv. I, 2). In v. 3, Yahweh, 
 beholding this action from heaven, is said to have uttered 
 words which, as represented in the English versions, appear 
 somewhat cryptic: ‘ My spirit shall not strive with man for 
 ever, for that he also is flesh; yet shall his days be an 
 hundred and twenty years.’* The fourth verse tells us of 
 the nepiilim,® or giants, who existed upon the earth in those 
 days, and also afterwards, whenever the ‘ sons of the gods ’ 
 united themselves with women. The presumption is that 
 these giants were sprung from the union between divine and 
 human partners. They are further identified with the 
 gibbovim or ‘mighty men’ of old, the traditional heroes of 
 popular folk-lore. We are then told (vv. 5, 6) that Yahweh 
 saw “ that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and 
 that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only 
 evil continually ; and Yahweh repented that he had made 
 man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.’ He 
 consequently resolves to destroy the human race by means 
 of a flood. Noah, however, finds favour in the sight of the 
 Lord. 
 
 As these verses stand, the only construction to be put 
 upon them appears to be as follows: The ‘ sons of the gods ’ 
 are divine beings, of an order inferior to Yahweh—or, to 
 employ a later and more familiar term, ‘ angels ’*—-who 
 gave way to lust, and committed sin by deserting their 
 heavenly abode and mingling the divine essence with the 
 
 1 This translation seems to be necessitated by the presence of the 
 definite article before pride. “Sons of God’ (AV., RV.) would pre- 
 sumably be DION, 22, asin Job xxxviii. 7. 
 
 2 See below, p. 23, n. I. 
 8 For an account of these mythical beings (containing a large element 
 of conjecture) see T. K. Cheyne in EB? iii. s.v. Nephilim. 
 
 * Cf., much later, the use of DITION in Ps. viii. 5; ‘ Thou didst make 
 
 him a little lower than the ’eldhim,’ and Briggs’ note 2” loc. (ICC., Psalms, 
 vol. i. p. 64): ‘ We must think of the Elohim as comprehending God and 
 angels, the latter being, in their historic origin, the ancient polytheistic 
 gods, degraded to ministering servants of the one God Yahweh.’ 
 
22 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 seed ofman. This unnatural action introduces the principle 
 of evil into humanity: a principle which finds its first and 
 most terrifying manifestation in the appearance of a mon- 
 strous brood of Titans, who disturb the moral order of the 
 earth by deeds of lawlessness. The chaos so created attains 
 to such dimensions as to provoke the Creator to visit the 
 earth with the Flood, so as to eliminate evil from the earth 
 by drowning both the giants and other members of the 
 human race who have been corrupted by their influence. 
 As the narrative stands, it appears to imply the existence of 
 a direct causal relation between the wickedness of the giants 
 and the lustfulness of their angelic sires; this construction 
 of the story, however, is not actually stated in the text, and 
 careful examination seems to show that there is a perceptible 
 ‘suture’ or join between vv. 4 and 5. Verses 5-8, giving 
 the account of man’s wickedness, lead directly into the 
 Yahwistic Flood-story ; but vv. 1-4, containing the legend 
 of the angels, seem to come from a cycle of tradition which 
 knows nothing of the Deluge; for in Numbers xii. 33 
 (a passage derived from JE) certain descendants of the 
 nephilim, including the famous sons of Anak,? are said to 
 have been still surviving in Palestine at the time of the 
 invasion under Joshua, a statement which is obviously 
 inconsistent with the supposition that the giants were all 
 drowned in the Flood. And the words attributed to Yahweh 
 in v. 3 seem inconsistent with the idea of a flood shortly 
 to follow; for, if we follow the most probable hypothesis, 
 their meaning may be paraphrased as follows: “ My “ spirit ” 
 or essence ’ (that is, the divine essence which the ‘ sons of the © 
 gods ’ have improperly introduced into the human stock by 
 their unnatural alliances) “must not be allowed to remain 
 intermingled for ever with the essence of mortal man, who 
 is but flesh’ (z.e. not much more than an animal) ‘ and 
 therefore is not entitled to the permanent enjoyment of the 
 supernatural increase in knowledge and strength which 
 participation in the divine essence brings with it. I will, 
 
 1 But G. Buchanan Gray (JCC., Numbers, p. 151) thinks that the 
 words py>n3n-}9 PY 25, ‘ the sons of ‘Anaq are some of the nephilim,’ 
 are a gloss, as they are not represented in the LXX. 
 

 
 
 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 23 
 
 accordingly, reduce the average duration of human life to 
 a period of a hundred and twenty years, in order to ensure 
 that the divine essence is worked out of the human race 
 within a comparatively brief period.’1 Again, it would 
 seem that Yahweh’s contemplation of so prolonged and 
 cumbrous a method of eliminating from the human stock 
 the divine element unlawfully introduced into it is quite 
 inconsistent with the supposition that he was able, and 
 intended, to destroy the whole human race en bloc by a 
 sudden cataclysm within a few years. We therefore con- 
 clude that the Angel-story comes from sources entirely 
 different from those of the Flood-story, and that it was 
 prefixed to the Flood-story by KR” in order to explain the 
 universal wickedness which provoked the Deluge. In 
 making it into a ‘ Fall-story’ it is probable that RJ” has 
 mutilated it, in order to abolish mythological features which 
 offended his moral and religious sense. 
 
 THE ANGEL-STORY IN THE APOCALYPSES 
 
 The use of this earliest Fall-story is illustrated by its 
 elaboration in the most interesting of all pseudepigraphic 
 
 1 This very obscure and probably corrupt verse has been exhaustively 
 discussed by J. Skinner (Internat. Crit. Commentary, Genesis, pp. 143 ff.). 
 
 Its interpretation turns upon the meaning of the word ‘Ff (‘ my spirit’) 
 
 and of the phrase HIND, which the LXX represents by od pi) Karapeivy 
 
 and the English versions by ‘ shall not strive.’ The explanation adopted 
 in the text is that given by Skinner, following Wellhausen (Die Composition 
 des Hexateuchs u. dey historisch. Biicher des AT, 2nd edn. 1880, p. 305 ff.). 
 It is not an objection to this view that the shortening of the lives of indi- 
 viduals would not affect the characteristics acquired by the race through 
 the divine-human unions ; for (assuming no further apostasies on the part 
 of the ’eldhim-beings) the amount of the divine essence latent in the 
 human stock as the result of the original transgression would, presumably, 
 be conceived as strictly fixed, and, with the increasing numbers of the 
 race, would be regarded as subject in each generation to a process of con- 
 tinuous subdivision, so that eventually the quantity of it to be found in 
 any given individual would be infinitesimal and so practically negligible. 
 The reduction of the average life of the individual from nine centuries 
 to a little more than one would be an obvious means of accelerating this 
 process. 
 
24 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 works—the Ethiopic Book of Enoch. This book is a literary 
 patchwork embodying the whole or fragments of at least 
 six separate documents, belonging to dates ranging between 
 the end of the third and the middle of the first century B.c. 
 The most important of these documents are (1) the Book of 
 Enoch proper, comprising Chapters 12-36 of our present 
 text, which may be dated in the neighbourhood of 200 B.C. ; 
 (2) the fragments of the Book of Noah, which is at least 
 earlier than the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes ; (3) the 
 Visions of Enoch, written about 165 B.c., in the midst of the 
 Maccabean struggle, and contemporaneously with the Book 
 of Daniel; and (4) the Similitudes, which appear to have 
 been written between the years 94 and 64 B.c., during the 
 reigns of Alexander Jannaeus and Alexandra. The most 
 complete statement of the Fall-story as connected with the 
 sin of the angels is contained in the fragments of the Book 
 of Noah.* In this work the apostate angels are described 
 by a term familiar to us from the Book of Daniel? as 
 ‘Watchers ’"—that is, spirits who are conceived in their 
 heavenly home as ceaselessly watching the Almighty, so as 
 to be in perpetual readiness to execute His commands. 
 We are told that they were two hundred in number, and 
 that, having bound themselves by a mutual oath to carry 
 out the projected rape, they descended upon the summit of 
 Mount Hermon.’ The giants, who were their sons, are said 
 
 1 For citations from the text of this book, as well as from other apoca- 
 lyptic writings which it has been necessary to mention in this lecture, 
 I have used the translations contained in the monumental Apocrypha and 
 Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, Oxford, 1913, edited by Dr. R. H. 
 Charles. In giving references, I have followed the common custom of 
 designating the Ethiopic Enoch as 1 Enoch, and the ‘ Book of the Secrets 
 of Enoch,’ or Slavonic Enoch, as 2 Enoch. 2 1 Enoch vi-xi. 
 
 3 iv. 13, 17, 23. The Aramaic word is YY, ‘wakeful one,’ which 
 LXX and Theodotion transliterate as efp; Aquila and Symmachus, 
 however, render }*)}Y by éypyyopot, which appears to have become a 
 technical term denoting the order to which the peccant angels belonged, 
 as it appears in the Slavonic Enoch under the curious form ‘ Grigori’ 
 (2 Enoch xviii. A text; the B text has ‘ Egoroi’; Charles, Apocr. and 
 Pseudep. ii. p. 439). 
 
 4 1 Enoch, vi. 6. St. Hilary (fvact. in cxxxii. ps. [PL X. 521)) 
 quotes this detail with some hesitation from the Book of Enoch, which 
 he describes as ‘ nescio cuius liber.’ W. Robertson Smith (Religion of the 
 
 Semites, 1914 edn., p. 446) suggests that the Watcher-story may have 
 originally been a local legend connected with Mount Hermon. 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION — 25 
 
 to have been three thousand ells in height. These Titanic 
 beings, we are told, ‘ consumed all the acquisitions of men. 
 And, when men could no longer sustain them, the giants 
 turned against them and devoured mankind. . . . And as 
 men perished, they cried, and their cry went up to heaven.’ } 
 The engendering of giants, however, was not the only way in 
 which the fallen Watchers introduced wickedness into the 
 earth. They corrupted the human race by imparting to it 
 knowledge which the Creator had not meant it to possess.? 
 Here we detect the emergence of a motif which reappears in 
 the second Fall-story, that of Adam and Eve, and is closely 
 paralleled by the Greek legend of Prometheus—the idea 
 being that God is jealous—ro @eciov wav dOovepov, as the 
 Greeks put it 3—that the Creator grudges His creatures the 
 possession of knowledge, and that all or many of their woes 
 are due to its unlawful acquisition. Of the fallen angels, 
 Azazél taught men the art of working metals, and of making 
 knives, swords, and armour, and also instructed them in the 
 manufacture of jewellery and cosmetics, arts which naturally 
 led to the increase of homicide and impurity ; whilst the 
 other angels reveal to men the sciences of magic, astrology, 
 and astronomy.* Then, in Chapter 9, the Archangels 
 Michael, Uriel, Raphael and Gabriel look down from heaven, 
 and see the corruption and disorder which reign upon the 
 earth. They complain to the Almighty, who charges them 
 to deal with the situation in different ways. Uriel is com- 
 manded to warn Noah of the approaching Deluge; Raphael 
 is commissioned to bind Azazél, the leader of the rebel 
 angels, hand and foot, and to bury him in a hole in the 
 desert, piling upon him rough and jagged rocks, until the 
 
 1 ; Enoch vii. 4; viii. 4. The arrogance of the giants is also mentioned 
 in 3 Macc. ii. 4; Ecclus. xvi. 7; Wisdom xiv. 6. 
 
 2 ix. 6: cf. also lxiv. 2 (Similitudes). 
 
 3 Herodotus i. 32, ili. 40: in these passages only material prosperity 
 is conceived as the object of the divine ‘jealousy.’ Aristotle condemns 
 this opinion, especially in so far as it attributes to God a dislike of human 
 progress in knowledge: ei 67 Aéyovoi re of moinral Kal mépuxe POovetv ro 
 Gciov, émt rovrov (1.e. in the matter of knowledge) ovpPaivew padrora eixds Kat 
 dvotuxeis elvar mavras Tovs mepirrovs. GAA’ ovre TO Deiov POovepov evdexerar 
 evar, GAAa Kal Kara Tv wapotmlavy TOAAG wevdovrar dovdoi x.7.A. (Met. A. 
 ii, 10). 
 
 4 1 Enoch viil. 
 
26 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 time is ripe for the last judgment, after which he is to be 
 cast into eternal fire. The Lord’s charge to Raphael con- 
 tinues— Heal the earth which the angels have corrupted, 
 and proclaim the healing of the earth that they may heal 
 the plague, and that all the children of men may not perish 
 through all the secret things that the Watchers have dis- 
 closed and have taught their sons. And the whole earth 
 has been corrupted through the works that were taught by 
 Azazél: to him ascribe all sin.’ 1 The commissions of the 
 two other archangels seem to be derived from a different 
 cycle of tradition, inasmuch as Gabriel is commanded to 
 proclaim the destruction of the children of the Watchers 
 through internecine strife—a command that seems incon- 
 sistent with the hypothesis of a rapidly approaching Flood ; 
 whilst Michael is bidden to bind one Semjaza, who in this 
 version appears to be the leader of the apostates, in a ravine 
 of the earth, there to await the last great assize. Such is the 
 haggadic amplification of the story contained in Genesis Vi. 
 I-4 as it appears in the fragments of the Book of Noah 
 embodied in the Ethiopic Book of Enoch. A supplemen- 
 
 tary detail is added in c. xv., belonging to the Book of Enoch — 
 
 proper, in which the souls of the dead giants are said to have 
 become demons who afflict mankind. It is very significant 
 that the author of this document is well acquainted with the 
 Paradise-story of Genesis iii. On one of his tours through 
 the supramundane regions Enoch is shown the Garden of 
 Eden with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil 
 growing in the midst of it.2 His angelic guide explains that 
 this is the tree of which Adam and Eve ate, which opened 
 their eyes so that they knew that they were naked ; but it 
 is noticeable that this event is mentioned merely as an 
 interesting historical fact, and that no attempt is made to 
 trace the origin of human wickedness to it. Evidently the 
 Watcher-legend of Genesis vi. is the only Fall-story of which 
 the Book of Enoch knows. 
 
 A symbolic version of the Watcher-legend occurs in the 
 third section of the Ethiopic Enoch, namely, the Visions, 
 which must have been written in the very midst of the 
 Maccabean struggle, almost contemporaneously with the 
 
 ey DOCU X.17310- ox Se A. 
 
 eae mmaini ttt ee 
 
 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 27 
 
 Book of Daniel. In the second ‘ Vision’ the history of the 
 world from the creation of man to the foundation of the 
 Messianic kingdom is told under the form of an elaborate 
 animal story.1_ The apostate Watchers are symbolised by 
 stars, the children of Seth, with whom they intermarry, 
 by oxen, and the evil brood of giants who sprang from these 
 unions by elephants, camels, and asses.2, The Watcher- 
 legend is assumed once more in the Similitudes, which 
 Dr. Charles dates between 94 and 64 B.c. Ince. lxvi-lxix. 
 the emphasis is laid, not so much upon the lust of the angels 
 as upon their transgression of the divine ordinance, in 
 revealing to the human race secret knowledge which the 
 Creator had not designed for it. As before, sorcery, metal- 
 lurgy, and the manufacture of weapons occupy a prominent 
 place among the forbidden arts in which the fallen spirits 
 instructed man ?: the author of the Similitudes ingeniously 
 adds the art of writing with ink and paper as one of the chief 
 causes of human corruption for which the apostate Watchers 
 were responsible. 
 
 Such was the earliest and crudest form in which the 
 doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin obtained any wide 
 currency amongst the Jews—the naive belief that the 
 universal sinfulness with which mankind appeared to be 
 infected flowed like a dark turbid river from a single fount, 
 namely, the unholy unions of angelic and human beings 
 narrated in Gen. vi. and the commixture of mortal and 
 immortal essences effected thereby. No less crude was the 
 theory of redemption dependent upon it. The world’s 
 deliverance from sin was to be accomplished by purely 
 external and mechanical means—the imprisonment of the 
 Watchers, by God, or the Son of Man, in a lurid Gehenna, 
 and the burning out of the body of the human race of the 
 plague-spot which their lust had left behind, by the fires of 
 an eschatological cataclysm. Doubtless we must attribute 
 it to the distractions of the mortal conflict with the Seleucid 
 power in which the Jewish Church-State was for nearly 
 
 1 + Enoch Ixxxv.-xc. Inc. lxxv., the creation of Adam and Eve, the 
 murder of Abel, and the birth of Seth are related insymbolic terms, but 
 there is no mention of the forbidden fruit or the expulsion from Paradise. 
 
 2 Ixxxvi. 3 Ixv. 6-8. 4°1xix.50;/10. 
 
28 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 a generation involved, that an obvious internal difficulty 
 exhibited by this artless theory was not at first perceived. 
 The difficulty is this. Taking the story of Genesis vi., vil. 
 literally, as the authors of Enoch took it (and ignoring the 
 reference to the nephilim in Num. xiii. 33), we learn that all 
 living beings, except Noah and his family and the animals 
 preserved in the Ark, were destroyed in the Flood. Pre- 
 sumably, therefore, the giants were drowned, and the whole 
 seed of evil proceeding from the Watchers must have come 
 to an end; so that the Watcher-story in no way accounts 
 for the fact of post-diluvian wickedness. The author of the 
 Visions seems dimly to feel this difficulty, because, after 
 stating that the elephants, camels, and asses, who symbolise 
 the giants, perished in the Flood, he goes on to state that 
 the three bulls, who symbolise the sons of Noah, procreated 
 after the Deluge—for no assignable reason—a heterogeneous 
 brood of lions, tigers, wolves, dogs, hyenas, wild boars, foxes, 
 squirrels, swine, and other unclean creatures.!_ These, of 
 course, are the Gentiles or wicked races of the earth; but 
 their appearance merely raises the problem of the origin of 
 evil all over again, and leaves the apocalyptic thinker in the 
 same condition of perplexity as before. 
 
 The interpolator of the Book of Jubilees, the main body 
 of which may be dated about the end of the second century 
 B.C., attempted to solve the problem by asserting that post- 
 Noachian wickedness was due to the ghosts of the drowned 
 giants, who continued to haunt the world as earth-bound 
 spirits.2, But the original author of Jubilees had already 
 cut the Gordian knot by abandoning the Watcher-legend 
 altogether, and fixing for his Fall-story on an entirely 
 different passage of Scripture, namely, the Paradise-narra- 
 tive of Genesis ii1., which eventually, owing to the influence 
 of St. Paul, became the official Fall-story of the Christian 
 Church.? This writer cannot, indeed, claim to be the first 
 inventor of this idea, inasmuch as the sin of Eve is asserted 
 to be the beginning of wickedness and the cause of death 
 by the Son of Sirach, writing some eighty years previously.? 
 
 1+ Enoch Ixxxix. 10. ? Jubilees, vii. 26-39; x. 1-15. 3 iii. 17-35. 
 4 Ecclus. xxv. 24; for an examination of this passage see below, 
 Lecture II, p. 54. 
 
 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION = 29 
 
 But, from the Book of Jubilees onwards, during the course 
 of the first century B.c., it is possible to trace the gradual 
 suppression of the Watcher-legend by the Adam-story as 
 the historical, or supposedly historical, explanation of the 
 origin of human sin. 
 
 THE EMERGENCE OF GEN. III. AS THE POPULAR FALL-STORY 
 
 In the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs both stories 
 seem to appear in this character. The Watcher-story 
 appears in the Testament of Reuben, with a curious variant 
 which makes the daughters of men take the initiative in 
 seducing the angels,t and in the Testament of Napthali.? 
 On the other hand, the Testament of Levi asserts that the 
 redemption which the Messiah will bring will consist in the 
 removal of the flaming sword which excludes man from 
 Paradise, his restoration to the happy garden, and his being 
 given to eat of the Tree of Life —a prophecy which seems 
 to presuppose the identification of the ultimate ° Fall’ with 
 the sin of Adam and Eve. In the Book of the Secrets of 
 Enoch (often called the ‘ Slavonic Enoch ’) written, perhaps, 
 contemporaneously with the life of our Lord, whilst both 
 Fall-stories appear, all the emphasis is laid on the Paradise- 
 story as narrating the origin of human wickedness in general, 
 and the Watcher-legend is depressed to a comparatively 
 subordinate role as the explanation merely of that particular 
 episode in the history of human sin which was the occasion 
 of the Flood. In the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon, which 
 may be probably dated during the decade which followed 
 the death of Christ,* there appears to be an incidental 
 allusion to the Adam-story as the explanation of the cause 
 
 1 Test. Reub. v. 5-7. 
 
 2 Test. Napth. iil. 5. 
 
 3 Test. Lev. xvili. Io, II. 
 
 4 A. T.S. Goodricke, The Book of Wisdom, 1913, Introd. § 2. But it 
 must be confessed that much diversity of opinion has prevailed amongst 
 scholars as to the period of this book’s composition: Grimm dates it 
 150-145 B.c., Thackeray 130-100 B.c., Gregg 125-I00 B.c., Gfrdrer 100 B.c., 
 Bousset under the Roman Empire, Farrar a.p. 40. For a full discussion 
 
 of the question, see S. Holmes, The Wisdom of Solomon, introd. § 5 (in 
 Charles, A pocr. and Pseudep. i. p. 520 f.). 
 
30 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of human mortality !; the Watcher-story is not mentioned. 
 The Ezra-A pocalypse, commonly known as the Second or 
 Fourth Book of Esdras, which dates from the last quarter 
 of the first century A.D., seems to mark the complete dis- 
 appearance of the Watcher-story, and the triumph of the 
 Adam-narrative as the generally accepted Fall-story.? It 
 need only be added, by way of epilogue to this earliest 
 chapter in the history of the Fall-doctrine, that, when the 
 angel-myth had finally ceased to be regarded as the inspired 
 record of the origin of human sin, its somewhat carnal 
 character gradually evoked, in the Israel of the Mishnic 
 period, a strong repugnance to that literal, and, historically 
 considered, correct interpretation of it which had hitherto 
 held the field. The idea of sexual intercourse between 
 celestial spirits and the daughters of men came to be 
 abhorrent to the pious Jew; hence the bené ha-’elohim 
 were rationalised into ‘ sons of the judges ’ or ‘ of the mighty,’ 
 that is, purely human beings of princely rank,? and their sin 
 was regarded merely as the first instance of seduction. 
 In the Middle Ages, the literal interpretation was revived 
 by the authors of the Oabbalah, and made the foundation 
 of wild theosophical romances ®; but the main body of 
 Judaism, which had ceased to believe in angels as more than 
 poetical personifications of the divine attributes, adhered 
 to the rationalistic view until recent times. The compara- 
 tive study of religions, whilst restoring the literal interpreta- 
 
 Ali, 23;).U. infra, Lecture 11,"p: 55. 
 
 2 uv. infra, Lecture II, p. 79. 
 
 3 See the references given in the Jewish Encyclopaedia, V. 333, art. 
 
 ‘Fall of Angels,’ and R. H. Charles, Book of Jubilees (1902), pp. 33 ff., 
 note. Symmachus embodies this interpretation in the text, rendering 
 piidsen 3 as viol rdv Suvacrevdvtwv. 
 
 4 Philo, however, characteristically allegorises the story, interpreting 
 the lustful angels as being in reality ‘ the wicked, who slip into the name 
 of angels, not knowing the daughters of right reason, the sciences and 
 virtues, but captivated by the mortal offspring of mortal men, even 
 pleasures, the bearers of no genuine beauty, which is seen by the under- 
 standing alone, but of a spurious gracefulness, through which the senses 
 are deceived’ (de gigant. iv). But, as usual, the allegorical significance 
 of the narrative does not exclude its literal truth (7bid. ii.). Josephus 
 (Ant. i. 3. 1 ) reproduces the story without theological or other comment. 
 
 5 Griinbaum, Gesammelie Aufsdtze zur Sprach- und Sagenkunde (1901), 
 
 PD. 70,70. 
 
 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION = 31 
 
 tion of the phrase béne ha-’elohim, has now dispelled any 
 lingering traces of belief in the historical character of the 
 story, within as without the modern Jewish Church.+ 
 
 It is easy enough to dismiss this queer old legend, this 
 superseded and forgotten Fall-story, as at the present day 
 totally devoid of interest, except for the Orientalist and the 
 student of folk-lore. But the time which we have spent 
 upon its consideration will not have been wasted, if in the 
 course of the discussion two points, which will play an 
 important part in our final constructive synthesis, have 
 been made to stand out with clearness; and this lecture 
 may appropriately conclude with a summary re-formulation 
 of them. 
 
 The first is this—that, considered historically and with 
 regard to the circumstances of its origin, the theory of the 
 Fall and of Original Sin does not rest upon the Paradise- 
 story of Genesis iii. Its true foundations are psychological, 
 based on bed-rock facts of ethical and spiritual experience 
 —the consciousness of the moral struggle, and the feeling 
 of a ceaseless strain and tension between duty and the 
 clamorous appetites, which ever and anon burst victoriously 
 forth into crude external expression, whilst reason looks 
 on in helpless dismay andshame. Video meliora proboque, 
 Deteriora sequor *: ‘ the evil which I would not, that I do’ ’: 
 the state of things described in these almost proverbial 
 sayings may be taken for granted, as requiring no explana- 
 tion, by the unspiritual and the thoughtless; but, when 
 deeply pondered and brooded over by pure, reflective, and 
 sensitive minds, it generates a mental atmosphere in which 
 the predicate of evil tends to become detached from outer 
 acts and transferred to the inner dispositions, even to the 
 very essence, of the soul—an atmosphere in which the con- 
 ception of penitence becomes invested with a new and deeper 
 meaning. The ordinary man may feel ashamed of doing 
 wrong: but the saint, endowed with a superior refinement 
 of moral sensibility, and keener powers of introspection, is 
 ashamed of being the kind of man who is liable to do wrong ; 
 
 1 For the history of the Watcher-story, and of the Fall-story based 
 upon it, within the Christian Church, see Lecture III, p. 113 f. 
 2 Ovid, Met. vii. 21. 3 Rom. vii. 19. 
 
32 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 and, the more complete his mastery over the rebellious 
 impulses of his lower nature, the greater is the distress which 
 the mere existence of these impulses tends to cause him. 
 The ordinary man, if he repents at all, repents merely of 
 what he does, the saint repents of what he is: hence is 
 derived the standing paradox of sanctity, the fact that the 
 consciousness of sin actually deepens in and through the 
 process of liberation from its malignant power, and that it 
 is precisely the most spotless of men—with the arresting 
 exception of One Whom Christians believe to be more than 
 man—who have always proclaimed themselves to be the 
 ‘chief of sinners.’ This attitude of repentance of one’s self, 
 translated into intellectual terms, becomes a belief in some 
 kind of ‘radical evil’ inherent in human nature. But 
 human nature was created by God, and the passionate 
 ethical monotheism which is the heart of Judaism and 
 Christianity alike cannot endure the idea that God is the 
 author of evil ; hence it was concluded that evil in man must 
 be due to some spontaneous revolt against the Divine Law, 
 some voluntary aberration from the path marked out for 
 man by his Creator—in other words, to a ‘ Fall’ of some 
 kind. The necessity of a ‘Fall’ being thus established 
 nothing remained but to identify it with some ‘ fontal sin ’ 
 of man’s infancy, and the unnatural marriages of Gen. vi. 
 seemed at first to be the catastrophe required. Whatever 
 we may think of the validity of this regressive chain of 
 reasoning, from the facts of the moral struggle back to the 
 idea of an inherited taint and from that again to the concep- 
 tion of a primordial sin, it is clear that, inasmuch as the first 
 Fall-story was that of Gen. vi., the doctrines of the Fall and 
 of Original Sin cannot be regarded as standing or falling 
 with the historicity of Gen. ii. The fact is that recent 
 research, which has disposed of the claims of these stories 
 to represent literal historic fact, has simultaneously disposed 
 of the idea that the Christian doctrines of Man and of Sin 
 are logically based upon them. If the Fall-theory rested 
 upon moral and religious experience at the time of its first 
 appearance, and if, as we have seen, the Watcher-story and 
 the Adam-story were subsequently and successively applied 
 to it as what we may call decorative after-thoughts or 
 
 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 33 
 
 supposed historical verifications, it follows that, in principle, 
 it must still claim to be based upon moral and religious 
 experience—and for us, who know these ancient stories to 
 be no more than folk-lore, upon moral and religious experi- 
 ence only. Hence the assertion which has sometimes been 
 made, to the effect that the idea of the Fall has been refuted 
 by ‘ Biblical criticism,’ would seem to be very wide of the 
 mark. <A psychological and metaphysical theory can never 
 be refuted by ‘ Biblical criticism ’—it is vulnerable only by 
 psychological and metaphysical criticism. Whether the 
 theory of an inherited taint or weakness actually corresponds 
 to the facts of human nature or not—and whether, if it does 
 so correspond, it is permissible to found upon it inferences 
 as to the remote origin of human sin—are problems which 
 must be reserved for discussion in the concluding lectures 
 of this course; but it will be sufficient for our present 
 purposes if it has been made clear that the question of the 
 truth of the doctrine is completely detachable from and 
 independent of the question of the historicity of the stories. 
 
 To put the matter in the clearest light, I will venture 
 to append a simile, drawn from the structure of those palaces 
 of commerce or pleasure which line the streets of a modern 
 metropolis. From the pavement, the passer-by who casts 
 his eye over one of these buildings sees a stately front, com- 
 posed, it may be, of pillar, cornice, and architrave in strict 
 accordance with the rules of Vitruvius or Palladio; and 
 the unskilled person may well imagine that the upper rooms 
 and stories are supported by the seemingly massive columns 
 which stand upon the roadway level. But the trained 
 glance of the professional architect discerns at once that the 
 imposing front is merely a stone veneer, masking a con- 
 structional frame of steel girders which is a mechanically 
 perfect and self-contained system, and that the sculptured 
 columns seen from the streets are mere pilasters and decora- 
 tive panels, which take none of the weight of the fabric. 
 In like manner the Fall-story of Gen. vi. and that which 
 eventually succeeded it, the story of Gen. ii., though long 
 believed to be supports of the doctrines under discussion, 
 have now been shown to be quasi-historical facades, suc- 
 cessively attached to a conceptual structure which stands 
 
 D 
 
34 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 upon a psychological basis. The fact that the existing 
 facade has now been discovered to consist of the gesso-work 
 of poetry rather than the ashlar masonry of history does 
 not in itself constitute any presumption against the sound- 
 ness and stability of the interior framework. 
 
 The second point which claims attention arises from the 
 nature of the Watcher-story itself. There can, of course, 
 be no question of utilising this story as a source of historical 
 information; but the student of comparative mythology 
 will not need to be reminded that stories which are value- 
 less historically may have a profound significance for the 
 psychology of races and peoples. Recent study of the mind 
 and its workings has taught us that, in the individual, the 
 dream may be the source of interesting and important 
 information as to the contents of the dim, mysterious region 
 of the Unconscious; for, in the fantastic imagery of the 
 dream, impulses, instincts, and wishes of which the conscious 
 ego may be entirely ignorant find a symbolic expression, 
 through the partial relaxation in sleep of the censorship 
 exercised by the higher self. And myths are the dreams of 
 the vast, slumbrous, diffused race-soul, embodying, in 
 symbolic and generalised form, unmistakeable testimony 
 to the mutual affinities and interpenetrations of the most 
 fundamental emotions of human nature. Hence, it is 
 deeply significant that, in the earliest Fall-story evolved 
 by the ancient Church of God, the primal sin is one which, 
 if the Decalogue could be supposed to have been in existence 
 at the time of its alleged occurrence, would be described 
 as a transgression of the Seventh Commandment. Though 
 it is impossible now to develop the inferences suggested 
 by this fact, it is worth while noting that, in the very 
 beginnings of the idea of Original Sin, there emerges a 
 tendency which has profoundly influenced the course of 
 Christian speculation on the subject, more particularly in 
 its Augustinian phase: and that is the tendency to regard 
 the flaw or weakness inherent in the structure of human 
 personality as caused by, or at least closely connected with, 
 what is known in the language of technical theology as 
 “concupiscence.” We shall have to formulate a judgment 
 as to the truth or value of this tendency, when we come to 
 
 
 
 : 
 | 
 ‘ 
 j 
 

 
 THE BEGINNINGS OF FALL-SPECULATION 35 
 
 examine the bearing of modern psychology upon the problem 
 of the origin of sin, and its detailed discussion must be 
 deferred until then ; but, in our historical survey, we shall 
 often have occasion to note resemblances, sometimes slight 
 and superficial, sometimes astonishingly exact, between 
 the idea of ‘ concupiscence,’ as it appears in Jewish and 
 Christian thought, and the Freudian conception of libido. 
 Meanwhile, we may take our leave of this curious fragment 
 of Semitic mythology, remembering that, despite the 
 grotesque and even repulsive details with which it was 
 bedizened by the riotous imagination of the apocalyptists, 
 it has for a season served a providential purpose. It is one 
 of the rough earthen vessels which for a time have enshrined 
 a heavenly treasure, the treasure of the spirit of true peni- 
 tence, which realises that man has good reason to feel 
 sorrow, not merely for his actions but for his nature, and 
 the treasure of faith in an All-Holy God, Who is ‘ of purer 
 eyes than to behold evil,’ and may not, therefore, without 
 impiety be deemed to be its author or fount. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE A 
 THE ORIGIN OF THE ARTS IN PSEUDO-ENOCH AND AESCHYLUS 
 
 It is instructive to compare r Enoch vii., vili., which tell how 
 the apostate ‘ Watchers’ instructed mankind in the arts of 
 civilisation, with the speech which Aeschylus puts into the 
 mouth of the rebellious god Prometheus, who performs the same 
 function in Greek mythology : 
 
 AéEw 8é, wépriv ovr’ avOpwors Exwr, 
 2))>2 7 D >” 2 , i 
 GAN’ dv d€dwx’ evvorav e€nyovpevos 
 
 a A \ / » / 
 ot mp@ra pev BAemovres EBAeTIOV wary, 
 Kdvovtes OUK GKoVOV, GAN’ dveiparwr 
 adXiyKiot pwopdatcr Tov paxpov Biov 
 4 > A 4 ” a 
 €dupov etx mavra, KovTe mALWOu gets 
 Sdpous mpoceirous Haav, od Evrovpylav’ 
 KaTtwpuxes 8° Evarov wor’ ajauvpor 
 pvUpenKes avTpwv ev wvxots avnAlors. 
 hv 8° oddev adrois ove xelwaros TéKap 
 ovr’ avdeuwdous pos ovTe KapTipov 
 Ogpous BéBatov, GAA’ drep yvouns TO av 
 €mpacoov, €ate 84 adi avroAds eya 
 dorpwv €deréa tds te Suoxpirous Svcets. 
 
36 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Kal pv dpb pov, éfoxov codiopdarwr, 
 e€ndpov avrois, ypapparwv TE ovvévets, 
 pynuny 0 andvrwv, fovoopynrop epydynv. 
 Kkalevéa mparos ev Cuyotor xvadadra 
 CevyAatar SovAevorra odypaciv 0’, dws 
 Ovntots peylorwy Suddoxou Moe Onyicreoy 
 yévow)’, vf’ appar nyayov diAnviovs 
 immous, GyaA pa THs UTEepTAoUTOU xALOAs. 
 BadacodrAayxra 8 ottis dAXos avr’ énod 
 Aworrep’ nope vavtidwy oxyjpara. . . 
 
 7a Aouad pov KAvovoa Pavpudoer tAéov, 
 olas Téxvas Te Kal mOpous Eunodunv..... 
 
 I will speak, not chiding mankind, but expounding the kindness that 
 I showed them in my gifts. For, at the first, men seeing saw in vain, and 
 hearing they heard not, but like unto dream-forms they mixed all things 
 in wild confusion all their days. Naught they knew of brick-built houses, 
 turned to face the sun, or of the joiner’s craft ; they dwelt underground, 
 like the tiny ants, in the sunless recesses of caverns. Nor was there any 
 certain sign for them of winter, or bloomy spring, or fruitful summer, 
 until I showed them the risings of the stars and their settings hard to be 
 discerned. Number I found out for them, noblest of inventions, and 
 groupings of letters, and memory of all things, creative mother of know- 
 ledge. I first yoked beasts of burden, and made them thralls to collar 
 and pack-saddle, that they might relieve mortals of their heaviest toils ; 
 and to the chariot I harnessed docile steeds, the splendid appanage of 
 luxurious wealth. Nor did any other devise the mariners’ canvas-winged 
 wains that roam the sea.... Thou wilt wonder yet more, having 
 heard the rest of my tale, what arts and contrivances I framed. 
 
 He goes on to claim credit for having originated medicine, the 
 art of divination, and (like Azazél) metallurgy :-— 
 
 evepbe 5é yOovos 
 Kexpuppev avOpwro.ow wdedAnpara, 
 xaAKdv, aldnpov, apyupov, xpvaov Te Tis 
 proevev av maporlev eLeupeiv epod ; 
 ovdeis, odd’ olda, 1H pdrnv drvVaat OédAwv. 
 Bpaxet S¢ pv0w wdvra avdAAnBdnv padbe, 
 maoat Téxvat Bpototow ex ITpopnbéws. 
 
 And who before me could pretend to have discovered the treasures 
 hid beneath the earth, brass, iron, silver, and gold ? no one, I wot, unless 
 he willed to babble foolishly. In one short sentence learn the whole story : 
 all the arts came to mortals from Prometheus. (Prometheus Vinctus, 
 
 447-468, 476-7, 500-6.) 
 
 In the Greek myth, knowledge is a blessing which the tyrant 
 Zeus desires to withhold from men because he hates them ; in 
 the Jewish story, it is, relatively to finite and imperfect beings, 
 a curse from which the Lord would fain shield his children. 
 
 
 
II. 
 
 THE ADAM-STORY AND THE 
 ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ 
 
Love is the source both of viriue and of sin 
 
 ‘Neé creator né creatura mai,’ 
 comincio ei, ‘ figliuol, fu senza amore, 
 o naturale o d’animo; e tuil sai. 
 Lo natural € sempre senza errore, 
 ma l’altro puote errar per malo obbietto, 
 O per poco o per troppo di vigore. 
 Mentre ch’egli € ne’primi ben diretto, 
 e ne’secondi sé stesso misura, 
 esser non puo cagion di mal diletto ; 
 ma, quando al mal si torce, o con pit cura 
 o con men che non dee corre nel bene, 
 contra il fattore adopra sua fattura. 
 Quinci comprender puoi ch’esser conviene 
 amor sementa in voi d’ogni virtute, 
 e d’ogni operazion che merta pene.’ 
 
 DaNTE, Purgatorio, xvii. gI-105. 
 
 
 
 
 
LECTURE If 
 
 THE ADAM-STORY AND THE 
 “EVIL IMAGINATION ’ 
 
 Rom. v. 12: ‘Through one man sin entered into the world, and death 
 through sin.’ 
 
 Gen. vi. 5: ‘ And the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great 
 in the earth, and that every imagination of the 
 thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.’ 
 
 IT was assumed in our last lecture that the Paradise-story 
 of Gen. ii., despite its traditional employment in later 
 Judaism and Christianity as a basis for the doctrines of the 
 Fall and of Original Sin, did not in the mind of the original 
 compiler of the Yahwistic source either explicitly or im- 
 plicitly contain these doctrines, in any of their developed or 
 technical forms.1 This assumption must now be justified 
 by a critical examination of that narrative which for many 
 centuries was venerated by Christians as the literal historic 
 record : 
 
 Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit 
 Of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste 
 Brought Death into the world, and all our woe.? 
 
 The cadence of these stately lines should remind us of 
 a preliminary warning, which despite its frequent repetition 
 by commentators is not even yet superfluous, namely, that 
 which bids us resolutely banish Milton from our thoughts. 
 Probably most educated Englishmen who are not theological 
 specialists still tend unconsciously to read the highly 
 systematised doctrinal background of ‘ Paradise Lost’ into 
 the artless simplicity of the primitive Scripture. But the 
 student who is on his guard against the subtle influence 
 which half-remembered poetic echoes may exercise upon 
 
 tecture 1. pir; 2 Milton, Paradise Lost, 1. 1. 
 
40 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the mind will see at a glance that the splendour of Milton's 
 mighty epic bears much the same relation to the original 
 story of Gen. iii. as Michael Angelo’s basilica of St. Peter 
 bears to its humble predecessor, the wattled oratory built 
 by the earliest Christians upon the same site ; and it is the 
 original story alone which has any significance at this stage 
 of our enquiry. To discover this significance, we must be 
 prepared to examine the narrative without presuppositions, 
 and with a certain necessary independence of its familiar 
 and hallowed associations. 
 
 The Paradise-story examined. 
 
 Approaching the story in this spirit, we naturally enquire 
 first of all, What, in the mind of the Yahwistic author, was 
 
 1 If the following exposition of the Paradise-story, insisting, as it 
 does, upon the imperfect conception of the moral character of God which 
 is involved in the idea of His grudging His creatures the possession of 
 knowledge, appears to any readers difficult at first sight to reconcile with 
 belief in the authority of the Old Testament as ‘ written for our learning, 
 that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope’ 
 (Rom. xv. 4), I would ask the attention of such readers to the following 
 words, which I am permitted to quote from a sermon preached by Dr. 
 H. L. Goudge, Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford : 
 ‘ There is a distinction which we must often remember as we read the 
 Old Testament. It is the distinction between the original meaning of the 
 words and the meaning which they now have for us. In early days the 
 Jews were accustomed to treat their literature very freely. They com- 
 bined old materials in a new way ; they corrected and added to what they 
 found: and, as their interest in religion deepened, they put new and 
 higher meanings upon old and familiar words. When the Christian 
 Church took over the Old Testament from the Jews, it used a similar 
 freedom. It did not, indeed, further alter the words which it found ; 
 we read them to-day much as our Lord must have read them. But the 
 fuller knowledge which the Church possessed enabled her teachers to find 
 in the Old Testament a deeper meaning than even the Jews had found ; 
 and it is with this deeper meaning that we are chiefly concerned to-day. 
 What the words originally meant often matters little; what they mean 
 as part of the Bible matters a great deal’ (italics mine). In accordance 
 with the method explained in Lecture I, p. 12, the present portion of our 
 enquiry is of a purely historical and scientific, not of a dogmatic or homi- 
 letic nature ; and it is therefore concerned solely with the question what 
 the Paradise-story originally meant, in the ninth century B.c., for the 
 Yahwist writer when he selected it from a mass of Babylonian traditions 
 for embodiment in his history of God’s dealings with man; it does not 
 touch upon the question, what this story means now as part of the Christian 
 Bible, for instructed members of the Christian Church. 
 
 
 
 
 
a 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION ’ AI 
 
 the condition of Adam and Eve! as first created? It is 
 clear that the physical and mental state of the first man is 
 not conceived as being very far exalted above that of the 
 beasts, because the sole object of the creation of animals, 
 according to the Yahwistic narrative of c. il. 18-25, is to 
 provide Adam with a suitable companion, and the various 
 existing species of brutes represent so many unsuccessful 
 experiments made to this end by the Creator?; who, 
 indeed, only hits upon the idea of building up a rib drawn 
 
 1<«Adam’ (ddham, OVS) is not really a proper name at all; it is the 
 ordinary Hebrew word for ‘ man,’ homo. ‘ Eve’ is a proper name, but 
 its Hebrew form is Hawwah (30, which in the LXX becomes Eda and 
 in the Latin ‘ Heva’ or ‘ Eva,’ whence the English‘ Eve’). The Yahwist 
 connects Hawwah with the verb /ayah (MN), to ‘ exist’ or ‘live,’ and 
 
 explains that this name was conferred on the first woman by her husband 
 “ because she was the mother of all living’ (iii. 20, which comes in rather 
 oddly after the account of the first sin, and may be misplaced) ; but this 
 etymology may well be an ex post facto invention, and it is not improbable 
 that Hawwah may be a ‘ depotentiated’ Phoenician goddess of the 
 
 underworld, as the name ym (HWT) occurs on a Punic tablet described 
 
 by Lidzbarski, Ephemeris fiiy semit. Epigraphik, i. pp. 26 ff.; see also 
 G. A. Cooke, North-Sem. Inscr., p. 135. To convey the full atmosphere of 
 this primitive folk-tale, we should, perhaps, designate the two human 
 actors in it as ‘Man’ (with a capital M) and ‘ Hawwah’ respectively ; 
 but, as the use of ‘ Adam’ and ‘ Eve’ will be inevitable in those sections 
 of our enquiry which are concerned with the Christian development of 
 the Fall-doctrine, it seems best for the sake of verbal consistency to use 
 them here. 
 
 2 In v. 18 Yahweh realises that solitude will be injurious to Adam, 
 and resolves to make him a suitable mate. He therefore (v. 19) forms 
 out of the ground ‘ every beast of the field and every fowl of the air,’ and 
 brings them in succession to Adam ‘ to see what he would call them,’ 7.e. 
 to see whether he would manifest his acceptance of any one of them as a 
 life-companion by addressing it with some endearing epithet. The man 
 apparently greets them in turn with ejaculations of a disparaging nature, 
 each of which adheres to the particular animal which provoked it (for the 
 primitive Hebrew, words are semi-material things which may become 
 attached to living agents—compare the story of Jacob’s theft of the 
 blessing designed for Esau) and becomes the animal’s permanent generic 
 name (‘ whatsoever the man called every living creature, that was the 
 name thereof’). See Skinner, Genesis, ICC., p. 67f.; the patristic 
 idealisation of the passage is discussed in Lecture V, p. 361 f. It is 
 hardly necessary to point out that this story, according to which man was 
 created before the brutes, and was, in fact, for some appreciable time the 
 only living organism in the world, is totally irreconcilable with the later 
 narrative of P (i. 20-27), according to which man was only created at 
 the close of the sixth day, after all the lower animals. 
 
42 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 from Adam’s own body into a separate person when he finds 
 that none of his sub-human productions prove congenial to 
 a being endowed with reason. Manis thus a frail creature, 
 child-like in his ignorance and simplicity, qualities which are 
 manifested and symbolised by his nakedness. His home is 
 Yahweh’s own private pleasaunce, set in the faery realm of 
 ‘Edhen towards the sun-rising, shaded by the solemn love- 
 liness of the primaeval forest, and watered by the perennial 
 fount which feeds the four great rivers of the ancient world, 
 Pishon, Gihon, Hiddeqel, and Euphrates1!; in its midst 
 stand up two trees endowed with magical properties, the 
 Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and 
 Evil. His days are spent in the light and pleasant labour 
 of dressing and keeping *the Garden. Apart from this duty, 
 one law only is imposed upon him—the prohibition against 
 eating of the Tree of Knowledge, the taste of which, he is 
 told, is fraught with instant death. 
 
 This detail raises a question of considerable importance 
 for the true understanding of the story—the question of the 
 moral condition of Adam and Eve before the first trans- 
 gression. It is clear that the story contains no formal 
 doctrine of ‘ Original Righteousness,’ such as was later 
 imagined in order to accentuate the malevolence of the first 
 sin. But, on the other hand, the state of our first parents 
 cannot be said to have been one merely of non-moral 
 innocence: for they are conscious of at least two duties, 
 those of doing a reasonable amount of work in the garden 
 
 1 Hiddegel is undoubtedly the Tigris; it seems most probable that 
 Pishén and Gihon are the Ganges and the Nile respectively (the traditional 
 identifications ; see Skinner, [CC., p. 64 ff.). A prosaic critic might find 
 a difficulty in the fact that the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Ganges, and the 
 Nile have not and never have had, a common source ; but the topography 
 of Fairyland need not be taken too seriously. For an attempt to extract 
 
 definite spatial determinations from these poetic fantasies, see F. Delitzsch, 
 Wo lag das Paradies ? (1881). 
 
 2 That is ‘ guarding’: against what sort of dangers, in an unfallen 
 universe, is not clear. 
 
 $ It may be observed that the convention of describing and depicting 
 the fatal fruit as an “ apple’ (which goes back at least as far as Venantius 
 Fortunatus in the seventh century A.p., who speaks of the ‘ pomum 
 noxiale ’—v. supra, p. 9, n. 3) is purely arbitrary. So far as the Yahwist 
 visualised the magic trees at all, he must have thought of them as palms 
 (like the sacred palms which appear in conventionalised form on many 
 Babylonian sculptures) and of their fruit as dates. 
 
 
 
 
 
ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ = 43 
 
 and of abstaining from the forbidden fruit. It would seem 
 truer to say that they are conceived as being in principle 
 moral and responsible agents, but exempted by their 
 ignorance and by the primitive simplicity of their paradisal 
 state from most of the painful conflicts between conscience 
 and appetite which more complicated conditions of life 
 necessarily involve ; they are in possession of the forms or 
 categories of ‘ Right’ and ‘ Wrong,’ but their acquaintance 
 with the content of these conceptions is imperfect and 
 limited. | 
 
 It is natural to enquire at this point ‘ If Adam and Eve 
 are conceived in the story as possessed, even before their 
 fatal act, of the knowledge of the distinction between right 
 and wrong, what is meant by the description of the sinister 
 Tree as “‘ the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” ?’ 
 The answer to this question seems to lie in the fact that the 
 Hebrew words for ‘ good’ and ‘ evil’ (¢6bh and va‘) do not 
 necessarily or primarily signify moral good and evil: their 
 fundamental meaning is rather that of ‘ good’ and ‘ evil’ 
 relatively to the physical well-being of man, the expressions 
 being transferred to virtue and vice only in so far as the 
 consequences of these two states are advantageous or the 
 reverse. In this phrase, therefore, ¢6bh and ra‘ may well be 
 translated ‘ beneficial’ or ‘ useful,’ and ‘ noxious’ or ‘‘harm- 
 ful,’ respectively. The knowledge, therefore, of ‘ good’ and 
 ‘evil,’ that is of ‘ beneficial’ and ‘ noxious’ things, which 
 Yahweh forbids his creatures to acquire, would appear to be 
 what we should call ‘ scientific ’ knowledge rather than moral 
 illumination. Hedoesnot wish them to know anything of the 
 arts of civilisation, or of the sciences which make society and 
 culture possible : he desires to keep them in happy, child-like 
 ignorance, infinitely inferior to himself, but safeguarded 
 from the sorrows which the increase of knowledge brings in 
 its train. We shall see how this conception of the effects of 
 the ill-omened tree lights up the whole story, as it appeared 
 to the mind of the Yahwistic writer. Once more we are 
 brought face to face with the Prometheus-moti/, which we 
 have already noted as running through ‘ Enoch’s’ decoration 
 of the Watcher-legend—the belief, that is, in a Divine 
 jealousy which grudges man the possession of scientific 
 
44 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 knowledge, and exacts stern punishment for its illicit 
 acquisition. The main duty, therefore, of Adam and Eve, 
 in their primal state, is to be ignorant : ‘ where ignorance is 
 bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.’ 
 
 Into this paradise of nescience there enters the sinister 
 shape of the serpent, the most subtle of all the beasts of the 
 field which Yahweh ’elohim had made, the incarnation of 
 the irrepressible spirit of intellectual curiosity. There can 
 be no doubt that in the mind of J it is the literal serpent 
 that is meant (at this early date, it is to be presumed that 
 only one? specimen of the serpent race was in existence, 
 the primitive progenitor of all subsequent members of the 
 tribe). In the text as it stands, there is no suggestion what- 
 
 “ever that he is Satan in visible form or that he is indwelt 
 by Satan, or that he embodies any personal principle of 
 evil external to or other than himself. With treacherous 
 affability, he engages our unsuspecting ancestress in con- 
 versation. By adroitly exaggerating the extent of the 
 divine prohibition (‘ Hath God said, Ye shall not eat of any 
 tree of the garden? ’), he lures the too communicative 
 woman into a discussion of the forbidden fruit and its 
 properties: and points out (apparently with perfect truth, 
 as we gather from the sequel) that the motives which have 
 impelled her master to enact this prohibition are of anything 
 but a disinterested nature, and that his warning as to the 
 mortal effects of the tree is an empty threat. Yahweh is 
 haunted by a jealous fear lest men, through the acquisition 
 of scientific knowledge, should attain to a position of 
 equality with himself, and he therefore endeavours to keep 
 them in the dark by means of baseless menaces. Eve is 
 deeply impressed by the uncanny creature’s knowledge of 
 these high mysteries, and her longing for wisdom is rein- 
 forced by the demands of natural appetite. She tastes the 
 seductive fruit, and induces Adam to share her transgression. 
 The immediate effects of the magic food are of a somewhat 
 unexpected nature; the man and the woman become 
 
 tSee' Lectures] pp. 251. 
 
 2 Or possibly two, if the Yahwist thought that sexual distinctions 
 existed in the brute creation at this date ; in which case it may be presumed 
 
 that the male serpent is here meant. But it is extremely improbable 
 that our author had thought the matter out with this degree of minuteness, 
 
 
 
——_—_—_— —-~ -. 
 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION ’ 45 
 
 suddenly conscious of the facts of sex, of which, it would 
 seem, they had hitherto been ignorant, with the concomitant 
 sense of physical shame: which impels them to enwreath 
 their bodies, hitherto innocently naked, with extemporised 
 aprons of fig-leaves.1 Then an ominous sound falls on their 
 ears—they hear the approaching footsteps * of the Creator, 
 who, with the most naive anthropomorphism, is represented, 
 like an earthly nobleman, as walking in his garden ‘in the 
 cool of the day.’ Instead of running to meet him, as on the 
 occasions of his previous visits, with the artless affection of 
 children, the conscience-stricken pair hasten to hide them- 
 selves in the undergrowth ; but are detected and summoned 
 forth to give an account of this undutiful conduct. The 
 man incautiously alleges his nudity as an excuse, thus 
 betraying the fatal fact of his sin, with which he is imme- 
 diately taxed. He confesses it, having no other resource, 
 but, with unchivalrous cowardice, hastens to lay the blame 
 on his wife, who in turn accuses the serpent; the latter, 
 unable to transfer the responsibility to any fourth party, 
 maintains a guilty silence. Then the judgment is pro- 
 nounced. The light and pleasant labour of tending the 
 fertile garden is to be exchanged by Adam for the heart- 
 breaking task of wringing a scanty sustenance from a thorny 
 and stubborn earth. The woman is punished for the 
 unlawfully acquired knowledge of sex by subjection to the 
 pangs of childbirth, which, despite its accompanying pain, 
 the deepest instincts of her soul will drive her to desire ; 
 whilst the serpent is deprived of the upright posture assumed 
 to have been enjoyed by him hitherto, and is condemned to 
 what our author evidently regards as a painful and igno- 
 minious method of locomotion, to food of dust, and toa 
 condition of perpetual feud with the human race. There 
 follows the enigmatic sentence traditionally known as the 
 Protevangelium, in which it is predicted that the seed of 
 
 1 It seems unnecessary to attribute (as apparently do St. Augustine, 
 de civ. Det, xiv. 17, and Milton, Par. Lost, ix, 1o11 ff.) strictly aphrodisiac 
 
 effects to the forbidden fruit. For the sex-motif in Fall-stories and Fall- 
 speculation generally, see Lecture I, p. 34; II, pp. 58, 66. 
 2 The word Sp, rendered by the English versions as ‘ voice’ (‘ the 
 
 voice of the Lord God walking in the garden’), should be translated 
 ‘sound,’ as RV. marg.; see Skinner in loc. 
 
46 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the woman will crush the serpent’s head, whilst the serpent 
 will crush or bruise his heel. The mystical interpretation 
 of this saying as a foreshadowing of Redemption is well 
 known, and, within the sphere of devotion, doubtless 
 legitimate ; the critical student, however, cannot feel con- 
 fident that the original significance of the passage is more 
 than aetiological, designed to explain the instinctive mutual 
 antipathy which exists between men and snakes. 
 
 The primal curse having been thus pronounced, feelings 
 of compassion seem, for a time, to come uppermost in the 
 mind of the offended Deity ; for he condescends to manu- 
 facture, apparently with his own hands, garments of skins } 
 to replace the drapery of fig-leaves with which the guilty 
 pair had clothed themselves. We are not told who slew 
 the animals from which these skins were procured ; it may 
 be surmised that a paragraph narrating the beginnings of 
 animal sacrifice, or of hostility between the animals (other 
 than the serpent) and man, has here dropped out of the 
 record. Then the feeling of jealous alarm for his own 
 position once more revives in Yahweh's breast. He suddenly 
 thinks of the possibility that man, having acquired poten- 
 tialities of scientific knowledge equal to that of his Creator, 
 may take the further step of seizing immortality by tasting 
 of the Tree of Life—a step which would make Adam 
 Yahweh’s equal, and practically annul the judgment just 
 pronounced against him.? To ensure effectually against this 
 undesirable contingency, he expels the man and the woman 
 from the garden, and places at its gateway the Cherubim 
 and the whirling sword of flame, to bar for ever man’s access 
 to the Tree of Life. 
 
 This wonderful saga, both when read in the matchless 
 English of the Authorised Version, and still more in the 
 Homeric simplicity and directness of the Hebrew original, 
 is instinct with a peculiar power and impressiveness, which 
 is felt even by those for whom the story has no theological 
 significance. And it may truly be claimed that, by removing 
 
 1 For the allegorisation of these ‘coats of skins’ by the Greek 
 Fathers, v. infra, Lecture IV, pp. 229, 251, 275, 285. 
 
 2 v.22: ‘ Behold, the man is become as one of us’ (i.e. of the ’eléhim, 
 Yahweh and his fellow gods) ‘ to know good and evil.’ 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ = 47 
 
 the baroque magnificence with which the genius of Milton 
 had gilded it, and bringing to light the brilliant, yet grave, 
 archaic colouring of the authentic story, fresh from the 
 Semitic world of the ninth century before Christ, modern 
 criticism has rather enhanced than diminished the splendour 
 of its literary and artistic appeal. It fulfils in a high degree 
 the function assigned by one of our great teachers to the 
 myths of Plato, that of evoking ‘ Transcendental Feeling ’ 
 in a singularly pure and poignant form!: it speaks like 
 solemn organ-music to the heart, awakening blended and 
 formless emotions of adoration, awe, and penitence. From 
 this point of view alone, it is impossible not to perceive the 
 enormous superiority of the Adam-story of Gen. iii. to its 
 earlier rival, the Watcher-story of Gen. vi., a superiority 
 which is reflected by the measure in which the frieze of 
 gorgeous pictures conjured up by Milton out of the former 
 surpasses the weak and bombastic drama (‘ Heaven and 
 Earth ’) founded by Byron upon the latter. And, on any 
 showing, there can be no doubt that religion was the gainer 
 by the victory of Gen. iii. It is not, indeed, necessary to 
 discuss the question of its historicity before an audience 
 such as this ; it has long since been recognised by educated 
 Christians that the sunlight of Eden, which falls upon the 
 magic trees, the talking serpent, and the man-like figure of 
 the Creator, walking in his garden in the cool of the day, is 
 
 The light that never was on sea or land.? 
 
 A few words, however, devoted to the questions of its origin 
 and significance will involve no waste of time, for they will 
 confirm the judgment provisionally formulated in Lecture I, 
 as well with regard to the Paradise-story as to the tale of 
 the fallen Watchers, that these narratives are to be viewed 
 as facades successively attached to, rather than foundations 
 
 1 See J. A. Stewart, The Myths of Plato, Introduction, 4 (p. 39). 
 2 In this connexion, it is perhaps worth noting that the Fall-story 
 of Gen. vi. has widely been thought to have subconsciously inspired a 
 line of Coleridge’s dream-poem, Kubla Khan: 
 ‘ A savage place ! as holy and enchanted 
 As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted 
 By woman wailing for her demon-lover.’ 
 
 8 Wordsworth, Stanzas on Peele Castle. 
 
48 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 which carry the weight of, that theory of the origin of evil 
 which is known as the doctrine of the Fall and of Original Sin. 
 
 It may be said at once that archaeology so far has failed 
 to discover the ultimate source from which J obtained the 
 story, though a few uncertain parallels to one or other of 
 its characteristic details have been discovered in Babylonian 
 and Zoroastrian literature.t Nor does its internal criticism 
 afford us much help in ascertaining the date and place of 
 its origin. A careful examination of it raises difficulties to 
 which no obvious answer is forthcoming. If Adam was 
 allowed to eat of all the trees of the Garden, except only of 
 the Tree of Knowledge, why did he not eat of the Tree of 
 Life, and so secure immortality, before the ‘ Fall’? Why 
 does the threat of instant death to follow upon the taste of 
 the Tree of Knowledge fail to secure fulfilment, with the 
 result that the serpent’s disparagement of the Creator’s 
 good faith is apparently vindicated? And, lastly, what 
 were the motives which actuated the animal tempter in his 
 gratuitous interference with the happy condition of Adam 
 and Eve? As the story stands, the serpent appears to come 
 very badly out of the affair. He loses various gratifying 
 privileges, and gains nothing whatever—a result which his 
 demonic subtlety might reasonably have been expected to 
 foresee. These inconcinnities suggest that the Paradise- 
 story contains two narratives imperfectly fused—whether 
 by J himself, or by an earlier writer, cannot now be 
 determined. Sir James Frazer has suggested? that one 
 story may have embodied a theme widely disseminated in 
 the folk-lore of the African peoples, the idea that God sends 
 a message to man informing him how to attain immortality, 
 and employing some animal as his messenger—and that 
 man’s present condition of mortality is due to the fact that 
 the messenger spitefully falsified or suppressed the message. 
 
 1 See Skinner, [CC., pp. 90-93; and W. L. Wardle, Isvael and Babylon 
 (1925), Cc. vii., ‘ Paradise and the Fall,’ which contains a criticism of the 
 attempt made by S. Langdon to find a Babylonian version of the Fall- 
 story in his Sumerian Epic of Paradise, the Flood, and the Fall of Man 
 (1915). For a defence of Langdon’s theories, Wardle refers to an article 
 by Mercer, in the Journal of the Society of Oriental Research, iii, 86-88— 
 a reference which I have not been able to verify. 
 
 2 Folk-lore in the Old Testament (1919), i. 2 (Pp. 45-77). 
 
 
 

 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ — 49 
 
 The other may have been based on another well-known 
 legend, which accounts for the supposed immortality of the 
 serpent by the fact that it periodically sheds its skin. It is 
 conceivable that the original story may have combined 
 these two ideas by telling how the serpent was commissioned 
 by God to advise Adam to eat of the Tree of Life and so 
 acquire immortality, and how through envy he perverted 
 the divine message by persuading Adam to eat of the Tree 
 of Death, and appropriated the gift of immortality by eating 
 of the Tree of Life himself. This, however, remains no more 
 than a brilliant conjecture. 
 
 The origin of the story is thus obscure: but the 
 significance which it bore for the minds of those who 
 embodied it in the great Prophetic history of God’s dealings 
 with man can be determined with much greater certainty. 
 It has been already pointed out that the most important 
 brima facie difficulties inhering in the story are cleared up 
 if we assume that ‘ good’ and ‘evil’ in the name of the 
 fatal Tree mean physical, not moral, good and evil 
 respectively, and that the sin of the first men consisted in 
 snatching the treasure of scientific and cultural knowledge 
 which the Creator had not destined for them. This con- 
 clusion is strikingly confirmed by the tenor of chapter iv., 
 which narrates the first rude beginnings of culture, following 
 immediately upon the expulsion from Paradise of the 
 ancestors of the human race; for it is precisely with this 
 growth of civilisation that the two first instances of human 
 cruelty and ferocity are connected. The development of 
 agriculture and of cattle-keeping, with its corollary, the 
 discovery? of the only kind of sacrifice acceptable to 
 Yahweh, brings in its train the first murder, that of Abel.? 
 The discovery of the art of working in metals by Tubal-Cain 3 
 leads to the fatal invention of the sword, and there follows 
 the repulsive scene in which Lamech is apparently repre- 
 sented as brandishing the newly forged weapon, which he 
 owes to the ingenuity of his son, before his wives Adah 
 
 1 If it be thought probable, as suggested above, that a paragraph 
 narrating the beginnings of animal sacrifice has dropped out between 
 iii. 20 and 21, for the words ‘ discovery of’ should be substituted ‘ acquisi- 
 
 tion of the means of offering.’ 
 2 Gen. iv. 2-8. ® Gen. iv. 22. 
 
50 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 and Zillah, and exulting in the bloody vengeance which 
 he has taken for some trifling slight.1_ It would seem that, 
 for J’s sombre philosophy of history, civilisation and culture 
 are, on the whole, a disastrous mistake. The undertones 
 of pessimism and world-weariness which pervade the early 
 sections of his narrative are easily discernible by an ear 
 attuned to the finer vibrations of an unstudied literary 
 style, and it can hardly be doubted that he would have 
 given a whole-hearted assent to the Preacher’s melancholy 
 aphorism ‘ He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’ ? 
 
 It will be seen that for this writer the first sin was 
 indeed a ‘ Fall,’ in virtue of its consequences, namely, the 
 forfeiture of Paradise, the loss of the opportunity of obtain- 
 ing immortality, and man’s resulting servitude to hard work 
 and death. But the causal link between the primal trans- 
 gression and man’s subsequent misfortunes is clearly 
 of an external and, so to speak, mechanical nature: 
 these misfortunes are represented as due, partly to the 
 arbitrary decree of a jealous Creator, concerned to safeguard 
 his unique prerogatives against a possible rival, and partly 
 to the complicated conditions of social life inevitably 
 engendered by the growth of ‘ scientific knowledge.’ There 
 is not a word in the narrative to suggest that the first sin 
 produced a reflex psychological effect upon Adam and Eve, 
 or infected them with an znterioy corruption or infirmity cap- 
 able of being transmitted by physiological heredity to their 
 descendants: that is to say, there is not a word which 
 implies the theological doctrine of ‘ Original Sin’ in any of 
 its historic forms. The mysterious phrase which has been 
 sometimes interpreted as imputing to Cain an innate bias 
 towards evil (‘if thou doest not well, sin coucheth at the 
 door ’—at the door of what, is not explained) is textually 
 so corrupt that its original meaning is irrecoverable, and 
 nothing can legitimately be built upon it?; even if it be 
 
 1 Gen. iv. 23. 
 
 # Eccles! 1. 15, 
 
 3’ Gen.iv. 7. Itshould, perhaps, be added that the reading of LXX (ovx 
 €av 6p0ds mpoceveyKys, 6pOds Sé w7 SreAns, Huapres ; Hovyacov—' If thou didst 
 offer rightly, but didst not rightly divide [the oblation], hast thou not 
 sinned ? be silent’) gives a sense which is perfectly intelligible, and may 
 well be original; it represents Yahweh as insisting upon ceremonial 
 
 
 

 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ § 51 
 
 insisted that these words must at least be understood as 
 attributing an evil nature to Cain, the verse is entirely 
 silent as to any inheritance of this by Cain from his parents, 
 and in no way excludes the supposition that it may have 
 been formed by unrecorded acts of free, but wrongful, self- 
 determination committed prior to the murder of Abel. 
 We can, indeed, read the story in the light of “ Original Sin,’ 
 or read back the idea of ‘ Original Sin’ into the story— 
 if we choose; but we must recognise that this can only be 
 done by the employment of a mystical or allegorical, not 
 a scientific, method of interpretation. In the narrative of 
 Gen. iii. and iv. as it stands, the only ‘hereditary’ influences 
 which play any part are such as fall under the general 
 description of ‘ social heredity,’ which affects the individual 
 from without, through the medium of laws, customs, insti- 
 tutions, traditions, conventions, and fashions, and which is 
 to be sharply distinguished from ‘ biological heredity,’ which 
 determines the individual from within, through the invisible 
 psychic characters borne by the fundamental germ-plasm 
 from which he springs. 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FALL-THEORY IN CONNEXION 
 WITH THE PARADISE-STORY 
 
 We conclude, then, that in the intention of J, the writer 
 to whom we owe its embodiment in our Scriptures, the 
 Paradise-story was meant to narrate what may be called 
 a ‘ Fall,’ in an external or dramatic sense—that is, an act, 
 of tBpis or presumption which brought the Golden Age to 
 an end: but that it does not contain the idea of a moral 
 infirmity or corruption transmitted by biological heredity, 
 an idea which is the necessary basis of the doctrine of 
 ‘Original Sin’ in all its forms. It must be remembered, 
 however, that simple minds would find it difficult to 
 distinguish clearly between ‘ social’ and ‘ biological’ heredity, 
 in the sense defined above, and that the former conception 
 
 correctness in every stage of the sacrificial action, not merely in the 
 first. But, so understood, the verse ciearly contains even less sugges- 
 tion of ‘ hereditary sinfulness ’ than it does in the Hebrew version. 
 
52 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 might well be expected to melt insensibly into the latter, 
 a transformation which would accomplish itself with especial 
 facility in an intellectual world still subconsciously saturated, 
 despite the work of the prophets, by the old conception of 
 evil as a quasi-material contagion. It will be appropriate 
 to subjoin a few words with regard to the steps by which 
 this metamorphosis was actually effected. 
 
 It was pointed out in Lecture I that the Fall-theory, 
 in its earliest and vaguest form as a belief in a ‘ first sin’ of 
 some kind which introduced an undefined poison into the 
 stock of humanity, would seem to have been first connected 
 with the Angel-story of Gen. vi., and that its attachment to 
 
 the Adam-story was in the nature of an afterthought. It> 
 
 must be frankly admitted that any attempt to reconstruct 
 the process whereby the Fall-theory became firmly anchored 
 to the Adam-story must necessarily be conjectural as regards 
 its earlier stages, owing to the paucity of literary data for 
 the period between Nehemiah and the Maccabees. We can 
 affirm with certainty that the process did in fact take place, 
 and that the Adam-story did, almost though not quite 
 completely,! extrude the Angel-story from its position as 
 the popularly accepted Fall-narrative, during the last two 
 centuries before Christ: references to the pseudepigraphic 
 passages which mark the stages of this silent revolution 
 were given in our last lecture, and need not be repeated 
 here. But it must be confessed that the pre-Maccabean 
 beginnings of this process are at present veiled in obscurity. 
 If, however, the provisional nature of all speculations as to 
 the course taken by this development before the epoch at 
 which it can be controlled through written evidence be borne 
 in mind, it will be permissible to claim as much certainty 
 as is possible under the circumstances for the following 
 propositions : 
 
 (1) The ruling idea of the original narrative, that 
 knowledge is intrinsically disastrous, presupposes a very 
 primitive and naive philosophy of life, and must have been 
 obscured and forgotten by the time that speculation on the 
 origin of evil began in earnest, after the Exile. It can 
 hardly have survived the rise to power and influence of the 
 
 Pee Lectureslit prin it 2 Lecture I, pp. 28-30. 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ = 53 
 
 ‘wise men’ (hakhamim) and the tendency to hypostatise 
 and almost to deify Wisdom (hokhmah). This idea once out 
 of the way, the command to abstain from the fruit of a 
 particular tree could be re-interpreted as a simple test of 
 man’s obedience to his Creator, and the first sin could be 
 viewed as deriving its significance and guilt merely from the 
 fact that it was a deliberate transgression of a known law. 
 In this way, we may suppose, the story was brought into 
 harmony with strictly ethical ideas of God and goodness, 
 and fitted to become the basis of a reasoned and logical 
 Fall-theory. 
 
 (2) It would seem that the first step in the construction 
 of such a reasoned Fall-theory on the basis of the Paradise- 
 narrative consisted in the affirmation of a causal connexion 
 between Adam’s sin and the fact of human liability to death, 
 that is, in the reading into the story of the hypothesis that 
 man at his creation was endowed with the gift of immortality, 
 but that this was withdrawn from him as part of the punish- 
 ment for his transgression.! In fact, the Scriptural text 
 says nothing of the kind: it implies, on the contrary, that 
 man was created mortal, formed of the dust and destined 
 to return to it, though he might have made himself immortal 
 by eating of the Tree of Life, even after his sin; and that 
 it was precisely in order to keep him mortal that Yahweh 
 expelled him from the Garden and posted a cherubic guard 
 to prevent his return. The point of Yahweh’s warning in 
 ii. 17 as to the fatal consequences which would follow a breach 
 of his command is, not that man would become mortal after 
 being immortal, but that man, mortal by nature and fated 
 sooner or later to return to dust, would suffer death forthwith 
 as a punishment for his sin (‘7m the day that thou eatest 
 thereof thou shalt surely die’) instead of living out his life 
 to a ripe old age and being re-absorbed into his parent earth 
 through a painless dissolution. It is the ruthless immediacy 
 of the threatened death, not the mere fact of mortality 
 (to which Adam was in any case subject by virtue of his 
 creaturely nature), which constitutes the spear-head of the 
 menace. It may be thought that the literal non-fulfilment 
 
 1 This theory seems to underlie the words of our first text, Rom. v. 12 ; 
 v. infra, Lecture III, p. 126 f. 
 
54 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of this warning, on which we have already commented, 
 ought to have presented as patent a difficulty to the Jews 
 of the post-exilic age as it does to us. But it must be 
 remembered that thinkers who approached the story of 
 Gen. ii. and iii. in a spirit of uncritical devotion would find 
 it easy to surmount this difficulty by supposing that, whilst 
 the taste of the Tree of Knowledge was intrinsically fraught 
 with death, its fatal operation was suspended for some nine 
 centuries by a special exercise of Divine mercy, and only 
 allowed to take effect after Adam had lived for the best 
 part of a millennium. Hence the son of Sirach, writing 
 in the first quarter of the second century before Christ, is 
 already able to affirm a direct causal relation between the 
 first sin and the fact of human death, though his misogynist 
 tendency leads him to saddle Eve with the sole responsibility 
 for our woes : 
 
 From a woman was the beginning of sin, and because of her 
 we all die. 
 
 This aphorism cannot, indeed, be quoted as evidence for 
 the existence in 180 B.c. of a doctrine of hereditary sinful- 
 ness, as distinct from hereditary mortality ; for the recovery 
 of the Hebrew original of this part of Ecclesiasticus has 
 shown that the phrase ‘ From a woman was the beginning 
 of sin’ only means that Eve’s sin was chronologically the 
 first to be committed in human history, and does not imply 
 that it was the cause of all subsequent sin.? It is probable, 
 however, that the distinction between merely chronological 
 and directly causal antecedence, even if consciously realised, 
 would soon tend to become blurred in the non-speculative 
 Jewish mind; and the idea of inherited mortality would 
 draw to itself, by a kind of capillary attraction, the floating 
 idea of inherited sinfulness, so that both alike would come 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 Ecclus. xxv. 24: 
 a0 yuvatkos apx?) GuapTias, 
 kal du’ adriy amoOvicKopev mavres. 
 2 The word apy stands for an origina] npn, which means ‘ temporal 
 beginning ’ rather than ‘ efficient cause’ ; see Brown, Driver and Briggs, 
 » Hebrew and English Lexicon of the O.T., s.v., p. 321. For the Hebrew text 
 of Ecclus. xxv. 24, see JQR, xii. pp. 456 ff. (Schechter) ; Facsimiles of 
 the Fragments of the Book of Ecclesiasticus in Hebrew (Oxford and Cambridge 
 University Presses, 1901). 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION ’ 55 
 
 to be regarded as direct consequences of the primordial sin 
 of the first man. It can safely be affirmed that this process 
 had been consummated, at least in some Jewish circles, by 
 the beginning of the Christian era. Even if the famous 
 saying of the Wisdom of Solomon: 
 
 God created man for incorruption 
 
 And made him an image of his own proper being ; 
 
 But by the envy of the devil death entered into the world, 
 And they that are of his portion make trial thereof 1} 
 
 be interpreted as referring solely to physical death, the 
 existence, at an epoch roughly coinciding with the life of 
 Christ, of a fairly well-defined doctrine affirming that Adam’s 
 sin was the cause of spiritual death in his descendants— 
 that is, of an embryonic doctrine of Original Sin—is proved 
 by its explicit assertion in the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, 
 in a passage describing a vision of the lowest hell which 
 unrolled itself before the eyes of the terrified patriarch. In 
 this abyss, he says, ‘I saw all our forefathers from the 
 beginning with Adam and Eve, and I sighed, and wept, and 
 spake of the ruin caused by their wickedness ; Woe is me 
 Sor my infirmity and that of my forefathers. And I meditated 
 
 in my heart, and said: Blessed is the man who was not 
 
 born, or having been born has never sinned before the face 
 of the Lord, so that he should not come into this place, and 
 bear the yoke of this place!’ ? 
 
 Before we leave the consideration of the Adamic Fall- 
 doctrine as it appears in the Jewish Apocalypses—if ideas 
 so hazy and fluctuating as were those of Adam’s guilt 
 and its melancholy inherited consequences in pre-Christian 
 Judaism may legitimately be described as a ‘ doctrine ’— 
 certain developments and variations of it, which were not 
 without influence in the formation of Christian thought on 
 
 1 Wisdom ii. 23, 24: 
 
 Ort 6 Beds Extisev TOV avOpwrov en’ adbapoia, 
 Kal eikova THs idlas (dudTnTOS emroinoev adrov' 
 Pbdvw S5é SiaBdAov Odvaros eiopAOev els Tov Kdopov, 
 meipatovor dé avrov ot THs Exeivouv peptdos Ores. 
 
 2 2 Enoch c. 40. It will be noticed that these words leave a loophole 
 for the idea of human free-will. Like the Christian second Council of 
 Orange and the Council of Trent, the Slavonic Enoch holds strongly that 
 the taint inherited from Adam and Eve is not so powerful as to destroy 
 the individual’s responsibility for his own fate, 
 
56 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 this subject, deserve to be briefly mentioned. The first and 
 most important of these consists in the growth of an exalted 
 theory of the state of unfallen man, which represents a 
 striking departure from the picture of a frail and ignorant 
 creature, not so very much higher than the beasts, contained 
 in the text of Gen. ii. and ili. The belief that Adam before 
 the ‘ Fall’ was, not merely in a position to acquire immor- 
 tality, but actually immortal, naturally suggested the 
 ascription to him of other physical, mental, and moral en- 
 dowments of a supernatural kind, thus eventually giving 
 rise to the idea of the original perfection of man, an idea 
 known in its moral aspect to later Christian theology as 
 that of ‘ Original Justice’ or ‘ Righteousness.’ The growth 
 of this conception was assisted by two factors: firstly, the 
 tendency already mentioned, to heighten the bliss of Paradise 
 and the supposed virtues of its inhabitants in order to bring 
 into stronger relief the wilful malice of the first sin and the 
 disastrous nature of its consequences ; secondly, the popular 
 diffusion of versions of the Paradise-story, parallel to but 
 more riotously imaginative and fantastic than the com- 
 paratively restrained presentation of it which secured 
 admission to the Yahwistic document, and through this 
 document to the text of canonical Scripture. It would 
 seem that extra-Biblical traditions of this kind underlie the 
 remarkable passage, Ezekiel xxviil. II-19, in which the 
 prophet compares the future fall of the king of Tyre to an 
 expulsion (presumably the expulsion of Adam) from the 
 Garden of Eden ; and (if it be admitted that a direct com- 
 parison of the Tyrian prince with Adam is here intended) 
 by implication describes the first man unfallen, as an 
 ‘anointed cherub,’ ‘ full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty,’ 
 perfect in his ways from the day he was created until 
 unrighteousness was found in him, dwelling in Eden the 
 garden of God and on the holy mountain of God, clothed 
 in garments sewn thick with jewels, and so completely 
 exempt from physical pain that he could walk up and down 
 ‘in the midst of the stones of fire.’1_ The doctrine of the 
 
 + On the ‘ fire-walk,’ a religious practice, common to many nations, 
 in which Adam is here said (by implication) to have been an expert, see 
 J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, i. p. 114. 
 

 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ = 57 
 
 ‘ original perfection ’ of man appears explicitly in the Book 
 of the Secrets of Enoch, which describes the first man as 
 “asecond angel, honourable, great, and glorious,’ ‘ appointed 
 as ruler to rule the earth, and to have God’s wisdom,’ and 
 endowed with the beatific vision so that he could see ‘ the 
 angels in heaven singing the song of victory and the gloom- 
 less light’ 1; for some reason, however, it is asserted that 
 this condition of beatitude only lasted for five and a half 
 hours.?, It is a reasonable conclusion that by the time 
 Christianity came into the world the idea of man’s ‘ original 
 perfection’ had become more or less stereotyped as the 
 logical frius or presupposition of the Adamic version of the 
 Fall-theory, in those areas of the Jewish Church where this 
 theory prevailed. 
 
 From the extra-Biblical versions of the Paradise-story, 
 which it thus appears necessary to postulate, would seem to 
 be derived a repulsive variant of the Adamic doctrine of the 
 origin of sin, which regards the ‘ Fall’ as consisting in the 
 seduction, in the restricted sense of that term, of Eve by 
 the serpent, or by Satan appearing as the serpent; from 
 which was later deduced a theory of the inherited taint as 
 an inguinamentum, a gross physical pollution so communi- 
 cated to her and through her to her posterity. The Slavonic 
 Enoch expresses this view of the Fall quite frankly : 
 
 On account of this (his expulsion from heaven) he (Satan) 
 conceived designs against Adam; in such a manner he entered 
 and deceived Eve. But he did not touch Adam.® 
 
 1 2 Enoch xxxi. (A text): cf. also the Book of Adam and Eve, i. 8. 
 
 *27tno0ch, xxxit. (Ajtext), 
 
 3 It should be added that a fragment of the Book of Noah (1 Enoch 
 lxix. 11) affirms the ‘ original perfection ’ of man, so far as righteousness 
 and physical immortality were concerned, but attributes its loss to his 
 intellectual development, stimulated by the instruction imparted by the 
 fallen angels: ‘For men were created exactly like the angels, to the 
 intent that they should continue pure and righteous, and death which 
 destroys everything could not have taken hold of them; but Pas this 
 their knowledge they are perishing.’ 
 
 4 v. infra, Lecture III, p. 122; Lecture IV, p. 227. 
 
 5 xxxi. 6. The words ‘into Paradise ’ which Professor Sokolov’s text 
 adds after ‘ entered,’ are a patent gloss, designed to remove the obvious 
 (and to later minds unedifying) significance of the passage: Morfill and 
 Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch (1896), p. 45. See Tennant’s 
 full discussion, Fall and Original Sin, pp. 208, 209. 
 
58 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 We observe once more the emergence of a motif, destined 
 to exercise a powerful though largely hidden influence on 
 the course of Jewish and Christian Fall-speculation, which 
 we have already found strongly expressed in the Watcher- 
 story, and less prominently in the Paradise-story (in connec- 
 tion with man’s realisation of his nakedness)—namely, the 
 idea that the first sin was a sexual one or in some way had 
 reference to the instinct of sex.1_ It is noteworthy that the 
 theory of the Fall here expressed exempts Adam from all 
 responsibility for it; and it is impossible not to suspect 
 that it may lie behind the cynical dictum of Ben Sirach, 
 quoted above— From a woman was the beginning of sin.’ 
 Strange though it may seem, we shall see in our next lecture 
 that this hideous legend has shaped the form of two passages 
 in the New Testament which allude to the first trans- 
 gression.” A less revolting, though hardly more reasonable, 
 embodiment of the sexual interpretation of the Fall is con- 
 tained in the Apocalypse of Abraham,® a pseudepigraph of 
 uncertain date, in which it seems to be implied that the first 
 sin consisted in the physical union of Adam and Eve, who 
 had apparently been meant by the Creator to live in per- 
 petual continence. We may for the sake of completeness 
 conclude this catalogue of apocalyptic variations upon and 
 decorations of the Adamic Fall-theory by mentioning the 
 idea, based upon the curse of Gen. iii. 17, 18, which doomed 
 the earth to lose its primitive fertility and to bring forth 
 thorns and thistles, that Adam’s transgression had cosmic 
 consequences of a far-reaching nature : the Book of Jubilees 
 asserts that in consequence of this event the animals lost 
 the power of speech which they had previously possessed, 
 and the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch attributes to it the 
 beginnings of pain of every kind. 
 
 We have now briefly sketched the origins, and traced 
 the pre-Christian development, of the Fall-doctrine proper 
 —that is, of the theory (if the cloudy and confused trains 
 of ideas running through the documents so far reviewed may 
 
 1 See Lecture I, p. 34; II, p. 45. 
 
 42 Cor) xi1/2,°5 $1 Lim, it) 14, See Lecture I11,'p, 122, 
 
 % cc. xxiii, xxiv. (E. tr., G. H. Box, 1918, p. 69 ff.; G. N. Bonwetsch, 
 Die Apok. Abrahams, p. 33 f.). 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 ———————————————— Ee ee aa... 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION ’ 59 
 
 be deemed to constitute a theory) which finds the origin of 
 evil in a first transgression, producing in its perpetrators 
 and their offspring a moral taint or infirmity which is con- 
 ceived as transmissible by strictly physiological heredity. 
 The Fall-doctrine however (understood in this precise sense) 
 was by no means the only explanation of the origin of sin 
 which was held within the Jewish Church at the time of the 
 birth of Christ. It will have been observed that nearly all 
 the evidence which we have adduced so far, of a date sub- 
 sequent to the close of the canon of the Old Testament, 
 has been drawn from the Apocalypses ; and these books, 
 broadly speaking, represent the popular religious literature 
 of Hasmonaean Judaism, unofficial tracts and flysheets 
 designed to inflame patriotism, purify piety, and foster the 
 hope of the Messianic deliverance from Gentile tyrants, 
 which circulated amongst the unlearned masses of the people, 
 and especially, it would seem, amongst the semi-outcaste 
 population debarred by the necessities of its manual avoca- 
 tions from the full observance of the Law, and known by 
 the contemptuous name of the ‘am ha-’dre¢, the ‘ people of 
 the earth.’ But, to obtain a complete picture of the intel- 
 lectual influences which surrounded the cradle of Christian 
 doctrine, and, as we shall see, had no small share in determin- 
 ing the lines on which the Christian Fall-theory was destined 
 to develop, we must consider the characteristic ideas, not 
 merely of popular, unofficial, and unscientific pietism as 
 represented by the Apocalypses, but of the official and 
 technical theology as taught by the Rabbis. The conception 
 of the psychological ground of sin which permeates this 
 latter stream of Jewish teaching is that of the yéger ha-ra*, 
 or ‘ evil imagination,’ a phrase drawn from the Scriptural 
 passage (Gen. vi. 5) which I have used as the second of my 
 two texts. This doctrine, whilst bearing some resemblance 
 to that of ‘ Original Sin,’ has no place for the idea of a‘ Fall,’ 
 in the strict sense of the term, an idea which may conse- 
 quently be said to be peculiar to the apocalyptic or popular 
 theology of sin. The all but complete disappearance of the 
 apocalyptic scheme of ideas from the mind of Israel, due, 
 partly to the conversion to Christianity of those Jews who 
 held it, and partly to the apparent refutation of the glowing 
 
60 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 millennial hopes which it embodied by the catastrophes 
 of A.D. 70 (the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus) and of 
 A.D. 135 (the overthrow of Bar Kokhba by Hadrian), has 
 brought it about that the Fall-doctrine is now exclusively 
 characteristic of the Christian, and the doctrine of the 
 yécer ha-va‘ of the Jewish Church: and the theology of 
 present-day Judaism is as devoid of any idea of a‘ Fall’ 
 as it is of the belief in personal angels and devils. To the 
 consideration of this Rabbinical idea of the ‘ evil imagi- 
 nation,’ and of the various attempts which were made, 
 previously to and contemporaneously with the rise of 
 Christianity, to blend it with the Fall-doctrine proper the 
 remaining part of this lecture must be devoted. 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF THE ‘ Evit IMAGINATION ’ 
 
 Unlike the doctrine of the Fall, which, as we have seen, 
 would appear to have been first constructed from data 
 given by spiritual experience, and then successively read 
 into two of the primitive stories embodied in Genesis, the 
 doctrine of the yécer ha-rva‘ arose directly from the exegesis 
 of a Scriptural passage. ‘ God saw that the wickedness of 
 man was great in the earth, and that every imagination 
 (y écer) of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually * 
 (Gen. vi. 5). Here the evil ‘form,’ or ‘ fashion,’ or ‘ im- 
 agination ’ of man’s thoughts is regarded as a factor which 
 provokes the Almighty to wrath; it is to be presumed, 
 therefore, that man himself is responsible for its existence. 
 A little later, however, in the same narrative we read 
 (vill. 21) that, after the subsidence of the waters of the Flood, 
 “Yahweh smelled a sweet savour’ arising from Noah’s 
 sacrifice, and said in his heart ‘I will not again curse the 
 ground any more for man’s sake, for that the smagination 
 (yécer) of man’s heart is evil (va‘) from his youth.’ Here the 
 “evil imagination ’ is clearly regarded by Yahweh as con- 
 stituting an excuse for human depravity, from which it 
 would seem to follow that it is something which is given 
 in the essential constitution of man’s nature, an inherited 
 infirmity of some kind which the individual cannot help 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ 61 
 
 possessing. It was inevitable that an idea based equally 
 upon both of these texts should be somewhat ambiguous. 
 In the light of the first, the y écer ha-ra‘ might be regarded 
 as the sinful habit which man, by the repetition of wrongful 
 acts, impresses upon his own soul ; in the light of the second 
 as a ‘form’ already imprinted upon him by the Creator.* 
 But this very ambiguity may be said to have exercised 
 a beneficent influence on the development of Jewish, and, 
 later, of Christian dogma, inasmuch as it contained the 
 potentiality of a doctrine of sin which would do equal justice 
 to those elements of religious experience which assure man 
 of the reality of his own free-will and to those which testify 
 to the limitation of free-will by the sinister handicap of an 
 innate moral weakness. 
 
 Owing to the vast extent of the documentary evidence 
 contained in the Rabbinical literature, it is impossible to 
 do more than indicate, in the briefest manner possible, the 
 main outlines of this important and interesting conception. 
 The recent discoveries of parts of the original Hebrew text 
 of Ecclesiasticus have revealed these outlines as already 
 existing, with tolerable clearness of definition, in the thought 
 of Ben Sirach. The most important passage is xv. II-I7, 
 
 1 «It is never doubted that God made the evil yé¢er, yet man is respon- 
 sible for controlling and subduing it. The word itself suggested these two 
 
 apparently contrary conceptions. The verb V¥° means to form, or fashion, 
 and also, to form inwardly, to plan. It was used as the technical word 
 for the potter’s work. It was frequently used of God’s forming of nature 
 
 and of man, and also of his planning or purposing. The 1¥° of man could 
 therefore suggest either his form, as God made him, his nature (so Ps. ciii. 
 14) or his own formation of thought and purpose, ‘‘imagination ’’ as the 
 word is rendered in several Old Testament passages (Gen. vi. 5; viii. 21 ; 
 Deniers 27> Nsaialvxxvi 13.77%, Coron xxvill./6,7.. xsIx405).5 Ln. Deut. 
 Xxxi. 21, and probably Isaiah xxvi. 3, the word is used without the further 
 definition “‘ of the thoughts,” ‘‘of the heart,’’ which 1 Chron. retains. The 
 word had gained, therefore, in the Old Testament, a certain independence 
 as meaning the nature or disposition of man, and this could be regarded 
 as something which God made (Ps. ciii. 14) or as something which man 
 works (Deut. xxxi. 21). It is evident that the word was fitted by Old 
 Testament usage for further development in discussions of the origin 
 of sin and the responsibility of man’ (F. C. Porter, The Yeger Hara, in 
 the Yale Bicentenary Volume of Biblical and Semitic Studies, 1901, 
 
 pp. 108, 109). See also C. Taylor’s note on ¥" (Sayings of the Jewish 
 Fathers, 1897 edn., p. 37, n. 36). 
 
62 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 which, as literally translated from the Hebrew, runs as 
 follows : 
 
 11. Say not, My transgression was of God ; 
 For that which he hateth he made not. 
 
 12. Lest thou say, He it was that made me stumble ; 
 For there is no need of men of violence. 
 
 13. Wickedness and an abomination the Lord hateth ; 
 And will not let it befal them that fear him. 
 
 14. For (?) God created man from the beginning, 
 And put him into the hand of him that would spoil him, 
 And gave him into the hand of his inclination (yé¢er). 
 
 15. If thou choose, thou mayest keep the commandment ; 
 And it is understanding to do his will. 
 If thou trust in him, thou shalt even live. 
 
 16. Fire and water are poured out before thee: 
 Upon whichsoever thou choosest stretch forth thy hands. 
 
 17. Death and life are before a man: 
 That which he shall choose shall be given him. 
 
 In this the author directly raises the eternal problem of 
 human wickedness in its relation to God’s all-disposing 
 providence. He cannot allow man unlimited free-will, nor 
 can he admit that God directly moves the human soul 
 towards sin. His solution is to suppose that God has 
 created two mutually antagonistic powers, the evil yéc¢er 
 within the soul and the (Mosaic) Law without it, and that 
 man possesses just enough freedom of choice to be able to 
 surrender himself either to one or tothe other. These alter- 
 native and mutually exclusive guides of life are symbolised 
 in vv 16, 17 as the fire and water, the death and life between 
 which the Israelite has to choose. This thought can be 
 paralleled exactly by one of the most important Rabbinical 
 sayings with regard to the yéger, the latter part of which 
 seems to be a verbal quotation of 14c; ‘I created the evil 
 yeécer; I created for it the Law as a remedy. If ye are 
 occupied with the Law, ye shall not be delivered into its 
 hand.’ # 
 
 The second passage, in the Hebrew original of which the 
 word yécer has been discovered to exist, is xxvii. 5,6. The 
 
 1 Schechter and Taylor, The Wisdom of Ben-Sira (1899), pp. Xxxi, xxxii, 
 * Qiddushin 30>, 
 

 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ 63 
 
 verbal form of these verses is in one or two details not 
 absolutely certain ; but the following is, according to a high 
 authority, textually most probable, and gives an intelligible 
 and instructive sense : 
 
 5. A potter’s vessel is for the furnace to bake ; 
 And, like unto it, a man is according to his thought. 
 
 6. According to the husbandry of the tree will be its fruit ; 
 So the thought is according to the yécer of man. 
 
 If this text be accepted as authentic, it throws a considerable 
 light upon the providential function attributed by Sirach 
 to the yécer ha-ra‘. The paraphrase of its meaning given by 
 the same authority can hardly be bettered: ‘A potter’s 
 vessel is both tested and made by the fire; so a man is 
 tested by his inner thought, it is this that both tries and 
 makes him (cf. Prov. xxii. 7). ... The husbandry of a 
 tree, 2.¢. the digging and pruning, both tests the life of the 
 tree and is the condition of its fruitfulness. So the thought- 
 life of man is tested and developed by the yé¢er, which, like 
 the fire of the potter’s furnace and like the labour of the 
 husbandman, is severe and may prove destructive, but is 
 essential to the making of a vessel and the growing of fruit. 
 A man is tested and made, not by appearances or deeds but 
 by his thought or reasoning, and his thought is tested and 
 made to be of worth by the evil inclinations within him, 
 that is, by moral struggle.’ } 
 
 The third passage which may be quoted in this connexion 
 is one which has not yet been recovered in the Hebrew, but 
 in which the occurrence of the word yécer is established by 
 the Syriac version. This is xxi. 11a, which is given in the 
 English Revised Version as: 
 
 He that keepeth the law becometh master of the intent thereof 
 
 —an apothegm of doubtful meaning—but in the Syriac 
 appears in a far more intelligible and significant form as: 
 
 He that keepeth the law getteth the mastery over his yéger. 
 
 It can hardly be doubted that this is the original sense : and, 
 like the first of our quotations, it testifies to the existence, 
 
 + PB. C. Porter, 0p. ctt., p. 142. 
 
64 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 towards the beginning of the second century before Christ, 
 of the belief, characteristic of later Rabbinical orthodoxy, 
 in the ‘ evil impulse’ or ‘ imagination’ as a power rooted 
 in the soul, prior to and independent of conscious choice, 
 exerting from time to time an almost intolerable pressure 
 in the direction of sin, yet capable of being tamed and sub- 
 dued by the wholesome discipline of a rigorous observance 
 of the Law.? 
 
 It is true that after its first occurrence in the Book of 
 Ecclesiasticus the term yécer disappears until the beginning 
 of the Talmudic epoch. This, however, is due to the fact 
 that most of the Jewish literature of the last two centuries 
 before and the first century after the birth of Christ is only 
 preserved in Latin, Greek, Ethiopic, or other non-Semitic 
 languages; and as, at the moment that Hebrew texts 
 become available once more, the idea of the yécer is found 
 existing in full force, it is safe to assume that it existed 
 during the period for which direct Hebrew or Aramaic 
 evidence is lacking. And it is well known that the Mishnah 
 and the Midrashim contain much material dating from 
 times long anterior to those of their actual codification 
 or composition in their present form. It will, therefore, be 
 permissible to make a cautious use of Rabbinical and Tal- 
 mudic data for the purpose of articulating and enriching the 
 general picture of the doctrine of the yé¢er ha-ra‘ which we 
 have constructed on the basis of the Sirach-passages, so as 
 to be in possession of a roughly accurate idea of the degree 
 of development which it had attained in Jewish thought at 
 the beginning of the Christian era. 
 
 It will be convenient to summarise the additional infor- 
 mation which may be obtained from these later sources 
 under the three heads of the Seat, the Nature, and the 
 ultimate Origin of the ‘ evil imagination.’ (a) The Rabbis 
 
 1 Cf, also xxxvii. 3, ‘O evil imagination’ (& zovnpov évOdunpua, pre- 
 sumably = Y} 7¥}) ‘whence camest thou rolling in To cover the dry 
 land with deceitfulness ?’: and xvii. 31, which W. Bousset (Religion 
 des Judentums im NTI, Zettalter, 1903, p. 384) restores as follows, after the 
 Syriac version: ‘ What shines brighter than the sun? yet it becometh 
 darkened. Soalso is it with the man who subdueth not his yé¢er ’ (‘seeing 
 that he is flesh and blood ’ Bousset thinks may be a gloss). On this latter 
 verse, see also R. H. Charles, Apocr. and Pseud. i. p. 312. 
 
ADAM AND THE ‘* EVIL IMAGINATION’ 65 
 
 are unanimous in placing the seat of the evil yécer in the 
 ‘heart’ (lébh), that is, the inner self, the basal personality 
 of man.t_ So intimately is the evil yécer connected with the 
 ‘heart’ that the latter term can be treated as almost 
 synonymous with the former: as when Ps. cix. 22, “My 
 heart is wounded within me,’ is interpreted to mean that 
 the Psalmist’s ‘ evil impulse’ has been wounded or slain, 
 from which the Rabbinical exegete deduces the consequence 
 that David is to be reckoned with Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob, over whom the yécer ha-va‘ had no power.” It has 
 recently been suggested that the “ heart,’ in Hebrew psycho- 
 logy, denotes precisely that obscure and profound region of 
 the Self which underlies, yet continually influences, the sur- 
 face play of thought and volition, and which modern writers 
 have named the “ Unconscious ’—the dark and unexplored 
 home of instinct, emotion, and impulse, which, using an 
 inevitable spatial metaphor, we are accustomed to describe 
 as situated below the brilliantly lit area of the conscious 
 mind.* Whether a simple equation of the ‘ heart ’’ and the 
 ‘Unconscious’ can be sustained—in view of the accepted 
 opinion, voiced by Driver and other critics, that the pro- 
 cesses believed by the Old Testament writers to reside in the 
 heart were strictly intellectual, and that the emotions were 
 associated by the Hebrews with the ‘reins,’ or kidneys— 
 is a question which must be left to the decision of experts. 
 But the ‘Unconscious’ of modern psychology includes 
 thought as well as emotion, so that its connotation at least 
 overlaps to a large extent, even ifit does not exactly coincide 
 with, that of /ébh. Weshall therefore not be far wrong if we 
 assume that in using the term ‘ heart’ to describe the seat 
 of the evil impulse, the Jewish writers meant at least to 
 orientate their readers’ attention in the direction of what 
 we now know as the ‘ Unconscious’: and we shall see in a 
 moment that such an assumption has the effect of illumina- 
 
 
 
 1 The question was raised, whether the ‘ evil imagination’ resides in 
 beasts. Rabbi Nachman ben Isaac is of opinion that it does, because they 
 bite and kick (Bevakhoth 614). Angels, however, are exempt from it 
 (Lev. vab. 26; Bacher, Amor. ii. p. 419). 
 
 * Baba bathvat74. It would seem that the doctrine of the Immaculate 
 Conception is here anticipated, in reference to these four patriarchs. 
 
 8 K. E. Kirk, Some Principles of Moral Theology (1920), p. 145. 
 
66 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 ting and clearing up the second of our three questions, 
 namely, that of the nature of the ‘ evil imagination.’ 
 
 (b) This question naturally subdivides itself into two 
 further problems, namely, (1) What is the predominant 
 meaning of the substantive yécer ? and (2) What is meant by 
 the adjective ‘evil’? The first of these has already been 
 dealt with up to a point, in the comments on Gen. vi. 5 and 
 viii. 21, prefixed by way of introduction to this section of our 
 enquiry. Etymologically, as we have seen, yécer should 
 mean a fixed habit or disposition, and it is sometimes used in 
 this sense. But, in by far the greater number of Rabbinical 
 passages, it is clearly conceived, not so much as a static 
 character but rather as a dynamic force, a strong current of 
 emotional and conative energy which (if the use of a mis- 
 cellany of metaphors may be allowed) can be resisted, fought, 
 bridled, tamed, subdued, diverted into fresh channels, or 
 harnessed to new purposes. The ambiguity is, however, 
 perfectly natural and intelligible. When we think of a 
 river, we may think either of its moving volume of waters, 
 which, as instinct with dynamic energy, may operate 
 turbines or demolish bridges: or else of the (relatively) 
 fixed and permanent channel in which it flows, which may 
 form the frontier separating parishes, counties, or empires. 
 So what appears to be the element of innate sinfulness in 
 human personality, which manifests itself with sudden and 
 terrifying vividness in moments of temptation, may be 
 viewed either as a dynamic uprush of psychic energy from 
 the depths of the soul, or as the static channel, consisting 
 of inherited psycho-physical dispositions, which directs this 
 energy, harmless in itself, towards morally reprehensible ends. 
 
 This ambiguity in the use of the substantive, which the 
 official Jewish theology never succeeded in resolving, ex- 
 plains an even more remarkable ambiguity in the use of 
 the adjective. The yécer is evil, because it is perpetually 
 pricking and prompting men to sin, and especially to sins 
 against purity. (We note once more the appearance of the 
 King Charles’ head which has obsessed so many speculators 
 on the problem of evil in man.) Anger and idolatry are 
 also conspicuous manifestations of the yécery ; and the pious 
 Jew still entreats, in his morning prayers, to be guarded 
 

 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ 67 
 
 from sin and temptation, and from the evil yéger.1 God 
 Himself, according to some authorities, repents of having 
 made the ‘ evil imagination’; ‘ It stands ill with the evil 
 yecer, since even its creator calls it evil’?; ‘Woe to the 
 dough, of which the baker himself testifies that it is bad!’ 3 
 Eventually the evil vécer was, in some quarters at least, 
 identified with Satan ; ‘Satan, the evil yéger, and the angel 
 of death are one.’* Yet, paradoxically enough, there is a 
 certain amount of testimony to the essential goodness of the 
 evil yécer. In expounding Gen. i. 31, “And behold it was 
 very good,’ Rk. Samuel ben Nachman says ‘ Is the evil yé¢er 
 then very good? Certainly, for without it man would not 
 build a house, nor marry, nor beget children, nor engage in 
 trade.’ ®> Another Rabbi, Simon ben Eleazar, teaches as 
 follows : 
 
 ‘The evil yécer is ike iron. From iron one may make all 
 sorts of vessels if only he cast it into the fire. So one can 
 make the evil yécer useful by the words of the Law.’ This 
 is proved by Prov. xxv. 21: “If thou soothe thine enemy 
 (the yécer) with bread and water (the Law), God will make it 
 thy friend.’ ® This apparent antinomy is easily resolved if 
 we understand the yécer as a fountain of conative energy, 
 welling up from the ‘heart,’ that is, approximately, the sub- 
 conscious self, intrinsically good, as having been created 
 by God, and remaining good, so long as it finds its outlet in 
 socially useful or legitimate activities, but becoming ‘ evil’ 
 when allowed to overflow without restraint in the directions 
 of sexual indulgence or ruthless self-assertion in defiance of 
 the rights of God and one’s neighbour. 
 
 The fact is that, in its quest for the source of evil in man, 
 
 1S. Singer, Authorized Daily Prayer Book, 4th edn., p. 7 (Morning 
 Service), ‘ O lead us not into the power of sin, or of transgression or iniquity, 
 or of temptation: Jet not the evil inclination have sway over us.’ It is 
 impossible not to be struck by the similarity of these sentences to the 
 language of the Lord’s Prayer as recorded by St. Matthew (vi. 9-13) ; 
 v. infra, Lect. III, p. 98, n. 2, and see also Taylor’s discussion in Sayings 
 of the Jewish Fathers (1897), Excursus V (‘ The Lord’s Prayer ’), p. 128. 
 
 2 Qiddushin 30b, 
 
 3 Num. vab. 13; Gen. rab. 34. 
 
 4 Baba bathva 164; Bacher, Amor. i. p. 354. 
 
 5 Gen. vab.9; Eccles. rab. 3,11; Bacher, Amor.i. p. 487 f. 
 
 6 Bacher, Die Agada dev Tannaiten, ii. p. 436; the same saying is 
 also ascribed to R. Berachiah (Bacher, Amor. iii. p. 381 f.). 
 
68 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the official Jewish theology had stumbled upon, though it 
 never quite succeeded in disentangling from confusing associ- 
 ations, that central conception of modern psycho-analytic 
 theory which is generally designated by the term /zbido. 
 We may note in passing the remarkable fact that this 
 conception should twice in the history of thought have been 
 developed by men of Jewish blood, once in the Palestine 
 of the second century before the birth of Christ, and again 
 in the Vienna of the twentieth century after it. It must be 
 added, for the sake of accuracy, that the idea of the yécer 
 ha-ra‘ seems to be the equivalent of the idea of libido as 
 defined by Jung, rather than of the strictly Freudian con- 
 ception; for the yécer, though largely, is not exclusively 
 sexual in nature. A definition drawn from an authoritative 
 exposition of Jung’s psychology will make this clear: 
 ‘(The libido is) a longing, a cosmic pressure or urge of the 
 life-force manifesting itself in the human individual, the 
 conation or striving which manifests itself not only in the 
 reproductive instinct but in such physiological and psycho- 
 logical phenomena as growth, development, hunger, and 
 other human activities and interests.’ 1 It is, consequently, 
 not surprising to find that, whilst the Rabbis occasionally 
 insist upon the necessity for ‘ repressing ’ the ‘ evil impulse,’ 
 the main tenor of their teaching finds the cure for it in what 
 is now called ‘ sublimation,’ that is, the diversion of it into 
 good and lawful avenues of expression, the chief of which 
 are prayer and the exact observance of the Tévah. (Ideally, 
 the observance of the Law is for the sincere and pious Jew, 
 
 1 From the introduction (p. xvii), by Dr. Beatrice M. Hinkle, to Jung’s 
 Psychology of the Unconscious (E. tr. 1922). The whole passage, which I 
 have epitomised in the definition given in the text, runs as follows: ‘ Be- 
 ginning with the conception of /zbido itself as a term used to connote sexual 
 hunger and craving, albeit the meaning of the word sexual was extended 
 by Freud to embrace a much wider significance than common usage has 
 assigned to it, Jung was unable to confine himself to this limitation. 
 He conceived this longing, this urge or push of life as something extending 
 beyond sexuality even in its wider sense. He saw in the term libido a 
 concept of unknown nature, comparable to Bergson’s élan vital, a hypo- 
 thetical energy of life, which occupies itself not only in sexuality but in 
 various physiological and psychological manifestations such as growth, 
 development, hunger, and all the human activities and interests. This 
 cosmic energy or urge manifested in the human being he calls libido, and 
 compares it with the energy of physics.’ 
 

 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ — 69 
 
 not the enforced performance of a dull mechanical routine, 
 but a joyful exercise, carried out with devotion and enthu- 
 siasm, which provides an ample outlet and satisfaction for 
 great volumes of emotional energy.) Yet the conclusion 
 which might be expected to have been suggested by this 
 remedial method, namely, that the yé¢er in itself is neither 
 good nor evil, but morally neutral and colourless, was never 
 attained by Jewish thought. Even at the present day it 
 seems to be generally assumed that the yécer is essentially 
 evil, though it may be endowed with a kind of artificial 
 and adventitious goodness by being harnessed to good ends. 
 In other words, Rabbinism never freed itself from what 
 appears to us the self-evident fallacy of supposing that, 
 because appetite under certain circumstances may lead to 
 sin, it is therefore in itself sinful—a fallacy which, as we 
 shall see in succeeding lectures, re-appears, with unfortunate 
 results, in certain areas of Christian speculation with regard 
 to the problem of sin. 
 
 (c) The question of the ultimate Origin of the ‘ evil 
 imagination ’ can be dismissed in a few words. The origin 
 of the evil yéger is attributed by the Rabbis immediately 
 to God: so immediately, in fact, that God is conceived, not 
 as creating the yécey in man at the beginning of human 
 history, and leaving it to be propagated by heredity, but 
 actually as implanting it de novo in the soul of every indi- 
 vidual member of the race at the moment of his or her 
 conception (or, according to some authorities, birth?). This 
 is the cardinal point which distinguishes the official and 
 scholastic doctrine of the yéger ha-ra‘ from the popular 
 and pseudepigraphic theory of the Fall—its denial that the 
 ‘evil impulse’ in man is hereditary. According to the 
 Rabbis, the individual sinner neither inherits the tendency 
 
 1 We are here simply concerned with theoretical principles, and it 
 would, therefore, be out of place to raise the historical question as to how 
 far this ideal was in fact realised during the centuries immediately pre- 
 ceding and succeeding the Incarnation ; though it will be understood that 
 a Christian author naturally assumes that there was ample justification 
 for the attitude towards the Law and the halakhic tradition taken up by 
 our Lord and by St. Paul. 
 
 * Rabbinical theology in general holds to the ‘ creationistic ’ hypothesis 
 
 of the origin of the soul: see F. Weber, System der alt-synagog. palastin. 
 Theologie (Leipzig, 1880), pp. 219, 220. 
 
70 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 to sin from his parents nor transmits it to his children ; 
 he receives it into his soul directly from God at the first 
 moment of his existence, as his parents individually received 
 it before him and his children will receive it after him. It 
 follows from this denial of the continuous transmission of 
 the evil tendency that the existence of the yécer ha-ra‘ is in 
 no sense due to Adam’s transgression ; on the contrary, 
 Adam transgressed because the evil yécer had already been 
 planted in him by his Creator. The disconcerting fact 
 that, on this hypothesis, God is apparently made the author 
 of evil, and the citadel of ethical monotheism in principle 
 surrendered, never seems to have been adequately faced 
 by the Jewish Church. 
 
 REACTIONS, REAL AND SUPPOSED, UPON EACH OTHER OF THE 
 PSEUDEPIGRAPHIC AND THE RABBINICAL THEORIES 
 
 Such, then, were the two chief theories with regard to 
 the origin of human sin which prevailed within the Jewish 
 Church at the moment when Christianity came into the 
 world—the popular and somewhat hazy theory of a primi- 
 tive moral catastrophe and of some kind of hereditary 
 corruption flowing from it, found in the Apocalypses, and 
 the official, scholastic, and well-defined doctrine of an ‘ evil 
 impulse’ planted by God in every human soul separately 
 and individually which appears in the writings of the Rabbis. 
 It would, however, be a mistake to exaggerate the division 
 between the popular and the official theologies of Palestinian 
 Judaism into an impassable gulf; the spiritual aristocracy 
 of Israel, the class of the scribes and of the rigid observers 
 of the Law, must have shaded downwards by imperceptible 
 degrees into the lower strata of Jewish society known as 
 the ‘ people of the earth,’ so that ideas could without great 
 difficulty travel both up and down the scale; and, in so 
 small a country as Palestine, it is to be expected that the 
 two worlds of thought, the apocalyptic and the Rabbinical, 
 would overlap and interpenetrate one another at a thousand 
 points. Hence a full description of the immediately pre 
 Christian state of Jewish opinion with regard to the origin 
 
ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION ’ FY. 
 
 and psychological ground of human sin must include some 
 account of what appear to be half-conscious attempts to 
 synthesise the two traditions, or at least to be instances of 
 a tendency in one or other of these traditions to assimilate 
 itself to its rival. A complete organic fusion of the Fall- 
 theory and the yéger-theory was never attained by Judaism ; 
 that was a task which Providence reserved for Christian 
 thought. 
 
 It is natural to classify the movements of thought just 
 indicated under the two heads of (a) apparent approaches 
 of Rabbinism towards the Fall-theory, and (0) leanings of 
 the Fall-theory in the direction of Rabbinism, that is to 
 say, in other words, developments of Rabbinical speculation 
 with regard to Adam and his sin which seem to have been 
 influenced by the apocalyptic vein of thought or at least by 
 the extra-Scriptural traditions underlying it, and attempts 
 made by the apocalyptic writers on their side to work the 
 characteristic Rabbinical theology of sin into their presenta- 
 tion of the Adamic Fall-theory. Of these movements, the 
 former class deserves prior consideration, inasmuch as some 
 scholars of weight have believed that they could trace, 
 running through it, the gradual fixation and crystallisation, 
 as it were, of two of the most important ingredients in that 
 version of the Christian Fall-doctrine which was taught by 
 St. Augustine—the ideas, namely, of ‘ Original Righteous- 
 ness’ or ‘ Perfection,’ and of what we will take leave to call 
 ‘ Original Guilt,’ a term which will be presently explained. 
 
 With regard to the first of these ideas, that of the 
 ‘Original Perfection’ of man, it is perfectly true that 
 Rabbinical theology developed it to an even more extrava- 
 gant pitch than did the apocalyptic writings quoted above.t 
 The ‘ image of God,’ after which Adam was created, is made 
 to include gigantic dimensions? (Adam is frequently said 
 to have filled the whole world!), surpassing beauty of body, 
 a degree of wisdom which almost suggests omniscience, an 
 aureole of light eclipsing the radiance of the sun, powers of 
 
 1 vesupra, Pp. 56. 
 
 2 Cf. the following, from Gesprachen der drei Heiligen (Denkschriften 
 der Akad. zu Wien, Bd. 24, S. 63): ‘quantum erat caput Adae? re- 
 sponsio: tantum ut triginta homines in illud intrare possent.’ 
 
72 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 vision which enabled him to see the total extent of the earth 
 at once, and the right to command the services of angels 
 for the purpose of ministering to his physical comfort.? 
 These marvellous endowments were forfeited as the result 
 of Adam’s sin, and the Shekhinah or divine glory withdrew 
 itself from the earth. It would seem at first sight natural 
 to conclude that Rabbinical thought must have regarded 
 Adam’s descendants in a certain sense as having been 
 injured by their first father’s transgression, inasmuch as 
 they were born without the supernatural qualities which 
 constituted ‘ Original Perfection’; and it is doubtless 
 possible to see, implicitly contained in these fantastic 
 speculations, the germ of the specifically Scotist doctrine 
 of ‘ Original Sin’ which defines it as consisting solely in the 
 ‘defect of Original Righteousness.’ 2 But there is no proof 
 that such conclusions were ever drawn by the Jewish 
 theologians in a formal and explicit way ; and the triviality 
 which characterises. most of the haggadic amplifications 
 of the Biblical Paradise-story strongly suggests that this 
 narrative was never taken in earnest by the Rabbis as the 
 explanation of the ultimate origin of sin, and that the belief 
 in Adam’s ‘ original perfection’ never decisively crossed 
 the frontier which separates the realm of romantic imagina- 
 tion from that of serious theological thought. 
 
 A similar conclusion appears to be inevitable with 
 regard to the supposed presence of the idea of ‘ Original 
 Guilt ’ in the official theology of Judaism during the epoch 
 which immediately preceded the birth of Christianity. 
 Though we have not met with this conception hitherto, it 
 is one which plays an important part in the history of the 
 Christian doctrine of Man and Sin, and the present will 
 therefore be an opportune moment for defining it. It is 
 the idea that the sin of the first man is legally imputed to his 
 descendants (either because they are supposed to have been 
 physically included in him when he sinned, or because they 
 are arbitrarily regarded by God as having been represented 
 or typified by him) in such a way that every individual 
 
 1 Quotations illustrating those beliefs have been collected by F. Weber, 
 System der alisynagog. Theologie, pp. 214, 215. 
 2. See Lecture VI, p. 410. 
 

 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION ’ 73 
 
 human being is born, not merely with the tendency to future 
 sins latent in him, but subject to the personal guilt of and 
 responsibility for the primal sin. It will be seen that this 
 is a different idea from that of which we have hitherto been 
 tracing the history, the conception of a hereditary bias 
 towards evil, though it may be and in large areas of Christian 
 thought has been closely associated with it; and it will be 
 convenient in our future discussion to keep the term 
 ‘Original Sin’ 1 for describing the innate tendency to sin, 
 which is a fact, or alleged fact, of the psychological order, 
 as contrasted with ‘ Original Guilt,’ which is a juristic or 
 quasi-juristic conception. It is this latter idea which 
 Ferdinand Weber asserts to be characteristic of Rabbinical 
 theology in all its periods, including, as we must suppose, 
 the immediately pre-Christian period. His words are: 
 “There is a hereditary gut, but no hereditary sinfulness 
 (Es gibt erne Erbschuld, aber keine Erbsiinde) ; Adam’s fall 
 has brought death upon the whole race, but not sinfulness in 
 the sense of a compulsion to sin; sin is the result of each 
 individual’s personal decision, which experience shows to 
 be in fact universal, but which, even after the Fall, is in no 
 sense theoretically necessary.’? Here it is affirmed that 
 the Rabbis—including, presumably, the Tanndim or 
 “ Repeaters,’ who were the dominant school of our Lord’s 
 day 3—whilst rejecting ‘ Original Sin,’ nevertheless accepted 
 
 1 Strictly speaking, of course, it is anachronistic to use the term 
 ‘Original Sin’ in dealing with the ideas of any period prior to that of 
 St. Augustine (see Lect. V, p. 327), as it is to employ the word ‘Fall’ to 
 describe the first sin as conceived by writers earlier than Methodius of 
 Olympus (see Lect. IV, p. 252, n. 4) ; but, in the case of both terms, we 
 may plead that the anachronism is convenient and inevitable. 
 
 “Ops Ct, Dp, 217.0 » Es gibtieme Erbschuld; aber keine \Erbstnde ; 
 der Fall Adams hat dem ganzen Geschlecht den Tod, nicht aber die 
 Sindigkeit im Sinne einer Nothwendigkeit zu sitindigen verursacht; die 
 Siinde ist das Ergebnis der Entscheidung jedes Einzelnen, erfahrungs- 
 gemass allgemein, aber an sich auch nach dem Fall nicht schlechthin 
 nothwendig.’ 
 
 8 It may be of interest to set down here a list of the successive schools 
 of divines which held sway during the classical period of Rabbinism. 
 They were (1) The Sépherim, or ‘ Scribes,’ whose period lasted, roughly, 
 from Ezra to the age of the Maccabees ; (2) the Zugéth, or ‘ pairs,’ so called 
 because it is alleged that there were only two of them in office at a time, 
 one being president, and the other vice-president, of the Sanhedrin—the 
 word is formed from the Greek Cuydv, a yoke-pair; their period lasted from 
 
74 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the idea of ‘ Original Guilt.’ If this conclusion could be 
 sustained, it would represent a fact of the highest importance 
 for the interpretation of the New Testament doctrine of the 
 Fall. Dr. Tennant has, however, shown that this sweeping 
 assertion of Weber is, at the least, uncertain in the highest 
 degree, in so far as it refers to immediately pre-Christian 
 Rabbinism, in which alone we are interested for the purposes 
 of the present enquiry.! It is, in fact, a precarious inference 
 from the supposition, itself unproved, that the Tannaim 
 believed Adam’s sin to have been the cause of mortality in 
 his descendants. But, despite the fact that this latter 
 doctrine was held by Ben Sirach ? and possibly by the author 
 of the Book of Wisdom,’ there is no proof that it became 
 at all common in the Rabbinical schools before the third 
 century of our era. It is, moreover, affirmed, in opposition 
 to Weber’s contention, by two eminent authorities * on the 
 religion and theology of Judaism, that the generation of 
 Rabbis nearest the time of Christ held for the most part an 
 individualistic view of the connexion between sin and death, 
 maintaining that each man’s death is due to his own sinful 
 acts (which, as we have seen, are deemed to arise from his 
 own culpable failure to control his yéger) and not to any ances- 
 tral or racial sin. The empirical universality of death would 
 thus be due merely to the empirical universality of actual 
 sin, and not to any a priovz necessity or arbitrary Divine 
 decree. It seems, therefore, safest to regard the attribution 
 of a belief in ‘ Original Guilt’ to the Rabbis of the first 
 centuries before and after the beginning of our era as an 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 the Maccabees till Herod the Great ; (3) the Tanndim, or ‘ repeaters’—who 
 flourished during the first and second centuries of our era ; (4) the ’Amédraim 
 or ‘ interpreters,’ from c. 200 toc. 500 A.D. ; (5) the Sabérdim, or ‘ teachers,’ 
 whose period coincides roughly with the sixth century a.D.; and (6) the 
 Geonim, or ‘noble ones,’ who taught from 609 to 750 A.D. For further 
 information as to these schools, see Oesterley and Box, Religion and 
 Worship of the Synagogue, c. IV ii.; H. M. J. Loewe, art. ‘ Judaism,’ in 
 ERE, vol. vii.; Oesterley and Box, Short Sketch of the Literature of Rab- 
 binical and Mediaeval Judaism (1920), pp. 89-126. 
 
 1 Sources of the Doctrines of the Fali and of Original Sin, pp. 161-168. 
 Ecclus, xxv. 24. 
 Wisdom ii. 23, 24; see above, p. 55. 
 Ginzberg, Monatsschrift fiir Geschicht eund Wissenschaft Judentums, 
 Jahrg. 43, p. 153 f.; Schechter, Studies in Judaism, pp. 260 ff. 
 
 Pe OO Dw 
 

 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ = 75 
 
 anachronism ; and to assume that, within the sphere of 
 the official theology, as it stood at this period, the hypothesis 
 of a causal connexion between Adam’s sin and the deaths 
 of his posterity only existed (so far as it existed at all) ina 
 vague and undefined form, as a haggadic and mythopoeic 
 motif rather than as a reasoned intellectual theory. 
 
 It would seem, then, that the official theology of the 
 Jewish Church in its immediately pre-Christian period only 
 leaned towards the Adam-theory on its haggadic,. that is, 
 its imaginative, romantic, and mythological side, and that 
 it exhibited no real approximation to what we are justified 
 in calling the pseudepigraphic doctrine in the sphere of 
 intellectual concepts. The case, however, is different when 
 we turn to the latest Apocalypses which have any bearing 
 on our enquiry, namely, the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch 
 and the Second or Fourth Book of Esdras. These books 
 - are of peculiar interest for our present purpose, because 
 both the composition of their several elements and their 
 final redaction as literary wholes are generally admitted to 
 fall within limits marked by the dates 50 and 120 a.p.— 
 that is to say, within a period roughly contemporaneous 
 with the development of Apostolic Christianity and the 
 writing of the New Testament ; and they therefore may be 
 taken as first-hand evidence for the background of Jewish 
 thought on the origin and ground of sin which is presupposed 
 by St. Paul’s treatment of the subject. In them we shall 
 find unmistakable evidence of the contacts and reactions 
 between the scholastic and the popular opinions which must 
 have been proceeding in the Jewish Church of our Lord’s 
 day—evidence which in the former book takes the shape of 
 
 1 These documents have been edited, with English translation and 
 full notes, by R. H. Charles and G. H. Box respectively, in Apocrypha 
 and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, vol. ii. (1913). Though the 
 introduction to each contains a complete bibliography, it may be well to 
 note here a few editions of importance: (1) (Baruch), R. H. Charles, 
 The Apocalypse of Baruch (1896); Ryssel, in Kautzsch, A pokr. u. Pseudepigr. 
 des AT, ii. 411 (1900); (2) (Esdras) R. L. Bensly and M. R. James, The 
 Fourth Book of Ezra (the complete Latin version, including for the first 
 time the missing fragment vii. 36-105, discovered by Prof. Bensly) ; Texts 
 and Studies, iii. 2 (1895) ; Gunkel, in Kautzsch, Apokr. u. Pseud. ii. (1900) ; 
 Bruno Violet, Die Esva-A pocalypse (Die griech. christl. Schrifist. der ersten 
 dvet Jahrhund, Bd. 18, 1910); G. H. Box, The Ezva-A pocalypse (1912). 
 
76 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 an emphatic repudiation of the Fall-doctrine, and, in the 
 latter, of a more or less successful attempt to fuse it with 
 the yécer-theory. Though it is certain that 2 Baruch and 
 4 Ezra (to employ the short titles under which scholars have 
 agreed to designate these works) are closely related, in the 
 sense that one was published as a conscious and deliberate 
 reply to the other, there is at present no consensus of opinion 
 on the question which came first ; and we shall therefore 
 content ourselves with sketching the positions character- 
 istic of these two books, without expressing any view 
 as to which ought to be regarded as thesis and which as 
 antithesis. As the Baruch-document represents what 
 eventually became the permanent mind of post-Christian 
 Judaism, it will be natural to examine this work in the first 
 place, and to reserve 4 Ezra, which approximates more 
 nearly than any other purely Jewish writing to the full 
 Pauline doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin, for subsequent 
 consideration. 
 
 It is noteworthy that all the passages in 2 Baruch which 
 deal with the origins of sin occur either in that stratum of 
 it which Dr. Charles denotes by the symbol A® and assigns 
 to the period prior to the destruction of Jerusalem, or in 
 that designated by him as B?, the composition of which 
 he places in the epoch of despair which succeeded the 
 catastrophe of A.D. 70.4 But this difference of date between 
 the two documents in question, even with the difference of 
 world-outlook necessarily involved in it, does not affect 
 their substantial identity of view with regard to the theology 
 of sin,? and the relevant texts may therefore be considered 
 together, without any attempt to group them chronologically. 
 2 Baruch admits, in accordance with the haggadic tendency 
 noticed above, in our discussion of the Rabbinical inter- 
 pretation of Gen. il., that Adam’s transgression was the 
 starting-point of a long series of external or material disasters, 
 in particular of physical death, or at least of its premature 
 
 1 Apocr. and Pseudepigy. ii. pp. 474 ff. 
 
 * It should, however, be noted that in B? Adam’s sin is the cause of 
 all death, it being apparently assumed that, but for the Fall, man would 
 have been immortal; in A%, on the contrary, man was originally 
 
 mortal, and Adam’s transgression is the cause only of its premature 
 occurrence. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION ’ vas 
 
 occurrence; this opinion finds expression in xxiii. 4: 
 ‘ Because when Adam sinned, and death was decreed against 
 those who should be born’ ; in xlvili. 42, 43: 
 
 (42) O Adam, what hast thou done to all those who 
 are born from thee, 
 And what will be said to the first Eve who 
 hearkened to the serpent ? 
 (43) For all this multitude are going to corruption, 
 Nor is there any numbering of those whom the fire devours ; 
 
 and most conspicuously in lvi. 5, 6: 
 
 (5) And as thou didst previously see on the summit of the cloud 
 black waters which descended previously on the earth,? this 
 is the transgression wherewith Adam the first man trans- 
 gressed. 
 
 (6) For (since) when he transgressed 
 Untimely death came into being, 
 Grief was named, 
 And anguish was prepared, 
 And pain was created, 
 And trouble consummated, 
 And disease began to be established, 
 And Sheol kept demanding that it should be renewed in 
 blood, 
 And the begetiing of children was brought about, 
 And the passion of parents produced,® 
 And the greatness of humanity was humiliated, 
 And goodness languished. 
 
 It will be noticed that v. 6 contains what looks like an 
 approximation to the later Augustinian doctrine of ‘ Original 
 Sin,’ in the shape of a suggestion that the existence of sexual 
 passion is due to Adam’s fall: this idea is further developed 
 in vv. ro ff., where it is connected with the story of the 
 lustful angels : 
 
 For he became a danger to his own soul: even to the angels 
 became he a danger. For, moreover, at that time when he was 
 created, they enjoyed liberty. And some of them descended, 
 
 eroce NOLe 2, p. 7G. 
 
 2 The reference is to Baruch’s vision, narrated in c. liii., in which the 
 history of mankind from Adam to the Messiah is symbolised under the form 
 of alternate showers of black and bright waters descending from a cloud. 
 
 3 Italics ours. 
 
78 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 and mingled with the women. And then those who did so were 
 tormented in chains. 
 
 If these passages stood alone, we should be entitled to 
 describe 2 Baruch’s views with regard to the significance of 
 Adam’s sin as a compromise between the Rabbinical and 
 the popular traditions, the consequences of the Fall being 
 kept, in the main, on the purely external and mechanical 
 level in deference to the former, whilst a single interior and 
 psychological consequence—to wit, sexual emotion and 
 activity—is taken over, in isolation, from the latter. It is 
 noticeable that no attempt is made to utilise the idea of the 
 yécer ha-va‘ in this connexion. But we have to set against 
 the texts just quoted certain other passages in which the 
 robust ethical libertarianism, almost amounting to what 
 was known to later Christian theology as Pelagianism, of 
 the Rabbis is strongly affirmed, and the popular Adamic 
 Fall-theory is repudiated in explicit and energetic language. 
 Those which bear most directly on the subject of our enquiry 
 are XVili. I, 2, where Moses is said to have lighted a lamp 
 for Israel (by promulgating the Law) but to have been 
 imitated by few, the majority of Jews having chosen to 
 ‘take from the darkness of Adam’ (that is, to imitate his 
 sin) instead of rejoicing in the light of the lamp+4; and 
 liv. 15 ff., which expressly states that Adam’s sin introduced 
 premature death only, and in no way affected his descendants’ 
 freedom of choice, in words characterised by such pointed 
 vehemence that they can only be interpreted as a direct 
 attack upon the Fall-theory : 
 
 (15) For though Adam first sinned 
 And brought untimely death upon all, 
 Yet of those who were born from him 
 Each one of them has prepared for his own soul torment 
 to come, 
 And again each one of them has chosen for himself glories 
 to come. 
 (19) Adam is not therefore the cause, save only of his own soul, 
 But each one of us has been the Adam of his own soul. 
 
 1 Cf. John v. 35, in which a similar metaphor is applied to John the 
 Baptist : éxetvos Fv 6 Avxvos 6 Kaidpevos Kal dpaivwr' dtpeis dé HOeAjoare 
 ayaAdacbfva mpos wpav ev TH pwrti avrod. 
 
 ' % Italics ours. 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ = 79 
 
 The patent inconsistency of this teaching with that of lvi. 
 5 ff., quoted above, is a striking reflection of the divided 
 opinions with regard to this subject which prevailed within 
 the Jewish Church, just at the time when St. Paul was 
 laying down, in measured yet unhesitating words, the 
 outlines of that Christian Fall-doctrine which ever since 
 has formed the presupposition of the Catholic redemptive 
 scheme. 
 
 With 4 Ezra we pass into a different atmosphere. This 
 writer accepts the Rabbinical doctrine of the yécer ha-ra‘ ; 
 but his experience of the actual sinfulness of Israel has led 
 him entirely to reject its companion doctrine, that the Law 
 is a sufficient remedy for the evil impulses connatural with 
 the human soul, and that man can perfectly well obey the 
 whole Law if he chooses so to do. Like St. Paul, though 
 untouched by any spark of Christian faith or emotion, he 
 has discovered that the Law produces only the ‘ knowledge 
 of sin,’ not the power to overcome it, and that in him, or 
 in his flesh, there dwelleth no good thing.! He arrives at 
 an explanation of this saddening fact by fusing the Rab- 
 binical and the pseudepigraphic theories, admitting that 
 the evil yécer was planted (presumably by the Creator) in 
 the heart of Adam at the moment of his creation, but sup- 
 plementing this position by the implied assertions that its 
 presence in him became fixed and habitual owing to the 
 Fall, and that it is now hereditary in the human race, being 
 communicated from Adam to the successive generations of 
 his posterity by physical propagation. This, it will be seen, 
 is for all practical purposes identical with the Pauline 
 doctrine, save in so far as the Apostle abstains from 
 affirming that the germ or potentiality of evil existed in 
 Adam before the Fall; and even this latter idea can be 
 paralleled in the teaching of St. Augustine, who finds 
 himself obliged to postulate a minute but appreciable 
 amount of “concupiscence’ in unfallen man, in order to 
 explain the possibility of his being tempted at all.” 
 
 The relevant passages may here be given at length : 
 
 1 Passages implying the empirical universality of actual sin are: 
 Hi yeh as Avil. 40; 68 >) 'Vill, 35, 
 ey pee Lecture V, p. 363; n.°3. 
 
 @ 
 
80 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 (a) For the first Adam, clothing himself with 4 the evil heart, 
 transgressed and was overcome ; and likewise also all who were 
 born of him. Thus the infirmity became inveterate; the Law 
 indeed was in the heart of the people, but (in conjunction with) 
 the evil germ ; so what was good departed, and the evil remained 
 (ill, 21-23). 
 
 (b) For a grain of evil seed was sown in the heart of Adam 
 from the beginning, and how much fruit of ungodliness has it 
 produced unto this time, and shall yet produce until sie threshing- 
 floor come ! (iv. 30). 
 
 (c) Then said he unto me: Even so, also, is Israel’ S portion ; 
 for it was for their sakes I made the world; but when Adam 
 transgressed my statutes, then that which had been made was 
 judged, and then the ways of this world became narrow and 
 sorrowful and painful and full of perils coupled with great toils 
 (VILULL a2) 
 
 (d) And I answered and said: This is my first and last word ; 
 better had it been that the earth had not produced Adam, or 
 else, having once produced him, (for thee) to have restrained 
 him from sinning. For how does it profit us all that in the 
 present we must live in grief and after death look for punishment ? 
 O thou Adam, what hast thou done! For though it was thou 
 that sinned, the fall 2? was not thine alone, but ours also who are 
 thy descendants ! (vil. 116-118). 
 
 In the first two of these passages the yécer ha-ra‘ is 
 referred to as ‘ the evil heart,’ ‘ the evil germ,’ ‘a grain of 
 evil seed’ ; it may be added that in another passage (vil. 92, 
 which I have not quoted because it does not directly bear 
 upon the questions of the origin and transmission of evil) 
 the yécer is even more recognisably mentioned under the 
 title of ‘the innate evil thought’ (cum eis plasmatum 
 cogitamentum malum). The third passage cannot, perhaps, 
 be claimed as going beyond the haggadic tradition generally 
 received by the Rabbis, namely, that Adam’s Fall was the 
 starting-point of material evil. But the transmission of the 
 ‘evil heart ’ from Adam to his posterity would seem to be 
 clearly implied in (a) and also in (d), the last sentence of 
 
 1 So the Syriac and Ethiopic versions: the Latin has ‘ bearing’ or 
 ‘carrying’ (7.e. within him)—‘ cor enim malignum baiolans primus Adam 
 transgressus et victus est.’ See Bensly and James, op. cit., p. 8. Box 
 (Ezva-A pocalypse, p. 16, note im loc.) argues that the Latin baiolans 
 represents a Greek dopéoas, which would be the equivalent of ‘ wearing’ 
 
 or ‘ clothing ’ himself with the ‘ evil heart,’ as though it were a garment. 
 2 For a note on this word, see Lecture IV, p. 252, n. 4. 
 
 
 

 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ = 8r 
 
 which can hardly mean less than that Adam’s descendants 
 in some sense have shared in his sin owing to their physio- 
 logical connexion and continuity with him. 
 
 It is impossible to read this Apocalypse, the last purely 
 Jewish document to set forth the popular doctrine of an 
 inherited interior weakness or disease, without feeling that 
 a true organic synthesis of the two conceptions which the 
 author of the main body of 4 Ezra somewhat mechanically 
 juxtaposes lay all the time ready to his hand. From the 
 standpoint of the dispassionate modern student, it must 
 seem that it would not have been difficult to harmonise the 
 official and the popular theories by taking advantage of the 
 more reasonable form assumed by the scholastic doctrine 
 in those passages of the Rabbinical writings which represent 
 the yécer as being in itself a morally neutral libido ; and, 
 whilst admitting that the yécer existed in Adam from the 
 moment of his creation, to conceive the Fall as consisting 
 in a mis-direction and fixation of this /zb1do upon an improper 
 object, a fixation which became stereotyped in him and was 
 transmitted by him to his posterity. I am not concerned 
 at this stage of our enquiry to maintain that such a view is 
 possible for us, but merely that it would have been possible 
 for 4 Ezra. But the opportunity was missed, and the 
 synthesis which seems for a moment to have trembled upon 
 the verge of consummation was never consciously achieved. 
 The crowning disasters of Bar Kokhba’s rebellion and its 
 bloody suppression by Hadrian (A.D. 135) finally discredited 
 the whole apocalyptic genre of literature and thought, which 
 vanished into the limbo of forgotten things, taking with it 
 (so far as Jewry was concerned) the half-developed ideas of 
 the Fall and of Original Sin, and leaving the strict Rabbinical 
 conception of the yéger ha-ra‘, as individually implanted by 
 the Creator in each human soul and not hereditarily derived 
 from any primaeval disaster, in sole possession of the field 
 of Jewish orthodoxy. 
 
 PHILO’s IDEAS WITH REGARD TO THE ‘ FALL’ 
 
 It should be added, before we close our survey of the 
 Jewish antecedents of the Christian Fall-doctrine, that little 
 G 
 
82 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 information of interest for our immediate purpose can be 
 gleaned from the writings of Philo. His loyalty to the 
 main tenor of the scholastic tradition leads him, in com- 
 menting on the early narratives of Genesis, to reproduce 
 the current haggadic ideas regarding the supernatural 
 endowments, physical, mental, and moral, enjoyed by the 
 first man,! and the material or external disasters which 
 were involved in his expulsion from the happy garden.? 
 But the idea of an internal psychological malady, trans- 
 missible by physical heredity, and engendered by our first 
 father’s fall, is totally absent from his writings. It is 
 probable that his deepest thought with regard to the story 
 of Gen. ili. is that which finds expression in the treatise 
 de mundi optficio: in which the Fall-narrative is said to be 
 an allegory (though this does not imply that it is not also 
 a record of literal fact) portraying in symbolic form the 
 processes which normally precede the commission of actual 
 sin, Adam typifying the rational and Eve the sensuous 
 element in human nature, whilst the serpent signifies the 
 sinister power of carnal lust and pleasure.® 
 
 It might have been expected that Philo, belonging as 
 he did on his Jewish side to the world of official and 
 Rabbinical theology rather than to the world of popular 
 pietism in which the Apocalytic literature grew up, would 
 have given an unfaltering allegiance to the idea of the 
 
 1 de mundi optf. 50 (Philonis Iudaet opera omnia, ed. C. E. Richter, 
 Lipsiae, 1828, 1. p. 47; references to the volume and page of this edition 
 are given in brackets after the references to the chapter or paragraph of 
 Philo’s text): Adam év dxpdrw drérpiBev eddarpovia, and was in all things 
 conformed to the will of his Creator ; ibid. 52 (i. p. 48): the naming of the 
 animals was a proof of Adam’s supreme wisdom and sovereignty over the 
 world (for the re-appearance of this idea in Christian thought, see Lect. 
 V, p. 361); quaest. in Gen. i. 32 (vi. p. 266): ‘ protoplastorum autem 
 animae ut a malo mundae essent et intemeratae, acutae omnino erant ad 
 perceptionem cuiuscumque vocis ... illi vero quemadmodum corpus 
 sortiti sunt nimis grande et proceritatem gigantis, necesse fuit ut prae 
 se ferrent sensus etiam certiores, et quod his praestantius est, philo- 
 sophicos intuitus auditusque. non enim frustra arbitrabantur nonnulli 
 oculis illos praeditos esse, quibus potuerunt etiam eas quae in caelo sunt 
 naturas essentiasque et operationes videre, quemadmodum et auribus 
 culuscumque generis voces percipere.’ 
 
 2 de mundi opif. 60 (i. 54), an expansion of Gen. iii. 16-19; cf. de 
 nobilit. 3, ad fin. (v. p. 262). 
 
 3 de mundi optf. 56 (i. p. 51 f.). 
 

 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ 83 
 
 yécer ha-ra‘ as the ground or source of human sin. This 
 idea does, indeed, seem to show itself, in a defaced and not 
 easily recognisable form, as the totality of the ‘ passions’ 
 (7a46n) which are described as ‘ rooted in the flesh’ 1 and as 
 ‘evils connatural with our race’?; and it is possible that 
 we might be able to perceive its authentic lineaments in 
 passages of the Philonian writings where its presence has 
 not so far been suspected, had the Hellenistic Jews been 
 able to agree upon one single Greek equivalent for the term 
 yécer.2 “But Philo was prevented from allowing this con- 
 ception to attain its full Rabbinical development in his 
 teaching by his great horror (which, as we have seen, the 
 doctors of Palestinian and Babylonian Judaism do not 
 seem to have shared*) of making God the author of 
 evil. And, where his Rabbinism leaves him in the lurch, 
 his Platonism emerges with redoubled power, and sets a 
 masterful grip upon the reins of his speculation. He never 
 attained to a single, internally harmonious explanation of 
 the origin of sin; but there can be little doubt that the 
 
 1 guts ver. div. haer. 54 (ili. p. 59): vd0a yap kal £éva Stavolas Ta adatos 
 Ws adnbds 7a On, capKos exrrepuKdta,  mpoceppilwrrac. 
 
 2 ibid. 55 (iii. p. 60): 7a otpduta Kaxa Tod yévous judy. Philo is 
 deeply conscious of the universality or practical universality of innate 
 sinfulness ; cf. de vita Mosis, iii. 17 (iv. p. 215): mavrl yervnTt® Kal av 
 omovdaiov 7, Tap’ Gaov HAGeEv eis yeveowv, cu dues TO Gpaprdvov eariv ; de confus. 
 ling. 17 (ii. p. 204) : <ra Kaxa> é€q’ adrep H poxOnpa dvors 8.” Eauris Badiler ; 
 de mut. nom. 6 (iii. p. 166 f.): daerpa pév dort Ta KaTappuTaivorTa THY puxiy, 
 dmep exvifpacar Kal admoAovoacba mavteAds ovK Eveotiv. amodeimovrat yap e& 
 avaykns tavtt OvyT@ ovyyeveis Kifpes, ds Awdfoar pev eikos, avaipeOfvar 8 
 eiodtrav advvatov: de poenit. I (v. p. 215): TO pev yap pndev ovvddAws auapreir, 
 tovov Deob, taxa Sé Kai Oeiov dvdpds : de sacy. Abel. et Caint 33 (i. p. 259) : 
 ayevotov yap mabav 7 Kaxidv puyiv edpetv aonavidrarov. Notice in this last 
 passage the comparison of humanity to a ¢vpaya, or lump of dough, which 
 re-appears in St. Paul (Rom. ix. 21, 1 Cor. v. 7), Tertullian (‘ conspersio’— 
 v. infra, Pp. 328, n. 3), Ambrosiaster (‘ massa,’ p. 310), and Augustine (p. 328). 
 
 3 For 18’ LXX has 8rdvora (Gen. viii. 21), d1aBovAov (Ecclus. xv. 14), 
 
 Stadoyiopds (1btd. xxvii. 6), evOdpnua (ibid. xxxvii. 3); etc. 
 
 4 de decem ovac. 33 (iv. p. 280): Oeds Fv, edOds 5€ KUpios ayabes, povwv 
 ayabdy aitios, Kaxod Sé oddevds; quaest. in Gen. i. 78 (vi. p. 290): ‘deus enim 
 malorum nullo modo causa est’ ; ibid. i. 89 (vi. p. 296): ‘minime pro causa 
 < corruptionis > habentes divinitatem, quae immunis est malitia et malis : 
 sola enim bona prius largiri est eius opus’; ibid. i. 100 (vi. p. 304): 
 “< deus est > causa sane non omnium sed bonorum tantum eorumque qui 
 secundum virtutem sunt; sicut enim expers est malitiae, ita etiam nec 
 causa’; etc. 
 
84 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 predominant factor in his thought on this subject is the 
 Platonic conviction (identical with what we have in Lec- 
 ture I described as the ‘ Hindu’ or monistic solution of the 
 problem 1) that evil is inseparably bound up with finite, 
 relative and phenomenal existence. With this conviction 
 naturally coheres another Platonic tenet, the belief in the 
 pre-existence of the human soul; and it is therefore not 
 surprising to find, in two passages at least,* inchoate 
 adumbrations of a theory (such as had been imaginatively 
 suggested by Plato himself in the Phaedrus, and as was 
 destined to be elaborated nearly two centuries later by 
 another great Platonist of Alexandria, Origen 3) of a prenatal 
 fall of individual souls, drawn downwards from the tran- 
 scendental plane, which is their true home, through a 
 sensual craving for earthly and bodily life, and contracting 
 the taint of evil from their voluntary self-imprisonment in 
 envelopes of material flesh. This idea, according to which 
 every human birth represents the voluntary fall of a pre- 
 existent spirit from the heavenly sphere, has played a 
 considerable part in non-Christian systems of religious 
 belief, will meet us more than once in the history of 
 Christian speculation on the origins of evil in man, and 
 will claim a measure of respectful consideration when we 
 approach our final task of determining what is the essential 
 Fall-doctrine of the Christian Church. But it must suffice 
 at this point to emphasise the fact that the theory of 
 pre-natal falls was only hinted at, and never worked out in 
 detail, by Philo, and cannot, therefore, be reckoned amongst 
 the influences which contributed to the shaping of that 
 doctrine regarding the Fall and Original Sin which we shall 
 find in the pages of the New Testament. 
 
 1 v. supra, Lecture I, p. 5. 
 
 2 de somn. i. 22 (iii. p. 244); de gigant. 3 (il. p. 53). But in de confus. 
 ling. 17 (ii. p. 265) the souls of the wise are said to have descended from 
 
 heaven to earth ‘ because of their love of contemplation and learning.’ 
 The theory of pre-existence is generally believed to underlie Wisdom viii. 19: 
 
 ‘Now I was a child of parts, and a good soul fell to my lot; 
 Nay rather, being good, I came into a body undefiled ’ 
 
 (though A. T. S. Goodricke, The Book of Wisdom [1913], pp. 212, 381 f., 
 denies this). But Pseudo-Solomon does not suggest that the incarnation 
 of a pre-existent soul is to be regarded as a‘ Fall.’ 
 
 Suv Lectuie LY, p. 2h Zp. 4 y. Lecture VIII, p. 507 ff. 
 

 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ 85 
 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
 In view of the vague and elusive nature of the ideas 
 respecting the origin and ground of sin which prevailed 
 within the Jewish Church, as it stood on the eve of the 
 Incarnation, it would seem desirable, even at the cost of 
 some repetition, to conclude our survey of the pre-Christian 
 history of the Fall-doctrine with a brief summary of the 
 results so far attained. We have seen that this doctrine 
 is entirely absent from the Old Testament documents of a 
 date prior to the Exile, and that its origin is to be found in 
 the feeling of sin, understood now in a strictly ethical and 
 not in a quasi-materialistic sense, which that great cata- 
 strophe inspired in devout and introspective souls. The 
 dreary impotence which for the most part characterised the 
 life of the restored community during the Persian and Greek 
 periods impressed deeply upon the mind of the later Israel 
 the idea of the empirical universality of sin. Reflection and 
 self-analysis seemed to show, lying behind this fact, an 
 innate sinfulness or tendency towards sin, deeply rooted in 
 human nature. But this psychological phenomenon itself 
 required an explanation. The piety of the common folk, 
 which found expression in the apocalyptic literature, could 
 not endure the supposition that human nature as it stands, 
 with the evil impulse rooted in it, represents human nature 
 as created by God; and was accordingly compelled to 
 postulate a voluntary and deliberate declension of man 
 from the moral ideal set before him by his Maker—in other 
 words, a ‘ Fall.’ The ancient traditions of Israel were ran- 
 sacked in order to discover an event which could be identified 
 with this hypothetical ‘ Fall’; and the first supposedly 
 historical incident which was selected for this purpose was 
 the unnatural intermarriage of divine and human beings 
 narrated in Gen. vi. 1-4. But the difficulty of accounting, 
 on this hypothesis, for the persistence of evil after the Flood 
 forced the later apocalyptists back upon the Paradise-story 
 of Gen. iii. ; which seemed to provide an explanation of the 
 origin of evil fitting the known facts of human nature and 
 the supposed facts of human history much more closely than 
 
86 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 that based upon the Angel-legend, and, in course of time, 
 pushed this earlier Fall-story into the background. Both 
 of these Fall-theories, as elaborated in the apocalypses, are 
 shot through and interwoven with frequent traces of two 
 diverse, though not necessarily discrepant, ideas as to the 
 nature and mode of propagation of sin—one which regards 
 it as bound up with man’s advance in knowledge, and one 
 which finds it in intimate association with his sensual 
 appetites, particularly with that appetite which subserves 
 the continuation of the race. 
 
 Meanwhile, the official theology of the Jewish Church, 
 as represented by the scribes, the authoritative custodians 
 of its traditional deposit, was developing a solution of the 
 problem of evil and its origin on largely different lines. 
 Having (it is not unfair to suggest) a somewhat colder, 
 more intellectualised and philosophical, conception of God 
 than that which underlay the passionate piety of the 
 pseudepigraphic writers, they felt less difficulty about attri- 
 buting, or appearing to attribute, the ultimate responsibility 
 for the existence of evil to Him; and the robust ethical 
 libertarianism 4 which they had inherited from the prophets 
 made it impossible for them to allow the sinner a possible 
 excuse for or palliation of his wrong-doing, such as he might 
 have found in the theory of an involuntarily inherited pro- 
 pension towards sin. Hence Rabbinical theology rejects 
 altogether the beliefs in a ‘ Fall,’ and in a hereditary infirmity 
 or taint, and substitutes the idea of the ‘ evil imagination,’ 
 individually implanted by the Creator in every man at his 
 conception or birth—a mysterious tumultuous force per- 
 petually welling up from the depths of the soul and appearing 
 in consciousness as an imperious hunger for self-assertion, 
 self-expression, and self-gratification, especially within the 
 sphere of sex. (In the stress which they lay upon this 
 matter, the scholastic and the popular theories join hands.) 
 This impulse has been placed by the Creator in man, not 
 
 1 This firm belief in free-will was held by the Rabbis side by side with 
 an equally firm belief in the universality of the Divine prevision, as appears 
 from the celebrated saying of R. ‘Aqibah ‘ Everything is foreseen, and free- 
 will is given’ (Pirge ’Abdth, ili. 24; Taylor, Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, 
 
 1897 edn., p. 59). But Divine prevision, even if construed as predestina- 
 tion, does not in itself imply a radical evil in man. 
 

 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ 87 
 
 indeed with the avowed object of causing him to sin, but 
 rather to be the necessary pre-condition of moral virtue, 
 which is only attained through its subjugation, by means of 
 the Law, and its consequent direction towards good and 
 noble ends. We have already suggested that this concep- 
 tion appears to be in essence identical with the libido of 
 recent psychology, an idea which may prove useful when we 
 approach the constructive part of our task. The Rabbis 
 were, however, sufficiently far influenced by the movements 
 of popular thought and by the vague body of extra-biblical 
 legend floating around the figures of Adam and Eve to be 
 willing to find a place, at least within the haggadic elements 
 of their teaching, for the theory that the transgression of the 
 first man, though not the source of human sinfulness, was 
 nevertheless attended by many disastrous physical conse- 
 quences affecting both himself and his descendants, and 
 including the forfeiture of the supernatural perfections 
 supposed to have been enjoyed by him in his paradisal state. 
 The doctrine of ‘ Original Righteousness’ would thus seem 
 to have been already present in the Jewish scholasticism 
 which formed part of the intellectual milieu within which 
 the Christian doctrines of Man and of Sin were first formu- 
 lated ; and, though it would doubtless be anachronistic to 
 attribute to the Rabbis an explicit belief in ‘ Original Guilt,’ 
 or the imputation of Adam’s sin to his descendants, yet it 
 can now be seen that the potentialities of such a belief lay 
 dormant in the traditional mythology which treated the Fall 
 as the origin of physical evil. 
 
 At the beginning, therefore, of our era three main theories 
 as to the origin of human sin were current within that 
 Jewish Ecclesta into which Christ and His Apostles were 
 born, namely : | 
 
 (rt) The theory of the older apocalyptists, which finds the 
 ground of moral evil in a hereditary taint introduced into the 
 world by the unnatural angel-marriages of Gen. vi. 
 
 (2) The theory of the later apocalyptists, which traces the 
 source of inherited sinfulness to the transgression of Adam and 
 Eve narrated in Gen. iii. Under this head we must distinguish 
 between (a) that form of the theory which, confining itself to 
 the interpretation of the Biblical narrative, found the first sin 
 in Adam’s wilful transgression of a known divine command, 
 
88 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 and (b) that based upon extra-biblical folk-lore, which regards 
 the moral corruption of mankind as a consequence of the physical 
 pollution of Eve by the serpent, or Satan. 
 
 (3) The theory of the Rabbinical, that is of the official and 
 scholastic theology, that the psychological basis of sin consists 
 in an ‘ evil impulse,’ ‘imagination,’ or ‘ disposition,’ which is 
 not hereditary, but implanted by the Creator in each individual 
 separately at the moment of conception or birth. 
 
 To these should perhaps be added (though, as already 
 observed, it appears to have exercised no influence upon the 
 earliest Christian thought) : 
 
 (4) The view of Philo, according to which evil is a necessary 
 quality of finite and relative being, and is communicated to 
 human souls through their individual falls to the material plane 
 from the transcendental sphere in which they are conceived as 
 having existed before their births in time—a view which appears 
 
 to be substantially identical with what we have described as the 
 “ Hindu theory * in Lecture I. 
 
 These diverse and in many ways discrepant conceptions 
 constituted the pile of raw material which lay ready to the 
 hand of the earliest Christian theology, at the moment when 
 first it bent itself to the task of building up a doctrine of 
 Man and of Sin to serve as the logical presupposition and 
 prius of its redemptive and soteriological scheme. 
 
 It may thus be claimed that a candid research into the 
 origins and growth of the later or ‘ Adamic’ version of the 
 Fall-theory has confirmed the conclusion which was pro- 
 visionally formulated at the close of Lecture I, as the result 
 of our investigation of the earlier or ‘ angelic’ version— 
 namely, that the true basis of the pseudepigraphic doctrines 
 of the Fall and of Original Sin (as of their scholastic rival, 
 the doctrine of the yéger ha-va‘) is to be found in facts of 
 inner spiritual experience, in particular the experience of 
 moral struggle and failure and of penitence; these beliefs 
 are rooted in psychology, not in history. The question 
 may well be asked ‘Does not this conclusion dispose of 
 their claim to be based upon a Divine revelation? ’: and 
 the last words of this lecture shall be devoted to the presen- 
 tation of a reply as definite as can be given at this stage of 
 our argument without anticipating contentions which have 
 yet to be developed. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION ’ 89 
 
 The nature of this reply must necessarily be determined 
 by the conception of ‘ Revelation’ which is in the mind. of 
 our imaginary interlocutor. If by ‘ Revelation’ he means 
 a purely external, objective, and mechanical impartition to 
 men’s minds of Divine truth in a finished and unalterable 
 form, the answer must be in the affirmative; the facts 
 which we have passed under review do indeed dispose of 
 any claim which might be put forward on behalf of the 
 Fall-doctrine that it rests upon such an outward, and, so to 
 speak, tangible revelation. In all probability Man has lived 
 upon this planet for not less than half a million years, and 
 the Genesis-stories, in their present form, can hardly number 
 thirty centuries of existence ; we cannot, therefore, regard 
 them as based upon genuine reminiscences of the infancy 
 of the human race. We have, moreover, seen that the 
 Fall-doctrine came into existence as the result of human 
 reflection upon the problem of human sin, and that it was 
 not until after a century of experimentation with the 
 Watcher-legend that the Paradise-story was finally chosen 
 as the nail from which the inferred chain of the hereditary 
 evil causality was to be suspended ; it is, therefore, equally 
 impossible for us to accept that more refined form of the 
 theory of an ‘ objective revelation’ underlying the Fall- 
 doctrine which would see in the narrative of Gen. iii. an 
 allegory directly dictated by the Holy Spirit in order to 
 acquaint mankind with the forgotten first page of its own 
 moral history. 
 
 But, when we deny that this doctrine originated in an 
 exterior or objective revelation, conveyed through oracle, 
 vision, or supernaturally dictated text, and affirm that its 
 immediate historical source is to be found in human specu- 
 lation, we do not thereby exclude the possibility that it 
 may be ultimately attributable to a Divine revelation of an 
 interior or subjective kind. God fulfils Himself in many ways; 
 and the praeparatio evangelica which, as heirs of the ancient 
 covenant, we Christians discern in the pages of the Old 
 Testament, was unrolled before the eyes of the Jewish 
 Fathers zoAvpep@s Kat moAvtpotws,1 in many fragments 
 and after many manners. Deep, searching, self-abhorring 
 
 1 Heb. i. 1. 
 
go THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 penitence, in which the whole theory is rooted and from 
 which it draws its vitality, is in any case the gift of God ; 
 and Christian believers should find no antecedent difficulty 
 in the supposition that the same indwelling Spirit, who 
 bestowed this poignant experience upon the noblest of the 
 apocalyptic thinkers, may also, with delicate invisible 
 touches, have so guided and shaped the course of their 
 introspective meditations and reflections upon it as to educe 
 from their tumultuous feelings a system of ideas—imperfectly 
 defined and commingled for the time being with error and 
 legend, yet containing a truer explanation of the origin of 
 moral evil than any that the mind of man had hitherto 
 evolved, and capable of purification during the following 
 centuries in accordance with the mind of Christ and of 
 ultimate incorporation into the majestic fabric of Christian 
 belief. If this be a true account of the matter, and if the 
 word ‘ Revelation ’’ may in this connexion be understood in 
 the subjective sense indicated above, the doctrines of the 
 Fall and of Original Sin may still claim to be founded in a 
 Divine revelation, as surely as though they had been graven 
 upon visible tables of stone or proclaimed in words of 
 thunder from the smouldering steeps of Sinai. 
 
 Whether, indeed, such a hypothesis may legitimately 
 be applied to the origin of these doctrines cannot be cate- 
 gorically decided until we have completed our final task of 
 examining their permanent residuum, as it has emerged 
 from the crucible of Christian thought, in regard to its 
 psychological and metaphysical validity, and must depend 
 upon the verdict at which we arrive in the course of our last 
 two lectures. If we see reason to believe that these ideas 
 embody the true explanation of the origin of evil, or an 
 explanation as true as is attainable with our present faculties, 
 we shall have no hesitation in assigning their ultimate source 
 to the subtle, but none the less real, inspirations of the 
 Divine ; if not, we shall conclude that they are mere human 
 figments. Meanwhile, we may be content to observe that, 
 as no consideration of a friort probability can be adduced 
 which militates against the hypothesis of an interior and 
 subjective revelation lying behind these doctrines, so also 
 no a fosteriort evidence fundamentally incompatible with 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 ADAM AND THE ‘EVIL IMAGINATION’ QI 
 
 such a hypothesis has been disclosed by a careful survey of 
 their pre-Christian development. He who would unravel 
 their obscure and confused beginnings must necessarily 
 handle, as we have already seen, much that is fantastic and 
 even repulsive. But it is to be expected that in imperfect 
 and undeveloped phases of revelation good and evil, truth 
 and error, should be found lying side by side; and the 
 searcher after Divine verity who is both qualified and pre- 
 pared to discriminate between the gold of genuine spirituality 
 and the mythological dross in which it is often to be found 
 embedded, will not allow his judgment to be deflected by the 
 repugnance which he will naturally feel towards the coarse 
 or puerile details which occasionally disfigure the Fall-stories 
 in some of their expanded haggadic versions. Whether or 
 not he admits the validity of the logic which argues from 
 actual sins to innate sinfulness, and from innate sinfulness 
 to a primal fall, he will at least respect the experience 
 which it endeavours to express, and will salute across the 
 centuries the devotion and the penitence of the Maccabean 
 saints, the holy and humble men of heart who waited for the 
 consolation of Israel. 
 

 

 
 III. 
 
 THE FALL-DOCTRINE 
 IN THE NEW. TESTAMENT 
 
 
 
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame 
 Is lust in action; and till action, lust 
 Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, 
 Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust, 
 Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight, 
 Past reason hunted, and no sooner had 
 Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait 
 On purpose laid to make the taker mad ; 
 Mad in pursuit and in possession so ; 
 Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme ; 
 A bliss in proof, and, proved, a very woe; 
 Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream, 
 All this the world well knows: yet none knows well 
 To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. 
 
 SHAKESPEARE, Sonnet CXXix. 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE 
 NEW TESTAMENT 
 
 1 Cor.xv.22: ‘For asin Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be 
 made alive.’ 
 
 Our last two lectures have been devoted to the task of 
 investigating the origin and defining the content of the 
 ideas which were prevalent within the Jewish Church with 
 regard to the origin of evil, at the moment when Christianity 
 appeared on the stage of human history. These, it will be 
 remembered, were the popular beliefs in ‘ Original Sin’ and 
 in a ‘ Fall,’ identified at first with the sin of the fallen 
 Watchers, but, in later Judaism, more often with the trans- 
 gression of Adam—and the Rabbinical, scholastic, or 
 official conceptions of the ‘ evil imagination’ and of the 
 imputation of Adam’s sin to his descendants. We now 
 have to face a grave and momentous question—how did 
 it come to pass that one only of these theories (the popular 
 and pseudepigraphic Adam-theory) was taken over, to the 
 exclusion of the others, by Christianity, and welded so 
 firmly into the dogmatic structure of our religion, that 
 succeeding ages have taken it for granted as one of the 
 central pillars and supports of the Church’s Faith ? 
 
 THE TEACHING OF JESUS CHRIST 
 
 It might naturally be supposed, by one who had never 
 enquired very closely into the question, that the choice of 
 this particular theory to constitute the official Christian 
 explanation of the origin of evil and to provide a logical 
 prius for Redemption was made by the supreme and final 
 
96 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 authority of Christ. But it must be said at once that an 
 examination of our Lord’s sayings as recorded in the 
 Synoptic Gospels reveals no evidence for such a supposition. 
 It is, of course, true that He assumes the empirical univer- 
 sality of sin as a fact. Even for those who fail to catch the 
 sombre undertones pervading all His teaching with regard 
 to the relations of God and man, this ought to be sufficiently 
 shown by the fact that His fundamental message, which He 
 proclaimed at the outset of His public ministry in Galilee, 
 and on which the rest of His exhortation was based, is to be 
 found summed up in the solemn cry, re-echoing the words 
 of the Baptist “ Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at 
 hand.’? Though this charge was addressed to the people 
 of Israel alone, yet if interpreted in its context of contem- 
 porary ideas it inevitably implies the strict universality of 
 the need for repentance ; for from the Jewish point of view 
 ‘Gentiles ’ were ex hypothesi sinners.* This universal need 
 of repentance and forgiveness is most clearly assumed in 
 the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant,? and the petition 
 for forgiveness included in the Lord’s Prayer, and the 
 Saying, preserved by St. Luke alone, with regard to the 
 Galileans “whose blood Pilate had mingled with their 
 sacrifices, and the eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam 
 fell—* Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.’ * 
 (The reference to the ‘ ninety and nine just persons who need 
 no repentance ’ ® can hardly be other than ironical.) Three 
 sayings can indeed be cited (two of which~at least are 
 respectively derived from two of the earliest sources of the 
 Synoptic Gospels, St. Mark and Q) which appear to take 
 the further step of assuming, behind the empirical univers- 
 ality of actual sin, some kind of sinful disposition naturally 
 inherent in the human soul; these are (a) St. Mark vii. 
 
 teMatt, 1V.)177) Markit) 15; 
 
 2 Even St. Paul, twenty years later, can allow himself to use the phrase 
 ‘ We who are Jews by birth, and not sinners of the Gentiles’ (Gal. ii. 15). 
 For a lurid description of the hatred and contempt felt by strict Jews 
 towards all Gentiles as such, see Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the 
 Messiah (1901 edn.), i. go-92. 
 
 3 Matt. xvili. 23-35. 4 Luke xiii. 2-5. 
 
 5 Luke xv. 7; cf. Matt. xviii. 12, 13. This interpretation clearly 
 applies also to a similar saying, Matt. ix. 13: ‘I came not to call the 
 righteous, but sinners.’ 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 97 
 
 21, 22 (= St. Matthew xv. 19): ‘ For from within, out of 
 the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed, fornications, 
 thefts, murders .. . all these evil things proceed from 
 within, and defile the man’; (b) Matt. vii. rr (= Luke xi. 13): 
 ‘If ye then, beng evil, know how to give good gifts unto 
 your children, how much more shall your Father which is 
 in heaven give good things to them that ask him ?’ 4 and 
 (c) Matt. xii. 33, 34: ‘ Either make the tree good and its 
 fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt and its fruit 
 corrupt: for the tree is known by its fruit. Ye offspring 
 of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things ? for 
 out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.’ ? 
 But the affirmations that this evil tendency or quality is 
 transmitted by physiological heredity, and is ultimately 
 derived from a primordial transgression—affirmations which 
 we have seen to be necessary constituents of a ‘ Fall- 
 doctrine ’"—are conspicuous by their absence. If, indeed, 
 it is possible to connect the ideas underlying these sayings 
 with current Jewish thought at all, the particular theory 
 of which they are reminiscent would seem to be that of the 
 yeécer ha-ra‘: for, as we have already seen, the ‘ heart,’ 
 which in (a) and (c) is implicitly asserted to be the home of 
 sinfulness, is again and again described by the Rabbis as 
 the source of the ‘ evil imagination’: and it is possible 
 that the phrase ‘bad’ (or ‘ evil’) thoughts (dvaroyropot 
 kakot Mark; zovypot Matt.) in the first of these sayings 
 may be a direct translation of an original yécer va‘.2 But 
 this coincidence of thought and language cannot legitimately 
 be pressed so far as to yield the further conclusion that our 
 Lord held the distinctive position of the Rabbinical doctrine, 
 namely that the ‘ evil imagination’ is, not inherited, but 
 separately implanted by the Creator in the heart of each 
 individual: and such a position would seem to be in sharp 
 
 1 This saying is assigned to Q by such representative authorities as 
 Harnack, Sir John Hawkins, and Canon Streeter. St. Luke has ‘ holy 
 spirit’ (mvedua ady.ov, without the article) for ‘ good things’ in the apodosis 
 of the sentence. 
 
 2 The Lukan parallel is vi. 43-45, which, however, omits the question 
 “ How can ye, being evil, speak good things?’ <A ‘ doublet’ of the first 
 part of this saying (the tree known by its fruits) is found in Matt. vii. 
 16-19. 
 
 ° In Ecclus. xxvii. 6 LXX diadoysopds is used to render V¥?. 
 
98 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 contradiction to the whole tenor of His teaching about God. 
 So far, therefore, as the Synoptic evidence goes, it appears 
 that our Lord never raised the question of the ultimate 
 origin of human sin at all, and never gave any authoritative 
 decision as between the three current theories of ‘ original 
 sin’ flowing from the fall of the Watchers, of ‘ original sin ’ 
 flowing from the fall of Adam, and of an ‘ evil imagination ’ 
 implanted separately in each individual at birth.” 
 
 If we turn to the Fourth Gospel, we shall find only two 
 texts which have any relevance to the subject of our enquiry. 
 The less important of these is the passage ix. 2, 3, in which 
 the intention of the Evangelist may be to represent our 
 Lord as condemning the Philonian or Platonic theory of a 
 pre-natal fall of individual souls, with reference to the 
 problem of the man born blind ?; it does not, however, 
 contain any positive information as to the real source of 
 evil, physical or moral. The more important passage is 
 ili. I-21, which gives us the wonderful scene in which our 
 Lord instructs Nicodemus by night—a passage destined, 
 as we shall see, to play an important part in the Pelagian 
 controversy. Here the Saviour is recorded to have taught 
 a ‘ruler of the Jews’ that man needs to be “ born anew ’— 
 in order to see the kingdom of God, a saying which would 
 certainly seem to imply that his present state, derived from 
 his first or natural birth, is in some way sinful or pre-disposed 
 
 1 It is a significant fact that the only allusion to Adam and Eve (other 
 than the bare mention of Adam in St. Luke’s genealogy of Christ) con- 
 tained in the whole of the Gospels has reference to their original creation 
 as male and female (Mark x. 6 = Matt. xix. 4), not to the‘ Fall.’ 
 
 * Some eminent authorities (C. Taylor, Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, 
 1897, p. 128; W. C. Allen, ICC. St. Matthew, in loc.; C. G. Montefiore, 
 The Synoptic Gospels, ii. 535) discern an allusion to the yécer ha-va‘ in the 
 petition ‘ Deliver us from evil’ which stands in the Matthaean version 
 of the Lord’s Prayer, and draw attention to the similar request contained 
 in the Jewish Liturgy ‘ O lead us not into the power of sin, or of trans- 
 gression or iniquity, or of temptation: let not the evil inclination have 
 sway over us’ (quoted above, Lecture II, p. 67,n.1). This suggestion, 
 however, though attractive, seems incapable of positive proof. 
 
 3 It is possible, however, that what is condemned in this passage is 
 the curious Rabbinical belief in the possibility of foetal sin, 7.e. sin com- 
 mitted by the embryo between conception and birth: see J. Lightfoot, 
 Hovae Hebraicae et Talmudicae in Quatuor Evangelistas (Lipsiae, 1675), 
 p. 1050, for Midrashic and Talmudic instances of this idea. | 
 
 * See Lecture. Viiips.375. 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 99 
 
 to sin; and the new birth, which is to be mediated through 
 ‘water and the Spirit’ would certainly have been under- 
 stood by the Evangelist’s readers, towards the end of the 
 first century A.D., to be Christian Baptism. If we could 
 rely upon this passage as reproducing the zfsissima verba of 
 Christ with the accuracy of a modern stenographic report, 
 we should doubtless be entitled to combine this saying with 
 the two Synoptic passages mentioned above as implying 
 a radical evil inherent in the heart of man, and to infer, or 
 at least to presume, that the linked conceptions of ‘ original 
 sin’ and of Baptism as the remedy for it, which we shall 
 soon encounter in the writings of St. Paul, were already 
 present, undefined yet unmistakeable, in our Lord’s own 
 teaching as given during His earthly life. But those who 
 are acquainted with the present stage of scholarly opinion 
 with regard to the origins and character of the Fourth 
 Gospel will be aware that the matter is not quite so simple 
 as it may appear at first sight. It is impossible here to 
 enter upon an exhaustive discussion of the Johannine 
 problem ; but the position upon which the greater number 
 of moderate and reasonable students, both of the ‘ con- 
 servative’ and ‘liberal’ schools, appears (so far as I can 
 judge) to be converging may be summarised, and its bearing 
 upon the point now under discussion briefly indicated. 
 
 The Fourth Gospel and the three Johannine Epistles, 
 it is now coming to be agreed, were written by a great primi- 
 tive teacher, John of Ephesus, commonly known as the 
 ‘Presbyter ’ or ‘ Elder’ whose presence in Asia towards the 
 end of the first century of our era is attested by Papias 
 and other writers of the second century.! There are still 
 scholars? who are prepared to identify this venerated 
 
 1 The necessities of compression will doubtless be accepted as a valid 
 excuse for what may seem to be the somewhat curt and dogmatic manner 
 in which the vast and intricate Johannine problem is treated in the text. 
 The same consideration must also justify the omission of any account 
 of the enormous mass of literature dealing with the subject; for this, 
 the student must be referred to Moffatt, Inivoduction to the Literature of 
 the New Testament (1911), pp. 515 ff. To the bibliography there given 
 must now be added Streeter, The Four Gospels, Part III, ‘ The Fourth 
 Gospel.’ 
 
 2 e.g. Dom John Chapman, O.S.B., John the Presbytery (1911) ; Bishop 
 Gore, Belief in Christ (1922), Cc. iv. 
 
100 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 personage with the Apostle John, brother of James and son 
 of Zebedee, and with the ‘ beloved disciple’ mentioned in 
 the Fourth Gospel itself, and it would be rash to predict 
 that there will never be a reaction in favour of this view ; 
 it would seem, however, that those who hold it are at present 
 in the minority, and that the main body of learned opinion, 
 whilst rejecting the counsel of despair which assigns this 
 Gospel to a ‘Great Unknown’ of the second century, is 
 divided between (a) the theory of Delff,1 which identifies 
 the Asian John with the ‘ beloved disciple,’ believed to be a 
 Jerusalemite and a youthful member of the sacerdotal caste, 
 who, on the occasions of our Lord’s visits to the Holy City, 
 spent as much of his time as he could in the Master’s com- 
 pany, but was not one of the Twelve who were permanently 
 and continuously attached to Him—and (0) that associated 
 with the name of Weizsacker, according to which the Asian 
 John was—not the ‘ beloved disciple,’ but—the pupil or 
 epigonus of the ‘ beloved disciple ’ (that is, on this hypothesis, 
 of John the Apostle), from whom he derived the information 
 which he has worked up in the Gospel.? In any case, how- 
 ever,—whether the Fourth Evangelist was the son of Zebedee, 
 or the young priestly aristocrat of Delfi’s theory, or the 
 disciple of the son of Zebedee—we are justified in claiming 
 a fairly general consensus of unprejudiced opinion for the 
 disjunctive proposition that he was either an eye-witness 
 ov the direct hearer of an eye-witness. This proposition, if 
 accepted, establishes a prima facie presumption in favour 
 of the trustworthiness, broadly understood, of the strictly 
 narrative elements in the Gospel—a presumption which is 
 confirmed by their many vivid, human and realistic touches, 
 and by the fact that in regard to certain questions of detail, 
 such as that of the date of the Crucifixion, they appear to 
 be in the right as against the Synoptists. It must further 
 be remembered that the Evangelist’s fundamental convic- 
 tion that the Word was in very truth made flesh, and that 
 the Divine glory was indeed manifested in true humanity 
 
 1 Geschichte des Rabbi Jesus von Nazareth (1899): the substance of 
 this theory has been adopted by Dr. C. F. Burney, The Aramaic Origin of 
 the Fourth Gospel (1922) c. ix. 
 
 2 See Stanton, The Gospels as Historical Documents (1920), Part III; 
 Streeter, op. cit. Part III. 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT tor 
 
 within the bounds of space and time, would inevitably 
 debar him from the conscious invention of fictitious narra- 
 tive. Unreal incidents would be the poorest of weapons 
 to employ against the Docetic Gnostics who affirmed the 
 unreality of Christ’s whole human life.t If, therefore, we 
 leave out of account those incidents which, owing to their 
 miraculous character, still tend to divide critical opinion, 
 we may claim to be justified (quite apart from any dogmatic 
 prepossessions, and solely upon the basis of an increasing 
 consensus amongst scholars) in regarding the main historical 
 framework of the Fourth Gospel as embodying good and 
 reliable tradition ; and we need not doubt that the interview 
 with Nicodemus, which is the point of immediate interest 
 for our present enquiry, is not a mere dramatic invention, 
 but a fact of objective history. 
 
 This conclusion, however, does not necessarily settle the 
 question, what precisely was said on that occasion. Given 
 the ancient conception of history as a branch of letters 
 rather than of science, it follows that the considerable 
 measure of factual solidity which may be attributed to St. 
 John’s? narrative framework does not of itself guarantee 
 the literal accuracy of the reports of the Lord’s sayings con- 
 tained within that framework: the speeches in Thucydides 
 are well-known instances of the classical custom of placing 
 in the mouths of historic characters, not the exact words 
 which they employed on given occasions, but what they 
 might have been expected to say,? or what appeared to the 
 
 1 Cf. Streeter, The Four Gospels (1924), p. 389: ‘ The familiar observa- 
 tion, that in John the miracles are ‘‘ acted parables ”’ is absolutely correct ; 
 only it does not go far enough. To John the whole of the appearance in 
 history of the Word-made-Flesh is an acted parable—including the Death 
 and Resurrection. That being so, it is essential surely to his whole 
 theological position, whether against the Docetic Gnostics, who denied 
 the reality of Christ’s human body, or against the passionless Christ of 
 Cerinthus, to affirm that the parable really was acted out in the plane of 
 material existence in this world of fact.’ 
 
 2 By ‘ St. John’ I mean here and in the following pages simply ‘ the 
 Fourth Evangelist,’ whoever he may have been. 
 
 8 Cf. Thuc. i. 22: doa pév Adyw elmov Exaoror 7 péAAovres OAc HOELW 
 } ev adr@ 75 Ovtes, xademov TH axpiBeray adriy TOV AcxPevrwv Sraurvnpovetoat 
 hv epol re Hv avros HKovoa Kai tots dAAobEv ober euol amayyéAAovaww® ws 8 
 dv €ddxovy euol wept t@v alel mapdvrwy ra Séovra pddAor’ eimetv, Exowevw Ore 
 eyyvrata Ths €upmdons yvouns TOv GdAnOds AexPevrwv, odrws etpynrat. ‘As for 
 
102 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 historian to embody the general spirit of their ideas and to 
 represent legitimate inferences from and developments of 
 those ideas. Now it is a striking fact that the style of 
 Christ’s speeches in the Fourth Gospel is thoroughly 
 homogeneous with the style of the narrative portions of the 
 Gospel, and with that of the First Epistle ; so much at least 
 is therefore clear, that the Evangelist has clothed the ideas 
 of his Master in his own characteristic language. And, 
 when this has been admitted, the further suggestion is 
 inevitably raised, that St. John may have, consciously or 
 unconsciously, blended with the teaching of Christ as he 
 remembered it, or as he received it from his instructor, his 
 own meditations on that teaching. There is, indeed, no 
 reason why he should not have done so consciously ; though 
 a Jew in race and mind, the Fourth Evangelist, as writing 
 for Gentiles and in a Gentile environment, might well have 
 felt himself at liberty to follow the Graeco-Roman custom 
 of reproducing the general spirit and essence of a great 
 philosopher’s teaching by means of imaginative discourses 
 freely composed and attributed to him, and to discard the 
 Jewish tradition which must have governed the compilation 
 of QO, that namely which prescribed the preservation of a 
 Rabbi’s apothegms as nearly as possible in their original 
 verbal form. 
 
 If the words and speeches of Christ contained in the 
 Fourth Gospel be interpreted in accordance with the view 
 just indicated, as a blend of authentic Jogia and Johannine 
 commentary, many difficulties melt away which have long 
 defied solution. I do not know of any other hypothesis 
 
 the actual words used by individuals at the outset of the war or during 
 ts course, it has been difficult to record their exact text, both for me 
 in regard to speeches which I heard myself and for my informants in 
 regard to other speeches; I have therefore set down what tt seemed to me 
 likely that the individual speakers would have said in dealing with given 
 emergencies, keeping as closely as possible to the general sense of what was 
 actually said.’ An even more striking and suggestive instance of the 
 liberty allowed themselves in this regard by ancient writers is to be found 
 in the Dialogues of Plato, who may be said to have been a ‘ beloved 
 disciple’ of Socrates, and, perhaps for that reason, has not hesitated to 
 place his own developed philosophy in the mouth of his master, without 
 feeling himself fettered by what a modern author would consider the claims 
 of historical veracity. 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 103 
 
 which adequately explains the fact that—whilst the Syn- 
 optists represent the intuition of our Lord’s Messiahship 
 and Divine Sonship as dawning very slowly and gradually 
 in the minds of the Twelve, and as not vouchsafed at all to 
 the generality of His hearers (the demoniacs who blurt out 
 the secret of His being are sternly silenced)—the Fourth 
 Gospel ignores this whole perspective and development of 
 the Messianic revelation, and portrays the Incarnate Logos 
 as both publicly claiming, and as being confessed by others, 
 to be Son of God, from the first moment of His ministry. 
 Sometimes, indeed, the two strands which compose the 
 didactic element in the Gospel (the words of Christ, and the 
 Evangelist’s commentary on them) are easily distinguish- 
 able ; in this very passage, for instance, it seems clear that 
 verses IO-I5 are meant to be the Lord’s own words, whilst 
 verses 16-21 are a devotional commentary on them, the 
 fruits of a lifetime of devout meditation and ripe spiritual 
 experience. It is evidently in St. John’s manner to glide 
 half unconsciously from a report of Christ’s sayings into 
 a train of exalted and mystical thoughts suggested by 
 them: and it is, therefore, all the more difficult not to 
 suppose that, in many or all of the speeches, the text of 
 what the Lord actually said, and the commentary supplied 
 by His servant’s spiritual experience, have become fused 
 into one indissoluble and indistinguishable mass. It may 
 be added that the proportion borne by the strictly Dominical 
 element in the Johannine discourses to that which must be 
 attributed to the Holy Spirit informing and penetrating 
 St. John’s own meditations is not by any means constant ; 
 it seems to vary from point to point of the text, a few 
 passages being almost demonstrably verbal transcripts of 
 logia which were actually spoken by the Saviour in the 
 days of His flesh,1 whilst, at the other end of the scale, 
 great tracts of discourse-matter approximate to the purely 
 ideal utterances ascribed to the Voice of the Master by 
 the author of the Imitatio Christi. We have, in short, to 
 
 1 John iv. 44 (‘a prophet hath no honour in his own country’) ; 
 xii. 25 (‘he that loveth his life loseth it’); xiii. 20 (‘ he that receiveth 
 me receiveth him that sent me’); xiii. 16 = xv. 20 (‘a servant is not 
 greater than his lord’). 
 
104 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 recognise that this wonderful book eludes all attempts 
 to force it into either of the hard categories of ‘ purely 
 historical’ or ‘ purely devotional’ literature, and that no 
 better description of it has yet been found than the 
 Alexandrine Clement’s phrase‘ a spiritual gospel’ (zvevpatixov 
 evayyéAov 1); we must think of it as an embodiment of 
 the idea which it enshrines in a sentence ascribed to the 
 Master Himself ‘ It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh 
 profiteth nothing ; the words that I have spoken unto you 
 are spirit, and are life.’ ? 
 
 In the light of all these considerations, whilst we may 
 feel reasonably confident that the interview with Nicodemus 
 actually happened, and that the Redeemer did actually 
 impress upon His disciple the need for a change of heart so 
 deep and complete as to deserve the name of a ‘ new birth,’ 
 we shall not be equally sure that this exhortation was 
 accompanied by a prediction of the future effects of the 
 Sacrament of Christian Baptism. We must leave open the 
 possibility that, in the Evangelist’s mind, the developed 
 sacramental theology of the Christian Church, as it stood 
 at the end of the first century, may have been as it were 
 projected backwards, and that the liturgical point of the 
 saying, which resides in the phrase ‘ by water,’ may represent 
 not so much what the Lord actually said as what the 
 Evangelist after a lifetime of missionary experience was 
 convinced that He meant.? If this be the true account of 
 the genesis of this particular passage in its present verbal 
 form, it would not by any means follow that the Evangelist 
 was wrong in the interpretation which he has given of the 
 Saviour’s mind. But it would follow that we could not 
 regard ourselves as entitled in default of further evidence 
 to use the passage as a proof that our Lord explicitly taught 
 the correlation of ‘ Original Sin’ and Baptism, as disease 
 
 1 Clem. Al. ap. Eus. H.E. vi. 14. 
 
 2 vi. 63. 
 
 3 Similarly many scholars would now hold that the other great sacra- 
 mental passage in the Fourth Gospel, the Discourse on the Bread of Life, 
 as it now stands in vi. 32-59, represents in the main the Eucharistic ex- 
 perience of the Apostolic Church, though it may well have been built upon 
 a recollection of historical sayings of the Lord referring to the Messianic 
 Banquet. 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 105 
 
 and remedy, during His earthly, not-yet-Risen, and not- 
 yet-Ascended life. It is not, indeed, proved, nor can it, 
 so far as we can see, ever be proved, that our Lord did not 
 use the crucial words ‘ by water’ on this occasion. But so 
 long as the doubt exists whether He did so or not, we cannot 
 legitimately build any conclusion upon them. 
 
 It must further be added that, even if we could rely 
 upon the verbal form of this saying with as much confidence 
 as though it were a Jogion preserved by Mark or Q, it would 
 yet be uncertain whether the implied undesirable state of 
 human nature, which is to be done away through baptismal 
 regeneration, is meant to be conceived in terms of the 
 Fall-theory or of the doctrine of the yécer ha-ra‘. There is 
 no allusion in the context to the Fall of Adam, and no 
 reference to the question, how man came by the disordered 
 or sinful nature of which he must needs rid himself in 
 order to see the Kingdom of God.? 
 
 Neither the Fourth Gospel, therefore, nor the Synoptists 
 provide us with any certain proof that the teaching given 
 by our Lord during His earthly life contained the doctrine 
 of the Fall, either in its ‘ Adamic’ or in any other version. 
 The most that can safely be asserted on the basis of the 
 available evidence is that on two or three occasions He 
 used language which is doubtless compatible with it, but 
 is also equally compatible with the doctrine of the evil 
 yécer. It seems clear that our Lord did not regard it as 
 part of His immediate mission, during the period of His 
 
 1 According to Kirsopp Lake, ERE ii. p. 384, art. ‘ Baptism (Early 
 Christian) ’ the words ‘ seem to have been unknown to Justin Martyr’ ; 
 this is presumably based on the fact that they do not occur in his loose 
 quotation of John iii.3,or 5,in 1 Apol. 61,4. But this contention would 
 prove too much ; for Justin also omits‘ by the Spirit,’ words which cannot 
 be excised from John ili. 5 without making nonsense of the verse. 
 
 2 It may not be irrelevant to add that no explanation of the origin 
 of evil is to be found in any of the documents which form the Johannine 
 corpus. It has been suggested that the sharp contrast between 7a avw and 
 Ta kdtw, between ‘light’ and ‘ darkness,’ which pervades St. John’s 
 writings, is the reflection of Philonian dualism ; and that the statement 
 that the devil ‘ was a murderer from the beginning’ implies the eternity 
 of a personified evil principle. Ido not wish to be understood as supporting 
 these contentions ; but the fact they have been brought forward empha- 
 sises the absence of a definite Fall-theory from the existing Johannine 
 literature. 
 
106 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 public ministry, to decide between the various theories of 
 the origin of evil then current in the Jewish Church. 
 
 This, indeed, is not to be wondered at in the light of 
 a true conception of the purpose and method which 
 governed His teaching activity during the two! crowded 
 last years of His life on earth. His purpose was to prepare 
 the way for the coming of the Kingdom of God, firstly by 
 bringing the members of the ancient Ecclesia, out of which 
 that Kingdom was to be developed, or upon which it was 
 to be divinely superimposed—the two conceptions are com- 
 plementary and not contradictory—to repentance and moral 
 transformation ; and secondly, by the intensive training, 
 in closest contact and association with Himself, of a band 
 of twelve men, reproducing the mystical number of the 
 twelve sons of Jacob who were the eponymous ancestors of 
 the traditional divisions of the Jewish race, to be the princes 
 or satraps of the Kingdom, sitting ‘ upon twelve thrones, 
 judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’? The method of His 
 instruction was therefore two-fold. To the multitudes, on 
 the plain or by the lake-shore, He taught in homely simile 
 or arresting parable, the moral ideals and values which were 
 the completion of the Old Law and the necessary basis of 
 the reign of God in men’s hearts. But to the inner circle 
 of the Twelve, the mysteries of the Kingdom—the Messiah- 
 ship and Divine sonship, the life given as a ransom for 
 many—were more fully unveiled, yet by hint and impli- 
 cation and apparently casual saying, rather than by anything 
 that could be described as systematic theological instruction ; 
 even for the future leaders of the Christian movement, 
 ethical and spiritual discipline was more important, and 
 claimed much more of the scanty time available for their 
 training, than purely intellectual illumination. Of this 
 latter, it is clear that our Lord during His earthly lifetime 
 
 1 [ have written ‘ two,’ in accordance with the views expressed above 
 as to the general reliability of the historical framework of St. John’s 
 Gospel. But the argument which follows is not weakened—it is, rather, 
 strengthened—if we take the Synoptists as our sole authorities, and 
 assume that the public ministry lasted for little more than one year. 
 
 2 Matt. xix. 28 = Luke xxii. 30, beyond doubt a Dominical phrase. 
 For remarks on the literary relationship of these two passages, see Streeter, 
 Four Gospels, p. 288. 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 107 
 
 imparted to His Apostles no more than was absolutely 
 necessary to give a right initial orientation to their thoughts 
 and feelings with regard to His own Person and Work ; with 
 regard to other matters concerning God and the Kingdom 
 (the being of the Holy Spirit, angels, the Law, the Ecclesia, 
 merit and good works, eschatology) He was content to 
 assume or to tolerate the current Pharisaic theology, only 
 occasionally correcting its more materialistic or unintelligent 
 conceptions (as when He repudiated the authority claimed 
 for the Rabbinical halakhoth—the ‘ traditions of the elders ’ } 
 —or condemned a grossly carnal idea of the resurrection ?). 
 The fuller elucidation and definition of the significance of 
 His Life and Death, and the complete sifting out of the 
 permanently valuable elements in the Jewish doctrine of 
 His day from the worthless or untrue, were tasks which, it 
 would seem, He deliberately left to be carried out by the 
 Christian Church, when His visible presence should have 
 been removed from the earth. Whether it is to be regarded 
 as paraphrasing a historical logion or not, the saying ascribed 
 to Christ by the Fourth Evangelist has admirably caught 
 and expressed the true inwardness of His educative method : 
 ‘TI have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot 
 bear them now: howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is 
 come, he shall guide you into all the truth . . . for he shall 
 take of mine, and shall declare it unto you.’ 3 
 
 This general conception of the scope and method of our 
 Lord’s teaching would seem to justify us in concluding that 
 the silence of the Gospels with regard to the Fall of Adam, 
 and, indeed, with regard to the whole question of the origin 
 of evil, is not merely accidental. If we may without irre- 
 verence or presumption endeavour to penetrate the mind 
 of the Master as revealed to us in His recorded words and 
 deeds, we may surmise that the predominantly practical 
 purpose of His instruction, and the shortness of the time 
 during which His teaching activities lasted, would naturally 
 exclude from the subject-matter of His discourses, both 
 public and private, all questions which might appear to be 
 
 1 Matt. xv. 3 ff. = Mark vii. 8 f. 
 2 Matt. xxii. 29 ff. = Mark xii. 24 ff. = Luke xx. 34 ff. 
 8 John xvi. 12-14. 
 
108 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 in the main of merely theoretical and speculative interest, 
 such as the question of the precise way in which sin came 
 into the world.! It was enough for Him that sin existed, 
 and was in some sense rooted in the ‘ heart’ of man; the 
 abolition of its malevolent power self-evidently was, and still 
 is, a vastly more important task than the philosophic explana- 
 tion of its origin. He came to call sinners to repentance, 
 and, by insisting that the guilt of the wilfully indulged 
 thought is no less in the sight of God than that of the 
 consummated act, to intensify and deepen the basic spiritual 
 experience out of which, as we have seen, the Fall doctrine 
 had arisen ; but it would seem that He left it to His future 
 Church to decide whether the doctrine was the truest 
 explanation of the experience, or no. 
 
 This conclusion is supported by a consideration which 
 can hardly be omitted from a discussion of our Lord’s 
 teaching with regard to the source or ground of sin. It isa 
 fact of some interest that—whereas we have only discovered 
 in His recorded sayings some three or four which appear to 
 contain the idea of an evil quality innate in man (and none 
 which imply the Fall-theory proper, as distinct from the 
 doctrine of the yéger ha-ra‘)—His discourses, as reported in 
 the four Gospels, embody more than twice that number of 
 expressions of a belief which might well appear prima facie 
 to be, and during the sub-apostolic age in point of fact 
 was,” an alternative and perhaps even a rival explanation of 
 human sinfulness. This belief, which we have not before had 
 occasion to mention at any length, but which permeated 
 Rabbinical and Apocalyptic Judaism alike, thus forming 
 an integral part of that background of Jewish religious 
 thought presupposed by the words of Christ, is the belief in 
 a host of personal devils attacking the human race with 
 evil solicitations from without and obsessing the souls and 
 bodies of individual men.? To their malign activities were 
 
 1 Another such question, which, so far as we can judge, was entirely 
 ignored by our Lord, is that of the conditions of the intermediate state 
 between death and the Last Judgment—the question to which the Western 
 doctrine of purgatory attempts to give an answer, 
 
 2 See below, Lecture IV, pp. 175, 177. 
 
 8’ This aspect of Jewish (and indeed of Christian) demonology, as 
 objectifying, externalising, and (in current psychological terminology) 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT Iog 
 
 attributed, not merely the phenomena of demoniacal 
 possession in the restricted sense of the term, but sin and 
 temptation of every kind and even physical diseases, such 
 as deafness, dumbness, and paralysis. From this point of 
 view, the sinful disposition which is antecedent to actual 
 sin is conceived not in medical terms as a disease, but rather 
 in what may be called political terms, as servitude to a 
 tyrant or robber chief; and redemption becomes not so 
 much the restoration of spiritual health as deliverance from 
 an external yoke or bondage.? 
 
 We are very far from asserting that the beliefs in an 
 interior innate corruption, and in an exterior personified 
 power of evil, are logically irreconcilable or incapable of 
 being simultaneously held by the same person ; they were 
 actually held together by the Jews of our Lord’s day, with 
 little attempt at harmonisation (though some Rabbinical 
 authorities * affirm, in some sense, the identity of Satan and 
 the yécer ha-va‘), and they are still held together by the 
 great mass of orthodox Christians. But itisclear that either 
 belief, if insisted upon as an exhaustive account of the genesis 
 of sin, makes the other otiose. Nor is this statement of the 
 logical relations of the two theories, considered in the abstract 
 and merely as theories, affected by the historical fact that 
 the Jewish Fall-doctrine in both of its classical versions 
 presupposes a supernatural tempter or tempters—Satan 
 dwelling in the serpent, or the lustful sons of the ’elo0him—as 
 the efficient cause of the assumed primitive catastrophe. 
 
 ‘ projecting ’’ the evil power which makes itself felt in the experience of 
 temptation, is strongly emphasised by the Bishop of Gloucester (Life and 
 Teaching of Jesus Christ, 1923, p. 126). ‘ The belief in a personal evil 
 spirit and a kingdom of evil implies that sin is no part of man’s nature. 
 His flesh may be weak, his heart may become full of evil imaginings ; 
 but the source of these is outside him. He listens to temptation, but it 
 comes to him. No part of him is necessarily evil, no part need be cast 
 away. It may be assumed, however, that these words are not meant 
 to imply the incompatibility of a belief in the devil with a belief in original 
 sin: see below, p. IIo. 
 
 1 For the distinction between the ‘ medical’ and the ‘ forensic’ meta- 
 phors as applied to sin, see Lecture II, p. 73; and for later and perverse 
 developments of the “ political’ conception of servitude to the devil, see 
 below, p. 292 ff. 
 
 2 See above, Lecture ITI, p. 67, n. 4. 
 
IIo THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 For in both versions the only necessary function of the evil 
 spirit or spirits is to effect the introduction of the hereditary 
 poison into the human stock ; once introduced, the poison 
 may well be deemed a sufficient explanation of all subsequent 
 actual sins, and no further intervention by the demons 
 appears in principle to be required. It would not in fact 
 be difficult to work out a Fall-theory (assuming liberty to 
 neglect the details of the Genesis-stories) which would 
 dispense altogether with the figure of an external tempter, 
 and find the primal source of sin solely in the free, self- 
 determining will of the first man. We are therefore entitled 
 to describe the hypotheses of ‘ original sin ’ and of a personal 
 devil or devils—in modern terminology, of “ auto-suggestion ’ 
 and of diabolical ‘ hetero-suggestion ’—as alternative, though 
 not necessarily incompatible or mutually exclusive, explana- 
 tions of the immediate source of temptation and sin. 
 
 It is probably not unfair to suggest that, in the sermons 
 and devotional literature of the present day, the question 
 whether, in a given passage, the sudden thrill of an im- 
 pulse condemned by conscience is to be accounted for 
 by the hypothesis of an evil thought arising from within, 
 spontaneously engendered by man’s ‘ fallen’ nature, or by 
 the hypothesis of an evil suggestion communicated by Satan 
 from without, is usually determined by the rhetorical exi- 
 gencies of the context rather than by any strictly scientific 
 criterion. At any rate, whether for this reason or not, it 
 is the case that in such literature the two explanations 
 occur in fairly equal proportions. In the light of this fact, 
 the apparent preference shown by our Lord for that explana- 
 tion of the provenance of sinful thoughts and impulses which 
 attributes them to the activity of Satan is not without 
 significance. The four Gospels, taken together, give us no 
 fewer than twelve separate sayings of this type,! as against 
 
 1 The Dominical sayings in question (we are not concerned with obzier 
 dicta of the Evangelists themselves, such as those in which St. Luke and 
 St. John ascribe the treachery of Judas to the inspiration of Satan) are the 
 following : 
 
 (1) Matt. v. 38: ‘ Whatsoever is more than these’ (‘ Yea’ and ‘ Nay’) 
 is of the Evil One.’ 
 
 (2) Matt. vi. 13: ‘ Deliver us from the Evil One’ in the Lord’s Prayer 
 (but see p. 98, n. 2). 
 
 
 
 ' 
 M 
 t 
 f 
 4 
 t 
 
 — a 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT irr 
 
 the three or four which imply that the seat of evil is within 
 the heart of man. If we read such characteristic logia as 
 the following : 
 
 Straightway cometh Satan, and taketh away the word which 
 hath been sown in them. 
 
 The enemy that sowed them [the tares] is the devil. 
 
 Then goeth <the unclean spirit>, and taketh with himself 
 seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter in and 
 dwell there, and the last state of that man becometh worse than 
 the first. 
 
 Satan asked to have you, that he might sift you as wheat. 
 
 Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father 
 it is your will to do. 
 
 —simultaneously bearing in mind the total absence from 
 our Lord’s discourses of any allusion to the Fall of Adam— 
 and if we assume that, on the whole, the sayings preserved 
 in the Gospels fairly represent not merely the content but 
 
 (3) Matt. xii. 43-45 = Luke xi. 24-36: ‘ When <the unclean spirit> 
 is gone out of the man’... etc. 
 
 (4) Mark iv. 15 = Matt. xiii. 19 = Luke vili. 12: ‘ Straightway cometh 
 Satan, and taketh away the word which hath been sown in them.’ 
 
 (5) Matt. xiii. 38-39 ‘ The enemy that sowed them’ (the tares) ‘ is the 
 devil.’ 
 
 (6) Mark viii. 33 = Matt. xvi. 23 (Peter addressed as ‘ Satan,’ a passage 
 which presumably implies the diabolical origin of mean or unworthy 
 thoughts). 
 
 (7) Luke xxii. 31: ‘Satan asked to have you, that he might sift 
 you as wheat.’ 
 
 (8) John viii. 44: © Ye are of your father the devil . . .’ 
 
 (9) John xii. 31, 
 
 (10) John xiv. 30, and 
 
 (rr) John xvi. 11 (Satan described as ‘ the prince of this world’). 
 
 (12) John xvii. 15: ‘I pray not that thou shouldest take them from 
 the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the Evil One’ (for 
 this translation of €« rod movnpod, see Westcott’s note iu loc.). The five 
 Johannine passages are, of course, quoted not as verbally exact transcripts 
 of individual Dominical Jogia but as generally reliable evidence for the 
 trend of our Lord’s teaching in regard to this matter; see the statement 
 of the position assumed in this section with regard to the Fourth Gospel, 
 supra, p. 101 f. The list includes only sayings which trace the origin of 
 moral evil to Satan ; if physical evil, such as disease, were also in question, 
 the list could be considerably lengthened. The most impressive testi- 
 mony to our Lord’s use of the Satanic hypothesis as the explanation of 
 evil solicitations does not reach us in the form of a ‘ saying’ at all; itis 
 the whole narrative of His own Temptation, which must be derived ulti- 
 mately from Him. 
 
112 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the balance and proportion of His teaching—it is not 
 unreasonable to suggest that we shall find ourselves con- 
 firmed in the conclusion that the Fall-doctrine never re- 
 ceived any explicit sanction from the lips of Christ Himself, 
 such as that which He undoubtedly gave to the belief in 
 the existence and activity of demons. 
 
 It does not follow in the least that He condemned or 
 rejected the Fall-theory: we are justified in presuming 
 that, if He had disapproved of the possible holding of this 
 doctrine by His followers, He would have denounced it in 
 terms so direct and trenchant that they would inevitably 
 have found a place in the primitive collections of His 
 sayings which underlie our present Gospels.1 The argument 
 from the silence of the Gospels is double-edged: it can be 
 used as well to show that Christ did not explicitly condemn 
 the doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin as to show that 
 He did not explicitly approve or promulgate them. But 
 further than this we have no warrant for going. We must 
 for the moment content ourselves with the only conclusion 
 which can safely be based upon the evidence, namely that 
 (to the best of our knowledge) our Lord said nothing either 
 for or against any one of the theories respecting the origin 
 of human sin which in His day prevailed amongst the Jews 
 —save only in so far as a considerable number of His sayings 
 may be taken to sanction the current belief in the existence 
 of personal evil spirits. 
 
 THE ‘ WATCHER’ AND ‘ ADAM’ STORIES 
 IN THE APOSTOLIC WRITINGS 
 
 It would seem, therefore, that the Gospels yield us no 
 information with regard to this interesting question—how 
 
 1 Those who do not admit the assumption made here and also towards 
 the end of the last paragraph must in logic renounce any attempt to grasp 
 or to formulate the teaching of the historical Jesus as a coherent whole. 
 But the validity of this assumption is guaranteed for the vast majority 
 of students of the Life of Christ by the overwhelming impression which 
 His recorded teaching produces of an internal harmony and unity so all- 
 pervasive and satisfying that it cannot be attributed to chance or to sub- 
 sequent redaction. 
 
 a 
 
THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 1713 
 
 was it that Christianity became committed to the Adamic 
 version of the Fall-doctrine rather than to any other of 
 the theories then current ? We must, accordingly, turn for 
 light to the Epistles. The facts disclosed by an examination 
 of these documents may be very simply summarised. The 
 sole authority within the New Testament for the Adam- 
 theory is to be found in the writings of St. Paul. The only 
 passages which can be adduced as embodying this doctrine 
 in one or other of its aspects are certain portions of the 
 5th, 6th, and 7th chapters of the Epistle to the Romans : 
 the exposition of the parallelism between the two Adams, 
 contained in 1 Cor. xv.; and the brief description of the 
 inbred hostility between ‘ flesh’ and ‘spirit’ in Gal. v.+ 
 It will be noticed that these Epistles all belong to the group 
 recognised by Baur and the radical critics of Tibingen as 
 ‘ pillar-Epistles,’ so that we may reasonably consider our- 
 selves dispensed from the preliminary task of vindicating 
 their authenticity : and also that they belong to the same 
 period of the Apostle’s life, the period of the missionary 
 journeys and the Judaistic controversy, so that we need not 
 expect to find any pronounced development or change of 
 opinion within them, and may assume that they express 
 a single, internally harmonious view. The scope of our 
 immediate enquiry is thus fortunately circumscribed and 
 simplified. But it remains true to say that if we confine 
 our attention to the New Testament, St. Paul, rather than 
 Christ, is the teacher on whose authority these Jewish 
 doctrines have descended to the modern world. 
 
 A complete statement, however, of the data on which 
 our judgment must ultimately be based should include the 
 very striking and remarkable fact that, whilst the only 
 
 1 The sentence which has often been quoted from Eph. ii. 3 as a‘ proof- 
 text’ establishing the doctrine of original sin—‘ we . . . were by nature 
 children of wrath’ (yea réxva dvoet dpyis)—is now generally admitted 
 to have no relevance to the matter, and is therefore not mentioned 
 in the text. ‘ By nature’ (¢vce.) means no more than ‘ in ourselves,’ 
 and ‘ children of wrath’ is a Hebraism meaning ‘ objects of the Divine 
 wrath.’ All, therefore, that the text means is that Jews and Gentiles 
 alike, prior to their acceptance of Christianity, were de facto actual sinners 
 and as such deserving of God’s wrath: there is no suggestion of a here- 
 ditarily acquired sinfulness antecedent to actual sin. See J. Armitage 
 Robinson, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, 1909, pp. 50 and 156. 
 
 I 
 
I14 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Fall-theory known to the Pauline corpus is that based upon : 
 
 the story of Gen. iii., the Catholic Epistles present two clear 
 traces of the influence of the Watcher-legend. The Epistle 
 of St. Jude alludes to the ‘ angels which kept not their own 
 principality but left their proper habitation’; these are 
 described by implication as ‘ giving themselves over to 
 fornication and going after strange flesh,’ for which reason 
 they are declared in the true Enochian vein to be ‘ kept 
 in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgment of 
 the great day.’1 And the so-called Second Epistle of Peter, 
 which is generally assigned to the second Christian century, 
 speaks of ‘ the corruption that is in the world through lust ’ 2 
 —that is, the lust of the fallen angels, who are affirmed, 
 as in the Epistle of Jude, to be ‘ cast down to hell and com- 
 mitted to pits of darkness to be reserved unto judgment.’ 3 
 It is a striking testimony to the vitality of the older Fall- 
 theory that a recrudescence of it should be found in a 
 document written more than a century after the beginnings 
 of Christian history. To these traces of the Watcher-story 
 in the non-Pauline Epistles we must add the fact that it 
 appears to have inspired St. Paul’s celebrated injunction 
 that women are to be covered in the church ‘ because of the 
 angels,’ 4 though his loyalty to the Adam-tradition prevents 
 him from making any use of this earlier theory as the 
 explanation of the ultimate origin of sin. 
 
 The situation, therefore, which the Epistles reveal to us 
 as existing within Christianity towards the end of the first 
 generation is this. It is probable that the Watcher-theory, 
 inherited from the Judaism of the second century B.c. 
 through the Book of Enoch and similar works, still lingered 
 in some Jewish-Christian circles. But the Adam-theory, 
 derived from the tradition which expresses itself in Jubilees, 
 2 Enoch, and Wisdom, must have predominated within 
 Jewish Christianity as within non-Christian Judaism. And 
 it would seem to have been the only Fall-theory known 
 within the borders of Gentile Christendom. This latter 
 conclusion, paradoxically enough, can be shown from the 
 small amount of space which is devoted to the subject— 
 a point which needs a word of elucidation. 
 
 RGU 0,17 ie OLer 1 As S02, Petersina as 4 t: Cort to. 
 
 — ee 
 
THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 115 
 
 Nearly seventy years ago Dr. Jowett, in his Commentary 
 on the Epistle to the Romans, suggested that the small 
 amount of space occupied in the New Testament by the 
 texts implying the doctrine of a hereditary sinfulness flowing 
 from Adam constituted a clear proof of the uncertainty and 
 unimportance of this doctrine.t It would seem that in for- 
 mulating this argument Dr. Jowett was still unconsciously 
 dominated by the old artificial conception of Scripture as a 
 systematic handbook of theology, a magazine of proof-texts, 
 in which the importance of a particular subject can be 
 measured by the amount of space devoted to its considera- 
 tion. To-day, however, the interpretation of St. Paul’s 
 writings is largely governed by an entirely contrary 
 principle, which is based upon the psychology of letter- 
 writing, and cannot be better stated than in the words of 
 Professor Kirsopp Lake : 
 
 Treat the Epistles as letters; and recognise that in letters 
 the subjects discussed are not those on which all parties are 
 agreed but those on which there is a difference of opinion ; so 
 that the really central points [of the Christian Faith, that is] 
 are not those which are supported by arguments but those 
 which are assumed as generally believed.? 
 
 Apply this principle to the two Epistles in which the Adamic 
 theory is expressly mentioned, Romans and 1 Corinthians, 
 and a clear result emerges. The problems upon which the 
 Apostle lavishes a wealth of laborious dialectic, of glowing 
 eloquence, or of mordant irony—such questions as the value 
 of faith as compared with works, the function and nature 
 of the Mosaic Law, the constitution of the resurrection body 
 —are precisely those upon which Christian thought is not 
 agreed, and in regard to which St. Paul has to wage a 
 
 1 op. cit. (1855 edn.), p. 162. ‘ How slender is the foundation in the 
 New Testament for the doctrine of Adam’s sin being imputed to his pos- 
 terity !’ (but it seems clear that Dr. Jowett is thinking not merely of 
 ‘ Original Guilt’ but also of ‘ Original Sin’) ‘ two passages in St. Paul at 
 most, and these of uncertain interpretation. The little cloud, no bigger 
 than a man’s hand, has covered the heavens. To reduce such subjects 
 to their proper proportions we should consider: First, what space they 
 occupy tn Scripture’ .. . (italics ours), etc. 
 
 2 Earlier Epistles of St. Paul, p. 424, 
 
116 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 stubborn fight for the triumph of his own view. But 
 behind this array of hotly disputed questions it is easy to 
 discern a solid nucleus of generally accepted ideas, or what 
 St. Paul assumes to be such, which only come to the surface 
 of his thought as it were accidentally, in unpremeditated 
 interjections or passing allusions; or, if designedly men- 
 tioned, are adduced, not as subjects of discussion, but as 
 universally admitted premises to be used for the establish- 
 ment of further truth. And to this residuum of beliefs 
 which the Apostle assumes to be common ground to himself 
 and his readers, it would appear that the Fall-doctrine 
 belongs, precisely because of the cursory and casual nature 
 of the allusions which are made to it. In neither of these 
 Epistles does St. Paul make any attempt to prove the Adamic 
 theory: on the contrary, he takes it for granted, in paren- 
 theses and obiter dicta, as though it were a matter about 
 which there was admittedly no dispute, and uses it to support 
 or illustrate some further position—the universality of grace 
 or the logical necessity for a resurrection. Nor is there any 
 reason for supposing that Rome and Corinth were peculiar 
 in this regard amongst the churches of the Gentile-Christian 
 world. In the Roman letter, indeed, the Apostle’s quiet 
 assumption of these ideas as indisputable truths is specially 
 impressive in view of the fact that the Roman Christians 
 were not his own converts and (at the time when he wrote 
 to them) had never seen him in the flesh. If, therefore, the 
 exegetical canon formulated by Professor Kirsopp Lake be 
 valid, we are entitled to conclude that the Adamic Fall- 
 doctrine was generally accepted throughout the churches of 
 the Uncircumcision. 
 
 It would save us some time and trouble at a later stage - 
 
 in the enquiry ! if we could accept the principle that what 
 St. Paul takes for granted and does not labour to prove must 
 have been explicitly accepted by the totality of his readers, 
 au pied de la lettre. But I must needs think that Professor 
 Lake has, in the passage quoted, phrased the principle 
 rather too absolutely, and that, in an unqualified form, it is 
 as unreliable an instrument of interpretation as the opposite 
 
 1 See’ Lecture LV; *p.1177 ff. 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 117 
 
 maxim which it has superseded, and of which we cited a 
 characteristic expression from Dr. Jowett. As it stands, 
 it ignores the fact that a man of masterful character and 
 intense conviction, such as was St. Paul, is often prone to 
 assume that his hearers, or readers, consciously agree with 
 him, when in point of fact they are merely not prepared to 
 contradict him. It appears to me that Professor Lake’s 
 principle must be somewhat modified in the light of this 
 psychological law, and that the utmost which can be safely 
 inferred from St. Paul’s confident assumption of the Adam- 
 doctrine is that no other theory of the origin of evil was in 
 possession of the Gentile-Christian field at the time when he 
 wrote. It is possible that some Corinthian and Roman 
 Christians, who were by birth Hellenistic Jews or had been 
 “God-fearers,) may have already been in possession of a 
 belief in the Adamic theory, as the result of a study of 
 Ben-Sirach, or the Book of Wisdom, but that we cannot 
 tell ; it is also possible that many of those who had been 
 converted directly from paganism to Christianity had never 
 given a thought to the question of the ultimate origin of 
 evil at all. The facility with which St. Paul assumes the 
 Adam-theory merely proves that it was self-evident for 
 him; so far as the Gentile-Christian world is concerned, 
 we cannot infer more from his language than that no other 
 theory was a serious rival to it. 
 
 It would seem, then, that when St. Paul wrote 1 Cor. 
 and Rom., rather less than thirty years after the death of 
 Christ, the Adamic Fall-doctrine existed within the Christian 
 Church. But it can hardly be said as yet to have been 
 universally and consciously accepted by the Christian 
 Church as such; there is some evidence which suggests 
 that its older rival, the Watcher-theory, still lingered in 
 Jewish-Christian circles, and it is possible that many Gentile 
 Christians may, at this early date, never have heard of it. 
 The question as to the effects produced on Christian thought 
 by St. Paul’s unhesitating adoption of this doctrine in the 
 two Epistles just mentioned must be reserved for discussion 
 in our next Lecture.1 There is no trace in the New Testa- 
 ment of the Rabbinical view that the bias towards evil 
 
 SDE GOik: 
 
118 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 is not inherited, but freshly implanted by God in every 
 individual at birth.t 
 
 A SUGGESTED THEORY REGARDING THE PASSAGE OF THE 
 FALL-DOCTRINE FROM JUDAISM INTO CHRISTIANITY 
 
 It must be observed, however, that this general and 
 preliminary review of the Epistles has by no means solved, 
 but rather accentuated, the problem of the precise way in 
 which the Fall-doctrine passed over from Judaism into 
 Christianity. In view of the solemnity with which St. Paul 
 assures his Corinthian converts ‘ I received of the Lord that 
 which I also handed on to you,’? the question becomes more 
 insistent than ever, How could the Apostle have taken these 
 doctrines for granted, especially in writing to Christians 
 whom he had never seen, if they had not direct Dominical 
 authority behind them? It would be a counsel of despair 
 to suggest that Christ must have given instruction, of which 
 no record has survived, on these mysterious subjects during 
 the ‘Great Forty Days’ which intervened between His 
 Resurrection and Ascension. We must frankly admit that 
 the process by which the Fall-doctrine, or rather one parti- 
 cular version of it, was inherited by the Christian Church 
 from its Jewish mother is involved in some obscurity, and 
 that we are moving in the realms of speculation ; but, if we 
 bear in mind the fact that Christianity was conceived by 
 its earliest adherents, not as a new religion intended to 
 compete with Judaism, but rather as an improved form of 
 Judaism—improved, that is, by the knowledge of the identity 
 of the Messiah and the consciousness of the possession of 
 the Spirit—it will not be difficult to frame a hypothesis 
 which will amply account both for the silence of our Lord 
 and for the confidence of St. Paul in regard to the Adamic 
 doctrine of the origin of human sin. 
 
 1 James i. 13, 14 (‘ God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself 
 tempteth no man; but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by 
 his own lust [é€mv@uyia] and enticed’) may represent a Jewish-Christian 
 attempt to retain the general idea of the yé¢er ha-ra‘ whilst repudiating 
 
 the belief that its evil nature is due to God. 
 Re COrs Xi 29)s C7 als0) 1) COL RV 53. 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 119 
 
 Such a hypothesis, it seems to me, may reasonably be 
 founded upon the fact that the original birthplace of 
 Christianity, the scene of our Lord’s childhood, youth, and 
 early manhood, the principal theatre of His public labours 
 and the home of eleven of His apostles,t was Galilee. The 
 remoteness of Galilee from the official centre of Judaism 
 at Jerusalem, and perhaps the genial and smiling aspect 
 of external nature, tended to develop amongst its sturdy 
 peasantry a freer and more imaginative type of piety than 
 that which prevailed in the neighbourhood of the capital, 
 under the shadow of the Temple and the Rabbinical schools, 
 upon the bare, rugged hills of Judaea ; and it is known that 
 the religiously outcast stratum of Jewry, contemptuously 
 described as the ‘am ha-’drec, the ‘ people of the earth,’ 
 whose manual avocations debarred them from the full 
 observance of the Law, lay thick amongst the population 
 of this northern province. The assertion sometimes made, 
 that the pseudepigrapha, and the apocalyptic genre of 
 thought which they illustrate, were especially popular in 
 Galilee cannot, indeed, be proved, but, in view of the circum- 
 stances just mentioned, it would seem to be highly probable ; 
 and Christianity itself must have at first appeared to be, 
 even if in fact it was not, a movement for hastening the 
 eschatological cataclysm which this literature had, with 
 such a wealth of lurid imagery, described. Nothing, 
 therefore, could be more natural than that the rough fisher- 
 men and artisans who were the first to follow our Lord 
 should have known and cared little about the learned 
 speculations of the great scholars and divines of Jerusalem 
 with regard to the yéger ha-va‘; nor is it less natural that, 
 with minds steeped in the apocalyptic literature, they should 
 have carried on into the new movement the ideas about a 
 
 1 Kerioth, the birthplace of Judas, was in the Negeb of Judaea. See 
 Hastings DB. s.v. Kerioth. 
 
 2 For a description of the religious state of Galilee in the days of 
 Christ, bringing out the theological and other differences between Galilean 
 and Judaean piety, see A. Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah 
 (1901 edn.), i. 223 ff. Cf. also E. Schirer, History of the Jewish People 
 (E. tr. 1893), ii. 1, pp. 3-5; A.C. Headlam, Life and Teaching of Jesus 
 Christ (1923), pp. 110 ff., and the works there referred to; A. Neubauer, 
 
 Géographie du Talmud (1868), pp. 177-233, and Merrill, Galilee in the Time 
 of Christ (1885). 
 
120 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 primitive catastrophe and a consequent inherited corrup- 
 tion which they had imbibed from Enoch, the Book of 
 Jubilees, or the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. 
 Indeed, it is difficult to see any reason why they should have 
 exchanged these ideas for others, in default of explicit 
 instruction on the subject by the Master Himself. The 
 only assumption, therefore, that need be made in order to 
 obtain a satisfactory explanation of the passage of the Fall- 
 doctrine from Judaism into Christianity is the very simple 
 assumption which, as we have seen, is amply consistent 
 with, if not necessitated by, the evidence of the Gospels— 
 namely, that our Lord abstained from taking any steps to 
 eradicate this belief from the minds of His disciples; in 
 other words, that He tacitly acquiesced in the continued 
 existence within His movement of the ideas of a ‘ Fall’ of 
 some kind and of a hereditary corruption derived from it. 
 If this hypothesis be correct—and I do not know of any 
 other which covers all the facts—it would follow that these 
 doctrines are not altogether devoid of Dominical sanction ; 
 they must be deemed to enjoy at least such a measure of 
 approbation as is involved in the fact of deliberate toleration. 
 At any rate we may assume that the Twelve and the Galilean 
 nucleus of the primitive community would continue to take 
 the Fall-conception for granted, because they had no reason 
 for not doing so. 
 
 The newly converted Saul would thus find himself 
 introduced into a community of which the leaders were 
 Galileans, and therefore presumably believers in the Fall- 
 theory. What his pre-Christian ideas on the subject of the 
 origin of sin had been it is impossible to tell; he was doubt- 
 less familiar with the Rabbinical stories about the disastrous 
 physical consequences of Adam’s sin, and he may well have 
 learnt ‘at the feet of Gamaliel’ the doctrine of the evil 
 yécgey, an idea which, as we shall later see, the Apostle Paul 
 did not altogether discard. But it is reasonable to assume 
 that after his conversion he received some instruction in 
 the essential ideas underlying the Christian movement, 
 whether from Ananias and the Christians of Damascus, or 
 at a later stage from the original Twelve. If, then, he found 
 that the Fall-doctrine was very generally assumed in the 
 
 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT rar 
 
 society which he had entered, that it was held by those who 
 had known the Lord in the flesh, and that, if not strictly 
 part of the Gospel, it was tacitly assumed as part of the 
 setting of the Gospel, by many or most of those who ‘ seemed 
 to be pillars,’ it would be the most natural thing in the 
 world that he should himself adopt it without question, and 
 use it in at least two of his letters as though it were an 
 axiomatic truth undisputed by any Christian. 
 
 The passage of the Fall-doctrine into Christianity may 
 thus be considered to have been provisionally accounted 
 for. But we have still to explain the immensely greater 
 popularity, which ultimately became an exclusive dominance, 
 within the Church of the Adamic theory of the Fall as con- 
 trasted with the Angel-theory. It is clear that, as we have 
 said, our Lord gave His followers no guidance whatever on 
 this subject ; even if we suppose, as suggested above, that 
 He consciously permitted a germinal theory of ‘ original 
 sin’ to pass on into Christianity, it would seem that He left 
 His Church to choose for itself between the two traditional 
 Fall-stories. If we assume that the Epistle of St. Jude 
 really comes from the pen of one of the Lord’s ‘ brethren,’ 
 this supposition receives an almost startling confirmation : 
 for the passage which we have already cited (v. 6) (cf. v. 14) 
 would then prove that the inspiration of the Book of Enoch 
 —and strongly suggest that the ‘angelic’ theory of the 
 Fall—was accepted within Christ’s own family circle, pre- 
 sumably without any protest on His part. But we have 
 seen in Lecture I, that by the beginning of the Christian era 
 the Adam-story had already attained to a position of pre- 
 dominance over its earlier rival, even within the Jewish 
 Church ; and, if any further reason be required at this stage 
 for its later triumph within Christianity, it may plausibly 
 be suggested that the deciding factor was the personal 
 influence of St. Paul himself. We may well believe that the 
 great Apostle’s keen spiritual and ethical perceptions were 
 revolted by the unedifying emphasis laid on sexual sin by 
 
 “the Watcher-story, especially as expanded in the Book of 
 Enoch, and that its eventual dispossession in favour of the 
 more austere and elevated Adam-story was not the least of the 
 services which his genius rendered to the Christian Church. 
 
122 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 We need not be deterred from attributing the final 
 expulsion of the Watcher-theory from Christianity to the 
 influence of St. Paul by the fact that he makes one, or, if 
 the Pastoral Epistles be reckoned as completely Pauline, 
 two allusions to a theory which is even more liable than the 
 Watcher-story to the objection just mentioned, that is, the 
 theory which exempts Adam from all responsibility for the 
 Fall and finds the source of evil in a physical pollution or 
 inquinamentum communicated to Eve by the tempter. The 
 first and most certainly Pauline of these allusions is that 
 contained in 2 Cor. xi. 2, 3: ‘I am jealous over you witha 
 godly jealousy: for I espoused you to one husband, that 
 I might present you as a pure virgin to Christ. But I fear 
 lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve in his crafti- 
 ness, your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity 
 and the purity that is toward Christ.’ If these two verses 
 be considered together, the underlying thought is not 
 difficult to discern. The second is that contained in 1 Tim. 
 il. 14, in which the author gives as the reason for his objec- 
 tion to women preachers the statement that ‘ Adam was 
 first formed, then Eve; and Adam was not beguiled, but 
 the woman being beguiled hath fallen into transgression.’ + 
 It is noticeable that the word translated ‘ beguile ’ (é€azarav) 
 is the same in both passages, being doubtless used with a 
 certain implied nuance, very much like the English word 
 ‘seduce.’ 2 Even if, however, we assume that both these 
 passages alike come from the lips of St. Paul, there can be 
 no doubt that nothing is further from his mind than the idea 
 of seriously employing this unpleasant piece of haggadic 
 mythology as the basis of his doctrine of sin: these two 
 allusions to it are of the most cursory nature, conceived in 
 the spirit of Philonic allegorism, and are merely intended 
 to sharpen the literary form of his moral and practical 
 exhortations. 
 
 1 For a full discussion of these passages, see H. St. John Thackeray, 
 The Relation of St. Paul to Contemporary Jewish Thought, cc. ii. iii. 
 (Pp. 50-57). 
 
 2 The use of this verb was, no doubt, suggested primarily by Gen. iii. 
 13, LXX—o dds jrarynoév pe, kal Edayor. But it is significant that 
 anmaradv is twice at least used by LXX as =‘ seduce,’ in the narrower 
 sense of the term (Exod. xxii. 16; Judith xii. 16). 
 
 
 
 
 
 ee ee eee 
 
 Se 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 123 
 
 THE PAULINE DOCTRINE. (a) THE FALL 
 
 The foregoing observations have, it may be hoped, 
 explained—so far as it is possible to explain—the transit of 
 the Fall-doctrine, and particularly of its Adamic form, from 
 the Jewish into the Christian Church. We now approach 
 a second and no less important task, that of examining the 
 classical Pauline passages, with the object of reconstructing 
 in detail what may be called the most primitive systematic 
 presentation of the doctrine within Christianity; it is 
 doubtless unnecessary to prove at length that the results of 
 this enquiry must, in the nature of the case, have the most 
 vital bearing upon our ultimate definition, of ‘ that which 
 has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.’ 
 
 The earliest passage in the Pauline writings which 
 refers to Adam’s Fall is 1 Cor. xv. 21, 22: 
 
 21. For since by man came death, by man came also the 
 resurrection of the dead. 
 
 22. For asin Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made 
 alive. 
 
 (The second allusion to Adam which occurs in the same 
 celebrated chapter, vv. 45-49, does not refer to his trans- 
 gression, but only to his ‘ okie ’ (buxekds, Which may 
 be roughly translated ‘animal’) or ‘earthy’ (yoikds) 
 nature or constitution—a nature which, it is implied, was 
 given him at his creation,! and cannot therefore be regarded 
 as a consequence of the Fall. These latter verses, accord- 
 ingly, are irrelevant to the subject of our enquiry, and need 
 not be further discussed.) 
 
 The two verses 2I, 22 quoted above do not raise the 
 question of hereditary sinfulness, and deal solely with the 
 origin of physical death. This is asserted to be a direct con- 
 sequence of Adam’s sin. The phrase ‘since by man came 
 
 1 Verse 45: ‘So also, it is written, The first man Adam became a 
 living soul’ (éyévero . . . ets uyiv CSoav, quoted from Gen. ii. 7, LXX). 
 Itis worth noting that the almost contemptuous terms in which the Apostle 
 speaks of the first Adam’s constitution, as ‘ earthy’ and merely ‘* psychic’ 
 or animal, suggest that he cannot have held any exalted doctrine of 
 ‘ Original Perfection’ or ‘ Righteousness.’ 
 
124 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 death ’ (v. 21) must refer to some one specific event marking 
 the entry of death into the world, and this event can hardly 
 be anything other than the primal transgression. And the 
 words ‘ in Adam ’ (v. 22), modelled as they are on the pattern 
 of the great phrase ‘ in Christ,’ 1 which pervades the Pauline 
 writings from the earliest to the latest, cannot mean less 
 than ‘ by virtue of their organic union or continuity with 
 Adam,’ that is, in other words, ‘ by virtue of their descent 
 from him.’ This passage, therefore, asserts that physical 
 mortality is a universal hereditary consequence of Adam’s 
 Fall. It will, however, be seen at once that this position 
 does not go beyond that of the Wisdom of Solomon (‘ by the 
 envy of the devil death entered into the world,’ ii. 24), 
 a book with which St. Paul may well have been familiar? ; it 
 appears to be assumed by the Apostle as by Pseudo-Solomon, 
 that Adam was created, and but for his Fall would have 
 remained, in a condition of immortality. To ascertain St. 
 Paul's beliefs with regard to the ethical and psychological 
 results of the Fall, we must turn to the Epistle to the Romans, 
 which contains the palmary texts or loc classict upon which 
 the whole subsequent development of the Fall-doctrine 
 within Christianity has been founded. 
 
 The first and most crucial of these texts is the celebrated 
 passage Rom. v. 12-21, round the interpretation of which 
 controversy has raged continuously, at least from the days 
 of Origen onwards. In studying these obscure and tangled 
 sentences we must bear in mind the fact that St. Paul is 
 dictating his letter to the Roman Church; that dictation 
 to a stenographer, although an easy and rapid method of 
 composition, involves the inconvenience of inability to see 
 at a glance what has just been dictated; and that con- 
 sequently, in dictated prose, sentences are liable to remain 
 incomplete, subordinate clauses are left hanging in the air 
 with no principal sentence on which to depend, and essential 
 
 1 On this phrase see Deissmann, Die neutestamentliche Formel tn 
 Christo Jesu, Marburg, 1892, and the note in Sanday and Headlam, 
 ICC., Epistle to the Romans, on Rom. vi. 11. 
 
 2 Cf. the note in Sanday and Headlam, Romans (1905 edn.), pp. 267 ff. : 
 ‘ The relation of St. Paul’s argument in chap. ix. to the Book of Wisdom’ ; 
 and above, Lecture I, p. 29, n. 4, for the various dates which have been 
 suggested for the composition of Wisdom. 
 
 es 8 
 
 a 
 
 S pl ie iy ans 
 
 ——. ne eee ae 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 125 
 
 links of thought are apt to remain in the author’s mind and 
 never to appear on paper at all. Ordinarily such blemishes 
 are remedied by a careful revision of the stenographer’s 
 copy ; but the frequent anacolutha and inconcinnities which 
 abound in St. Paul’s letters make it clear that he had no 
 time for the processes of grammatical, stylistic or logical 
 polishing, and that he usually contented himself with scrawl- 
 ing a final personal message, in the large letters which may 
 have been necessitated by defective eyesight,! at the end 
 of Tertius’ manuscript, which was forthwith despatched, 
 unrevised, to its destination. In order, therefore, to recon- 
 struct in its fullness the series of ideas lying behind a difficult 
 passage such as this, our exegesis must be prepared to supply 
 a certain number of missing members by the judicious use 
 of conjectural restoration. 
 
 It will be convenient to consider the passage in two 
 divisions (a) vv. 12-14 and (0) vv. 15-21; the first of these 
 may now be given at length. 
 
 12. Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the 
 world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all 
 men, for that all sinned : 
 
 13. For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not 
 
 imputed where there isnolaw. | 
 
 14. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam unto Moses, even 
 over them that had not? sinned after the likeness of Adam’s 
 
 transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come. 
 
 It is clear from the context that St. Paul, when he began 
 this section, had no idea of writing a formal dissertation on 
 
 1 Cf. Gal. vi. 11: tSere myAixous buitv ypdupacu Eypapa TH Euh xeupl. 
 
 2 The argument developed in the text depends upon the retention 
 of this ‘ not’ (u) ; which has the all but unanimous testimony of the 
 Greek MSS. behind it, and appears in TR., Vulg., WH., and RV. But 
 there is some authority for its omission : Prof. Souter’s note (in his critical 
 edition of the Revisers’ Greek Testament) runs as follows: p7 om. 424* * 
 al. pauc. ‘IL (vt.d *) Orig. (Tert. Cypr. Victorin.) codd. uetusti ap. Ambst., 
 quos sequitur ipse, codd. plur. ap. Aug., qui omnes uel fere omnes om. etiam 
 kat. It will be noted that, with the exception of Origen, the corrector 
 of 424, and the text of three other cursives, these authorities are all Latin. 
 We may appeal with confidence to the maxim difficilior lectio potior in 
 support of 7, as its omission (by making all who died between Adam and 
 Moses guilty of actual sin) might easily have been thought by an unin- 
 telligent scribe or translator to simplify the passage ; whereas its insertion 
 into a text which did not contain it would be psychologically inexplicable. 
 
126 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the Fall; he may indeed have had no definite intention 
 even of touching upon it. The first eleven verses of c. v. 
 are of a purely practical and hortatory character, designed 
 to impress upon his Roman readers the duty of cultivating 
 in themselves dispositions of hope, interior peace, and 
 confidence in God, and appealing to the immediate con- 
 sciousness (which he assumes to be possessed by all Christians) 
 of redemption through the atoning Blood of Christ and 
 sanctification by the indwelling Spirit, as the all-sufficient 
 logical ground of these virtues. It then occurs to him that 
 the parallel between the first and the second Adams, the 
 natural and the spiritual heads of the race, which (as we 
 have just seen) he has already employed in I Cor. xv. to 
 establish the congruity of an eschatological resurrection, 
 may at this point be effectively re-used, in order to enhance 
 the glories of Christ’s saving work by momentarily opposing 
 to them the sombre consequences of Adam’s Fall, and so to 
 deepen in the minds of his readers the sense of Redemption 
 as a solid and reasonable basis for Christian confidence and 
 peace. He accordingly begins his next sentence (v. 12) 
 ‘ Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, 
 and death through sin,’ intending doubtless to supply the 
 words ‘so also through one man righteousness came into 
 the world, and through righteousness life,’ or some similar 
 phrase, to serve as its principal clause. Unfortunately, 
 however, for the structure and symmetry of his sentence— 
 though fortunately for our comprehension of his theology 
 of sin—having once raised the question of the connexion 
 between death and sin, he cannot resist the temptation to 
 insert a parenthetic explanation of it into the ‘as’ clause; 
 one idea brings up another by the chain of inevitable associa- 
 tion, and the parenthesis expands to such a length that it 
 overpowers the ‘ as ’ clause, and drives the principal sentence 
 for the time being entirely out of his mind. What had, 
 therefore, been intended merely as a passing allusion to the 
 contrast between the typical acts of Adam and Christ and 
 their respective consequences becomes in effect a short 
 excursus on the subject of the Fall. For the immediate 
 purpose of our enquiry we may neglect the disordered syn- 
 
 tactical structure of these three verses, and treat their 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 127 
 
 contents as a series of detached propositions which, taken 
 together, will reveal to us in its main aspects the doctrinal 
 idea which is in the Apostle’s mind. 
 
 Examined in this way, the first two affirmations con- 
 tained in v. 12 do not seem to present any: difficulty. Sin 
 entered into the world (presumably from some external 
 source, which may be identified with Satan or the serpent 
 of Gen. iil.) through the transgression of Adam. Simul- 
 taneously physical death entered into the world as an 
 inseparable concomitant of sin. So far all is plain sailing. 
 
 With the third affirmation we begin to get into difficul- 
 ties. The Apostle continues ‘ And thus’ (that is, in con- 
 sequence of the Fall) ‘ death passed abroad unto all men,’ 
 in other words, was distributed or disseminated like a 
 plague amongst all men, ‘ because all sinned’ (e¢’ & mavres 
 yjpaptov).1 These words bring us to the central crux of 
 this difficult passage. In what sense does he mean that all 
 men ‘sinned’? Does he mean that, when Adam sinned, 
 all men constructively or potentially sinned 7m him, because 
 they were all contained in his loins at the moment when he 
 sinned ? or, that in subsequent centuries all men actually 
 did commit wrongful acts, thereby imitating the first man, 
 although they were in no way obliged or hereditarily inclined 
 to sin ? or is his fundamental thought merely this, that all 
 men were in some vague sense “ sinful,’ in virtue of having 
 a tendency to sin within them? The next verse (13) will 
 throw light on this problem. 
 
 The Apostle has just stated, with bald simplicity, that 
 all Adam’s descendants ‘sinned.’ He has no_ sooner 
 dictated these words than a difficulty occurs to his mind, 
 arising out of one of his own leading ideas, namely, the 
 correlative connexion of ‘sin’ and ‘law.’ He naturally 
 assumes that the essence of ‘ sin ’ lies in the conscious trans- 
 gression of God’s law? ; and when (as here) the influences 
 
 1 It is sufficient to refer to Sanday and Headlam, JCC., note in loc., 
 for proofs that the phrase éd’ # simply means ‘ because.’ For remarks 
 on Ambrosiaster’s misunderstanding of the inaccurate Latin rendering 
 in quo, see Lecture IV, p. 308. 
 
 fae Out. 1. 23, 25.11. vil. 16,22 f° 1: Lim, 1.8 ff. This assumption 
 is formulated in so many words by the author of the First Johannine 
 Epistle : 7 dyapria éoriv 4 dvopla (iii. 4). 
 
128 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of his Jewish ancestry and education are uppermost in his 
 mind, ‘ God’s law’ for him becomes identified with the 
 concrete historical Law promulgated by Moses. The 
 question is therefore inevitably raised ‘ What about the 
 people who lived between Adam and Moses ? ’—that is, 
 between the ‘ Fall’ and the giving of the Térah, or—as we 
 might express it in rough figures based upon the Old Testa- 
 ment chronology, which St. Paul, of course, took for granted 
 —between 5000 and 1200 B.c. ‘ They all died,’ he reflects, 
 ‘therefore, they must have sinned in some sense’ (death 
 and sin being inseparably connected) : ‘ and yet they cannot 
 have sinned in the stvict sense of the term—they cannot 
 have sinned in the precise way in which Adam sinned ’ 
 (‘ after the likeness of Adam’s transgression ’) ‘ by wilfully 
 breaking a known commandment, because, prior to the 
 publication of the Decalogue, there was ex hypothesi no 
 commandment for them to break. No law, no sin. In 
 what sense, therefore, can the post-Adamic but pre-Mosaic 
 generations be said to have “ sinned ”’ ? ’ 
 
 To us at the present day the difficulty will doubtless 
 appear entirely unreal, because we do not accept its root- 
 assumption that a person who has never heard of Exodus xx. 
 can have no idea of the moral law: but it is real enough 
 for St. Paul. He is not, however, at a loss for a solution. 
 If we may judge by the general tenor of the verses which 
 follow (15-21), the answer to the problem which shapes 
 itself in the Apostle’s mind is, that during the pre-Mosaic 
 period the human race, though incapable of committing 
 “sin ’ in the strict sense of the term, was nevertheless fene- 
 trated and infected by the miasma of a vague and undefined 
 abstract “ sinfulness.’ It would seem, in other words, that 
 he invokes in his own thoughts the conception of ‘ original 
 sin, in what the sequel will show to have been a somewhat 
 nebulous form, in order to explain the universal domination 
 of death at an epoch when, according to the Jewish view of 
 the Decalogue as the sole embodiment of the moral law, 
 
 1 A similar puzzle with regard to the good deeds of virtuous Gentiles, 
 based upon the assumption that Gentiles as dvopou, 7.e. ignorant of the 
 Torah, must be zpso facto non-moral and incapable of meritorious action, 
 is discussed in c. ii. 12-15. 
 
 a eS, ee ae Se oe ee ee ene eee 
 
 - —— 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 129 
 
 ‘actual sin’ did not and could not exist. ‘ Until the Law 
 sin (= “ original sin ’’) was in the world’ ; that is, the soul 
 of man is conceived, as having suffered, before the giving 
 of the Torah, from a kind of ‘ suppressed sinfulness,’ much 
 as his body may suffer from a latent fever or imposthume. 
 This conception, however, remains for the time being in 
 the Apostle’s mind, and only reveals itself by degrees in the 
 following section (vv. 15-21). At the moment, it occurs to 
 him that he is in danger of being drawn into the quagmire 
 of an interminable discussion as to whether ‘ sin’ which is 
 merely an unconscious state really is sin or not; and he 
 consequently extricates himself from this perilous ground 
 as rapidly as possible. He hastily drops the whole problem 
 of the moral condition of pre-Mosaic mankind, leaving the 
 complicated string of clauses which he has begun in v. 12 as 
 a hopeless anacoluthon, and reverts to the main thought 
 from which he has been drawn aside by these subtle specula- 
 tions, so that (in the course of vv. 15-19) the ‘as’ clause 
 which begins v. 12 receives in substance, though not in form, 
 the principal sentence with which he has forgotten to provide 
 it. The abruptness of the transition, and the mutilated 
 shape of the argument contained in vv. 12-14, leading up 
 as it does to a conclusion which is not spoken, but only 
 formulated in thought, will be graphically represented if we 
 employ the modern typographical device of inserting a row 
 of dots between the end of v. 14 and the beginning of v. 15. 
 “ Death reigned from Adam unto Moses, even over them that 
 had not sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression, 
 who is a figure of him that was to come. . . . But not as 
 the trespass,’ etc. If we assume that in the parenthesis 
 which begins with v. 13 St. Paul is not really arguing with 
 anyone in particular, but only thinking aloud, it will be 
 easy to see that the dots stand for an unspoken thought, 
 which may be formulated as follows : 
 
 ‘ The solution, of course, lies in the fact that though the 
 pre-Mosaic generations could not commit sinful acts, they 
 were hereditarily constituted in a sinful state. But the 
 question how a mere “ state,’ acquired by birth and not 
 by the individual’s personal act, can be “ sinful,’”’ is too 
 abstruse to be discussed now : I will therefore return to the 
 
 K 
 
 9) 
 
130 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 point from which I started, the parallelism between the 
 first Adam and the last.’ 
 
 This parallelism is now expounded in a series of com- 
 parisons and contrasts, the verbal expression of which, 
 however, is compressed by the seething uprush of the 
 Apostle’s thought into a highly elliptical form which does 
 not conduce to lucidity. It will be, once more, well to 
 give the passage at length: I will, however, at this point 
 desert the English Revised Version, and print a somewhat 
 paraphrastic version of my own, in order to minimise its 
 obscurity and render detailed commentary as far as possible 
 unnecessary : 
 
 15. But the bounty procured by Christ’s atonement is not 
 in all points analogous to the sorrowful legacy of Adam’s trans- 
 gression. By the transgression of the one Adam mankind 
 in its myriads died; but the kindness? of God, and the gift 
 won by the kindness of the one Man, Jesus Messiah, have re- 
 dounded to the welfare of mankind in its myriads ? in infinitely 
 greater measure. 
 
 16. And the boon of salvation is not exactly parallel to the 
 disastrous achievement of the one individual who sinned; for 
 God’s Judgment began from the one (Adam) and ended in 
 (universal) condemnation, whilst His free gift began with the 
 myriad offences which called it forth, and has ended in (poten- 
 tially universal) acquittal. 
 
 17. It is true that by the transgression of the one individual 
 death became king of mankind, through the instrumentality 
 of that one individual; but much more shall they who are 
 receiving the abundance of God’s kindness and of His gift of 
 
 righteousness reign as kings in life eternal through the one Man 
 Jesus Messiah. 
 
 18. So then, as the first process, that of the propagation of 
 sin, began from one transgression, infected all men, and involved 
 them in universal condemnation, in like manner the second 
 process, that of salvation, began from one verdict of acquittal, 
 is designed to diffuse its beneficent operations amongst all men, 
 and leads to God’s acquittal, which brings life. 
 
 1 Gr. xdpis : on this word, usually translated ‘ grace,’ see below, 
 Pp. 233,07. 
 
 2 Gr. ot woAdol, ‘ the many,’ that is, the human race considered in its 
 multiplicity. The AV. rendering ‘ many’ (without ‘ the’) is a mistrans- 
 lation, which has been abused to support the Calvinistic doctrine of 
 ‘ particular redemption.’ 
 
 ee ee ee 
 
 ’. - ee a 
 
 —— 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 1331 
 
 19. For as through the disobedience of the one man the 
 myriads of mankind were constituted (xareord@yoay) sinners, 
 so also through the obedience of that other One Man the myriads 
 of mankind shall be constituted righteous. 
 
 20. And Law came into the process of human history as an 
 afterthought, in order that the transgression might be multiplied ; 
 but where sin was multiplied, God’s kindness superabounded, 
 
 21. In order that, as sin reigned in a world penetrated by 
 death, so also the Divine favour might reign by means of right- 
 eousness, leading men on to life eternal, through Jesus Messiah 
 our Lord. 
 
 We need not follow this complicated passage through all 
 the changes which it rings upon the phrases ‘ the one’ and 
 ‘the many,’ now comparing and now contrasting ‘ the one 
 man, Adam, and ‘the many’ who were injured by his 
 fault, ‘the one man’ Jesus Messiah, and ‘the many’ who 
 reap the benefits of His Atonement. A broad general view 
 of it is enough to show that here, at last, we have in fully 
 developed shape, albeit stated without any scholastic pre- 
 ciseness of definition, that momentous doctrine of the Fall 
 and the Redemption as correlative conceptions, as twin 
 pillars bearing up the fabric of Christian soteriology, which 
 we saw in Lecture I to be distinctive of the orthodox or 
 traditional presentation of our religion. It is clear that the 
 transgression of Adam is conceived as standing in a causal 
 relation to the subsequent death, sin, and condemnation of 
 his descendants—nothing less than this can be meant by 
 the word kareora@ycav (‘ were constituted’) in v. I9— 
 though the exact nature of the link between this primal 
 cause and its multitudinous effects is not expressly indicated. 
 But we have already gathered from our consideration of 
 I Cor. xv. 22, which may be regarded as a preliminary 
 sketch or Vorstudie for this extended exposition of the 
 idea of the two Adams, that St. Paul believed physical 
 mortality to be a hereditary consequence of the first 
 Adam’s fault; if, then, death and sin are inseparable 
 associates (as is implied all through vv. 12-14), the Apostle 
 must have held that sin also—in the vague sense of in- 
 herent sinfulness or propensity towards evil—is hereditarily 
 transmitted. 
 
 This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that the last 
 
132 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 two verses of this chapter (20, 21) are most easily explicable 
 in accordance with the hypothesis adumbrated above, 
 in connexion with vv. 12-14—namely, that the conception 
 which is struggling for expression in St. Paul’s mind is that 
 of a hereditary disease, somehow introduced into the human 
 stock by Adam’s sin, existing in a suppressed form in the 
 pre-Mosiac generations, but since the promulgation of the 
 Decalogue manifesting itself in a perpetual irritation and 
 stimulus towards wrong-doing. For, we are told in a 
 brilliant and audacious paradox, the Law came in as an 
 ‘episode,’ an afterthought, a temporary expedient which 
 would not have been needed had there been no Fall, in order 
 that the transgression might abound (v. 20) ; in other words, 
 the Ten Commandments were given precisely in order that 
 they might be broken as much and as often as possible. 
 And this multiplication of actual sins was divinely ordained 
 in order that God’s kindness might abound, that is to say, 
 in order that God might be moved to bestow upon mankind 
 the gift of redemption and the reign of divine kindness 
 through Jesus Messiah our Lord. 
 
 Whatever may be thought of this attempt to describe 
 in human language the providential processes of the Mind 
 of God, the doctrine of Man and of sin which underlies the 
 whole passage vv. 12-21 should now be sufficiently clear. 
 Man derived from Adam—we have been constrained to 
 conclude, by physical heredity—the poison of suppressed 
 sinfulness, which during four millenniums or thereabouts 
 was unable to find its natural outlet in law-breaking, because 
 there was no law to break. The Mosaic Law was then 
 applied to mankind, as a sort of sharp, stinging fomentation, 
 designed to bring this innate but suppressed poison up to 
 the surface of the individual consciousness, so that it might 
 discharge itself in the shape of actual sins. Sin, having 
 been thus externalised and concretised, could then be dealt 
 with by God on forensic lines, by means of a judicial atone- 
 ment and acquittal. It would seem that at this point 
 St. Paul assumes that ‘innate sinfulness’ is a thing too 
 vague, subtle, and elusive for God to treat directly: He 
 needs a tangible subject-matter, in the shape of Actual Sin, 
 before He can set His restorative processes in motion. 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 133 
 
 This curious assumption is, however, clearly bound up with 
 the common Jewish idea that the moral law was uniquely 
 and exclusively embodied in the Decalogue; we need not, 
 therefore, devote further consideration to it now. It will 
 be sufficient for the purposes of our historical enquiry if it 
 has been shown that the language of this crucial passage 
 explicitly asserts the existence of a causal relation between 
 Adam’s sin and subsequent sin and death, and that the 
 Apostle’s language is most easily explicable on the sup- 
 position that there underlies it a half-thought-out idea of 
 a hereditary spiritual disease, of an unconscious suppressed 
 sinfulness, which when stimulated by the external impact 
 of the Law, with its blunt, uncompromising series of 
 commands and prohibitions, naturally wells up into the 
 field of conscious volition. | 
 
 It should be added that there is nothing in this passage 
 which implies that ‘ suppressed sinfulness ’ actually involves 
 guilt in the sight of God, previously to and independently 
 of the commission of actual sin; and, indeed, the phrase 
 in v. 13, ‘sin is not imputed where there is no law’! 
 (apaptia dé odk eAXoyetTat pur) dvTos vopov), Would seem to 
 deny by anticipation the later Augustinian conception of 
 ‘original guilt,’ at any rate in the case of the pre-Mosaic 
 men. If we may judge by his general usus loquendt, 
 St. Paul shares the opinions of the ‘ plain man’ on this 
 point. The word ‘ guilt,’ with the whole apparatus of 
 forensic terminology to which it belongs, ‘ judgment ’ (xpiua), 
 ‘condemnation’ (xardxpia), ‘ acquittal’ (dicaiwors), and 
 the like, is only applicable to voluntary and responsible 
 actions, that is, to actual sins: the ‘ inherited tendency to 
 sin,’ or ‘ original sin,’ so called—if a fact—must be con- 
 ceived as a disease, and medical terminology alone is 
 appropriate in speaking of it. Neither here nor elsewhere 
 does the Apostle make any attempt to explain how it is 
 that a state for which we are not responsible manifests 
 itself in acts for which we are, or why a guiltless malady 
 should issue in symptoms to which guilt attaches—problems 
 
 1 These words might be paraphrased thus: ‘“ Original”’ sin by itself, 
 which has not expressed itself in the breach of a known commandment, 
 is not considered by God to be sin in the true sense of the term.’ 
 
134 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 which have baffled the philosophers, theologians, alienists, 
 and penologists of all ages. 
 
 THE PAULINE DOCTRINE. 
 
 (6) ‘ INHERITED SINFULNESS’ AND BAPTISM 
 
 The process of unravelling St. Paul’s profoundest thought 
 is necessarily difficult, and may, I fear, have been in the 
 present instance somewhat tedious, to follow in detail. It 
 will, therefore, be appropriate, before we turn to the con- 
 sideration of a second and hardly less important division of 
 the Apostle’s ‘ anthropology,’1 namely, his teaching with 
 regard to the nature and seat of ‘ inherited sinfulness,’ to 
 conform to the actual order of the Epistle to the Romans, 
 and devote a few words to a more practical and more easily 
 comprehensible aspect, or corollary, of the Pauline doctrine 
 of Man and of Sin—that is, its conception of baptism. 
 
 In the light of certain ideas which are familiar to us from 
 the teaching of the Prayer Book offices and the Catechism, 
 it is at least interesting to find that the discussion of the 
 universal and hereditary ‘ sinfulness ’ of mankind (v. 12-21) 
 is immediately followed by a deeply mystical passage 
 (vi. I-11) in which the dominant thought is that of the 
 saving effects of Baptism. We are at once reminded of the 
 Nicodemus-scene in the Fourth Gospel (iii. 1-15) in which 
 the words of Christ, as recorded by St. John, seem to speak 
 of Baptism as the remedy for some implied and undefined 
 defect inherent in human nature.2 As we have already 
 seen, the modern critical study of St. John’s literary methods 
 makes it difficult to be sure that our Lord Himself did 
 actually point the sacramental moral of His exhortation as 
 explicitly as the narrative represents ; but in the passage 
 about to be discussed we have the ipsissima verba of the 
 Apostle of the Gentiles, fixed and preserved for all time by 
 Tertius’ shorthand as they fell from his very lips. I cannot 
 
 1 It need hardly be said that this term is here used in its theological, 
 not in its modern scientific sense. 
 2 See above, p. 98 ff. 
 
 Le NRL PELLAED IL LAGE NI LOL EA IEA 
 
 
 
 ae ee 5 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 135 
 
 doubt that the key to the interpretation of vi. 1-11 is 
 given us in the words of Professor Kirsopp Lake: 
 
 Baptism is for St. Paul and his readers universally and un- 
 questioningly accepted as a mystery or sacrament which works 
 ex opere operato; and from the unhesitating manner in which 
 St. Paul uses this fact as a basis for argument, as if it were a 
 point on which Christian teaching did not vary, it would seem 
 as though this sacramental teaching is central in the primitive 
 Christianity to which the Roman Empire began to be converted. 
 
 Given this hypothesis, which illuminates the relevant 
 passages 2 of the Pauline writings as no other does or can 
 do, and which can only be refuted on the basis of a priors 
 assumptions as to what the Apostle ought to have believed 
 —the articulation and sequence of St. Paul’s ideas about 
 Sin and its remedy stand out with photographic clearness. 
 Mankind inherited physical mortality and ‘ suppressed sin- 
 fulness’ from Adam, who himself acquired them by his 
 Fall. The promulgation of a Law which man had not the 
 strength to obey stimulated this subconscious sinfulness 
 to pullulate in a multitude of actual sins. In due season, 
 whilst we were yet (actual) sinners, Christ died on behalf of 
 the ungodly. Thenceforward, ‘ Faith,’ that is, unreserved 
 mental, moral, and emotional self-surrender to Jesus as 
 risen, Messiah, and Lord, procures for the believing soul 
 ‘justification,’ or judicial acquittal from the burden of actual 
 offences: and Baptism, which is the indispensable external 
 expression and crowning moment of the act of Faith, 
 mystically unites the neophyte to the Saviour, in whose 
 death and resurrection, viewed sub specie aeternitatis as 
 timeless facts, he sacramentally participates, and through 
 the infusion of whose divine life he wins, as it would seem, 
 the complete and final cure of the inherited disease of 
 “suppressed sinfulness.’3 Faith, in short, brings ‘ release 
 
 1 Earlier Epistles of St. Paul, 1911, p. 385. Professor H. A. A. 
 Kennedy’s attempt to disprove this hypothesis (St. Paul and the Mystery 
 Religions, 1913, pp. 232 ff.) seems to me quite unconvincing; I may, 
 perhaps, be permitted to refer to my observations on ‘ The Origins of the 
 Sacraments,’ in Essays Catholic and Critical (1926), p. 389, 0. 7. 
 
 RiGeal) 11192 Fes 07) COL Vil i exe 1, 2) xii rg Coliii. 12 5\hphiiva 5: 
 
 8 This idea—natural enough in the Church’s enthusiastic infancy— 
 
 that the regenerated Christian is from the moment of his baptism onwards 
 strictly incapable of sinning—reappears in 1 John iii. 9: ‘ whosoever is 
 
136 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 from sin’ in the ‘ forensic,’ and Baptism in the ‘ medical,’ 
 sense, of these words. 
 
 Know ye not that all we who were baptised into Messiah 
 Jesus were baptised into His death? So then we were buried 
 together with Him through our baptism so as to share in His 
 death. . . . For if we became incorporate with the likeness of 
 His death, surely also we shall be incorporate with the likeness 
 of His resurrection ; knowing this, that our old man was cruci- 
 fied together with Him in order that the body of sin [.e. the 
 physical nature of man in which, as we shall see, this hereditary 
 disease of sin inheres] might be annulled or abolished, so that 
 we should no longer be the slaves of sin.? 
 
 There can, I venture to think, be no reasonable doubt 
 as to the meaning of these words. Baptism is assumed by 
 St. Paul to be a cathartic and therapeutic rite, the logical 
 parallelism of which with some observances of the Greek and 
 Oriental mysteries he would not have repudiated,? which 
 unites the sick soul to the strong and stainless Redeemer- 
 God, conferring upon it, through a mystical death and 
 resurrection, the heavenly gifts of healing, purity, and 
 inward peace. | 
 
 It is one of the inevitable inconsistencies to which 
 pioneers in any sphere of thought are liable, that this 
 description of baptism as the infallible medicine which heals 
 the disease of sinfulness and ‘annuls’ the ‘ body of sin’ 
 should occur in a context which is devoted to imploring the 
 Roman Christians to abstain from sin. It might well have 
 
 begotten of God doeth no sin, because His seed abideth in him; and he 
 cannot sin (od dvvarat duapraverv), because he is begotten of God’ ; cf. also 
 v. 18. 
 
 1 Extracts from vi. 2-6, freely translated. The original Greek is 
 appended: 7 ayvoetre ri door €BarricOnpev eis yprotov "Inoodv, eis Tov Oavatov 
 adrot e€BanricOnuev; auveradynuev ody att@ dia tod Banrioparos eis Tov 
 O@dvarov...e€i yap ovpudutor yeydvapev TH Opotwmmate rob Oavdrov avrod, 
 GAAa Kal Tis avacrdcews €odpue0a* TobdTo yivdoKortes, GTL 6 Tadaos HUdv 
 avOpwmos ovvectavpwbn, tva Katapynff ro oya ths duaptias, Tod pnKére 
 SovAevew Huds TH Gpapria. The depth of St. Paul’s belief in the absolute 
 efficacy of baptism is shown by the fact that Col. ii. rz re-echoes the 
 thought of this passage, affirming the ‘ putting off of the body of the flesh’ 
 to be a result of Christian initiation, which is again described as being 
 ‘ buried with him in baptism.’ 
 
 2 I do not, of course, mean to imply that St. Paul’s ideas with regard 
 to the Sacraments were derived from the Mysteries ; see above, p. 135, 0.1. 
 
 
 
 ; 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 137 
 
 been asked by an external critic of the first century A.D. 
 ‘If the rite of Baptism has this immediate and all-sufficient 
 effect in annihilating the power of innate sinfulness, why 
 should it be necessary to urge baptised Christians to main- 
 tain a high standard of moral life? How is it possible to 
 reconcile the liability to backsliding which these exhorta- 
 tions presuppose with the permanent and irrevocable effect 
 which Baptism is assumed to produce?’ The answer, of 
 course, is that it is not really possible, and that St. Paul at 
 this early date had not fully thought out the implications 
 of the fact of post-baptismal sin, which he is curiously loth 
 to face. The logical difficulty in which he finds himself 
 involved in exhorting people to refrain from sin who, on his 
 own hypothesis, were incapable of committing it, was in 
 a later age solved in theory by admitting that baptism did 
 not destroy ‘ concupiscence ’1 ; and the practical difficulties 
 which arose in connexion with the treatment of Christians 
 who had sinned after baptism gave birth to the sacrament 
 of penance, at first available only once in a lifetime for the 
 post-baptismal offender, and then only to deal with one 
 or more of the three capital sins, homicide, impurity, and 
 apostasy, later expanding and ramifying so as to cover 
 every type of sin and to be available as often as required.” 
 When the Apostle wrote, however, these developments still 
 lay in the future (the occasions on which he administered 
 penitential discipline at Ephesus? and Corinth* would 
 appear to him as purely exceptional events, which were not 
 likely to recur before the Parousia): and he has therefore 
 to content himself with the position ‘ You cannot, and 
 therefore you ought not to, commit sin "—a reversed and 
 
 1 Cf. Article IX, ‘ this infection of nature doth remain, yea in them 
 that are regenerated,’ etc.; conc. Trident. Sess. V. 5: ‘ manere autem 
 in baptizatis concupiscentiam vel fomitem, haec sancta synodus fatetur 
 et sentit,’ etc. (the whole passage is quoted below, Additional Note F, 
 ‘ Formularies,’ p. 539). 
 
 2 For the details of this development, see O. D. Watkins, History of 
 Penance (1920). A convenient summary of the development of Penance 
 up to A.D. 400 may be found in Haslehurst, Penitential Discipline in the 
 Early Church (1921). 
 
 8 Acts xix. 18: moAAoi re tTHv memictevKdtwv (1.e. of the baptised 
 Christians) 7#pyovro é£opuodoyovpevor Kal avayyéAdovtes Tas Tpdkers addy (pre- 
 sumably with a view to receiving some sort of absolution). 
 
 Patol ves. 50h 21 Cor 4116 it. 
 
138 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 negative form of the Kantian dictum ‘I ought, therefore 
 I can,’ which the most superficial analysis will show to be 
 a patent self-contradiction. The fact is, that he is on the 
 verge of raising, though he does not actually raise, a philo- 
 sophic problem which is implicit in the idea of Original 
 Sin and of sacramental grace as the remedy for it, namely 
 this: ‘Is it possible for there to be a presentation of the 
 Fall-doctrine which will be sufficiently deterministec—which 
 will lay sufficient emphasis on man’s hereditary weakness— 
 to establish the need for “‘ grace,”’ in the technical theological 
 sense,! and for sacraments; but will also be sufficiently 
 libertarian to preserve the idea of man’s freedom and moral 
 responsibility 2?’ But, interesting and important as this 
 question is in its bearings upon modern religious life and 
 thought, considerations of time compel us to defer its 
 examination to the constructive part of this course, and to 
 resume the thread of our main task, that of studying the 
 Apostle’s conception of the state of human nature which 
 in his view made baptism and all other elements in the 
 redemptive process necessary. 
 
 THE PAULINE DOCTRINE. 
 
 (c) ‘ INHERITED SINFULNESS,’ ITS NATURE AND SEAT 
 
 We have seen that St. Paul assumes the existence of a 
 vague hereditary sinfulness, transmitted by Adam to his 
 posterity, as the presupposition of Actual Sin and conse- 
 quently of Redemption; and we have now to examine 
 more narrowly his conception of this inherited infirmity or 
 taint. It is probable that we shall gain most light on this 
 point if we begin by investigating the question of the seat 
 
 1 That is, gratia sanctificans, which in the common usage of Western 
 theology denotes positive Divine assistance given ab extra to the struggling 
 soul; this is a different idea from that conveyed by the term ydpis as 
 used by St. Paul, which means the sentiment of ‘ favour’ or ‘ loving- 
 kindness ’—‘ graciousness’ rather than ‘ grace ’—-with which God regards 
 His creatures. No doubt the practical consequence of God’s attitude of 
 xdpis is His bestowal of gratia sanctificans ; but much confusion has been 
 caused by the failure to realise that what St. Paul means by xdpis is not 
 precisely the same as what St. Augustine means by gratia. 
 
 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 139 
 
 of the congenital malady, that is, of the precise “ part ’? of 
 human nature in which it resides and through which it is 
 transmitted. A careful study of cc. vi. and vii. of the 
 Epistle to the Romans will leave us in no doubt as to 
 St. Paul’s view of the matter. The seat of hereditary sinful- 
 ness is ‘ the flesh,’ that is, the strictly physical or animal 
 nature of man. It is well known that the Apostle’s theory 
 of human nature is trichotomous, dividing the domain of 
 personality into three clearly cut areas, namely (a) the 
 ‘flesh’ or the ‘ body,’ (0) the ‘soul’ (#vx7), the principle 
 of organic life which we share with the animals, a concept 
 which is the practical equivalent of Aristotle’s ‘ vegetative 
 soul,’? and (c) the ‘spirit’ (avedua) which includes the 
 highest intellectual, moral, and religious faculties.? And 
 what distinguishes St. Paul’s ideas with regard to the subject 
 of innate sinfulness from those of the other thinkers whom 
 we have noticed up to this point, is the fact that he confines 
 the seat of the inbred evil rigidly to the ‘ flesh,’ apparently 
 exempting the ‘soul’ and the ‘spirit’ from any sort of 
 inherent taint, and only conceding that they may be pol- 
 luted as it were fer accidens, by the maleficent influences 
 arising out of their physical substratum.* So we find that 
 the effect of union with Christ in baptism is to “ annul,’ to 
 ‘bring to nought,’ the ‘sinful body’ ® (vi. 6)—in plainer 
 language, to paralyse, or rather to annihilate, sinful impulses 
 assumed to be rooted in the body. More explicitly, the 
 hidden sources of sin are described as ‘ the sinful passions 
 which come through the Law’ ® (vii. 5)—in other words, 
 the evil impulses stimulated into life, in a way which will 
 
 1 An apology is doubtless due for the use of this word; but it will be 
 remembered that we are investigating ancient, not modern, psychology. 
 
 2 Cf. Eth. Nic. I. vii, 12: de anima 413 b 7. 
 
 3 See arts. ‘ Soul,’ ‘ Spirit,’ by J. Laidlaw, HDB; andcf. R. H. Charles, 
 Eschatology, Hebrew, Jewish, and Christian (1899), pp. 409-15, for an 
 elaborate, if occasionally arbitrary, analysis of St. Paul’s trichotomous 
 psychology. 
 
 4 The perversion of the intellect by sensuality is the last stage of 
 moral degradation ; the final punishment of the vicious Gentiles is to be 
 abandoned by God eis dddxipov votv (Rom. i. 28), and, conversely, the 
 ‘renewal of the intellect’ (dvaxaivwows rod vdos) is the final stage of post- 
 baptismal sanctification (Rom. xii. 2). 
 
 5 +6 o@pua Ths duaprias. 
 
 § ra mabjuata Tov dpapriav Ta Sia Tod vopov. 
 
140 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 be presently explained, by the prohibitions and threatenings 
 of the Law; and these are said, with reference to the 
 unregenerate state in which both the Apostle and his readers 
 once lived, to have been ‘ active in our members.’! As 
 inherent sinfulness is thus connected with passion and 
 impulse, it would seem that he would have spoken more 
 accurately if he had affirmed the innate source of sin to lie 
 in the dvx7 or “‘ vegetal soul’ ; we must, however, take his 
 language as we find it; and his apparent determination to 
 saddle ‘ the body,’ or ‘ the flesh,’ with the sole responsibility 
 for being the home of sin, by its Arima facie inconsistency 
 with his own trichotomous theory of human nature,? may 
 well suggest that it is prompted by some unconscious 
 psychological cause, lying deep in his personal idiosyn- 
 crasy, rather than by considerations of the strictly logical 
 order. . 
 
 The Pauline theory, if such it may be called, regarding 
 the nature and seat of ‘innate sinfulness,’ and regarding 
 the psychological vationale of its externalisation in the shape 
 of actual sins, under the stimulus of acquaintance with the 
 Law, may be studied at length in vii. 7-25; in what 
 appears from the directness and poignancy of its language 
 (it is difficult to believe that its use of the first person 
 singular is a mere literary device) to be a sketch of the 
 Apostle’s own moral autobiography, a miniature analogue 
 of the Confessions of St. Augustine. The passage deserves 
 
 1 éynpyetro ev tots péAcow Hydv. 
 
 2 The sharp contrast between ‘ flesh’ and ‘ spirit’ discussed later in 
 the text seems to insist on a dichotomy rather than a trichotomy. 
 According to W. Bousset (Religion des Judentums im NTlichen Zettalter, 
 1903, p. 381) the Jewish psychology of St. Paul’s day treated the terms 
 “ spirit’ and ‘ soul’ as identical in meaning, thereby diverging from Old 
 Testament usage, which had recognised a subtle difference of connotation 
 between them, the former emphasising the element of Divine force which 
 permeates and sustains all organic being, the latter laying stress on the 
 separate psychic life of the individual organism (H. Schultz, ATliche 
 Theologie®, 1896, p. 492 ff.). St. Paul’s normal use of the terms seems to 
 accord with the practice of the Old Testament writers; he distinguishes 
 sharply between 70 mvedpa and 7 pvx7y in 1 Thess. v. 23. But in writing 
 the passages discussed above he may well have felt the dichotomous usus 
 loquendi of his Rabbinical instructors to have been better adapted to the 
 
 clear exposition of the point at issue than the trichotomous category which 
 is more characteristic of his own thought. See, however, R. H. Charles, 
 
 op. cit., pp. 412-13. 
 
 
 
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 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT rar 
 
 to be quoted at length, both because of its intense human 
 interest and because of the light shed by it upon the difficult 
 conceptions with which we are dealing. 
 
 What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? God forbid. 
 Howbeit, I hadnot known sinexcept throughthe Law. For I had 
 not known desire, except the Law had said ‘ Thou shalt not 
 desire? (wrongfully).’ But Sin, finding an occasion (or, starting- 
 point), wrought in me through the Commandment all manner 
 of (wrongful) desire ; for apart from the Law Sin is dead. Now 
 I was alive apart from the Law once: but, when the Command- 
 ment came, Sin revived, and [ died. And the Commandment, 
 which was unto life (¢.e. meant by God to promote my true life), 
 this I found to be unto death: For Sin, finding its occasion (or 
 starting-point) through the Commandment, beguiled me, and 
 through it slew me. So that the Law is holy, andthe Command- 
 ment holy, and righteous, and good. Did then that which is 
 good become death unto me? God forbid. On the contrary, 
 Sin, that it might be shewn to de Sin, by working death to me 
 through that which is good. . . that through the Command- 
 ment Sin might prove to be superlatively sinful... (an un- 
 finished sentence). For we know that the Law is spiritual: but 
 I am a being of flesh * sold under the power of Sin. But that 
 which I do I know not: for, not what I would, that do I practise ; 
 but what I hate, that Ido. But if what I would not, that I do, 
 I consent unto the Law that it is good. So now it is no more 
 I that do it, but Sin which dwelleth in me. For I know that in 
 me—that 1s, in my flesh—dwelleth no good thing: for to will is 
 present with me, but to do that which is good is not. For the 
 good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, 
 that I practise. But if, what I would not, that I do—it is no 
 more I that do it, but Sin which dwelleth in me. I find then 
 the law,? that to me, who would do good, evil is present. For 
 I delight in the Law of God after the inward man (or, so far as 
 my inner self is concerned): But I see a different Law in my 
 members, warring against the Law recognised by my intellect, 
 and bringing me into captivity under the Law of Sin which is 
 in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver 
 me out of the body of this death? ... I thank God through 
 
 1 ovx émOuvpjoers—the first words of the Tenth Commandment as 
 given in Exodus xx. 17 (LXX). 
 
 2 odpxwos: this word merely means ‘ made of flesh,’ and should 
 be carefully distinguished from ocapxixdés, ‘ carnal’ in the bad sense, a 
 distinction which RV. fails to recognise. See Grimm-Thayer, Greek- 
 English Lexicon of the N.T., s. vv. 
 
 8 rov vouov must here, I think, mean‘ the general rule,’ or “ constraining 
 principle’ ; see Sanday and Headlam’s note. 
 
142 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Jesus Christ our Lord.—So then I myself with the intellect serve 
 the Law of God ; but with the flesh the Law of Sin.* 
 
 The connexion of these verses with what precedes them 
 is easily intelligible. The two passages on which we have 
 just commented (v. 12-21 and vi. I-11) are, as we have seen, 
 pervaded by the theory that mankind inherited a suppressed 
 or latent sinfulness in virtue of its descent from the first 
 sinner Adam, but that this hereditary taint did not manifest 
 itself in actual wrongdoing until stimulated by knowledge 
 of the Law. A somewhat obtuse imaginary critic is repre- 
 sented as objecting that, if the effect of acquaintance with 
 the Law is the commission of actual sin, the Law itself must 
 be supposed to be in some way an evil power or agency 
 (v. 7). The Apostle repudiates this suggestion with a stern 
 ‘God forbid,’ but feels it necessary to provide against future 
 misconceptions of the kind by clearing up, once and for all, 
 the relations of ‘ suppressed sinfulness,’ the Law, and actual 
 sin. He therefore proceeds to elucidate the nature of 
 ‘ suppressed sinfulness’ (designated in these verses simply 
 as “ Sin ’) by examining its operation on a small scale, within 
 the compass of a single soul (in point of fact, as we have 
 suggested, his own)—thereby reversing the procedure of 
 Plato’s Republic, which endeavours to elucidate the nature 
 of Justice in the individual soul by examining its workings 
 on a large scale in the State. The parallel centres on the 
 idea of the Law, the learning of which during childhood, 
 from the lips of parent or hazzdn,? constitutes a moral 
 Rubicon in the life of the individual, like that which its 
 proclamation from Sinai constituted, as the Apostle believes, 
 in the collective life of the race. If he had been acquainted 
 with modern biological science, he might well have adapted 
 one of its maxims to his purpose, and written ‘ (ethical and 
 spiritual) ontogeny is the recapitulation of (ethical and 
 spiritual) phylogeny,’ as the premise from which his exposi- 
 tion is derived. 
 
 1 RV., somewhat modified and expanded. I have italicised the 
 references to ‘ the flesh,’ ‘ the body,’ and ‘ the members,’ in order to make 
 the underlying theory of the seat of sin stand out with clearness. 
 
 * The synagogue attendant, or professional reader, who often acted 
 as schoolmaster. 
 
 oh ge oe 
 
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 ee ne a Oa ee ee eee 
 
 
 
 SS a ee ee ee 
 

 
 
 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 143 
 
 In three or four vivid words (v. 9) he sketches the golden 
 age of earliest childhood, during which he was alive,! ‘in 
 the purely physical sense,’ without the Law ; that is, during 
 which he was a non-moral organism, swayed solely by 
 instinct, ignorant of the Decalogue, and therefore incapable 
 of actual sin. This state of innocence was brought to an 
 end by the coming of the Commandment, through instruc- 
 tion in the Law, which for the son of pious Jewish parents 
 followed immediately upon the dawn of reason and moral 
 responsibility. The effect of acquaintance with the Law 
 was to rouse into venomous life the latent power of ‘ Sin’ 
 (that is, “ original sin,’ or the sinful tendency) which during 
 infancy had been slumbering within him, inert, like a frozen 
 snake. Through some strange psychic chemistry, the stern 
 warning ‘ Thou shalt not desire . . .’ provoked in his soul 
 a passion of guilty desire to which he has hitherto been a 
 stranger (v. 8) ; and, before he has had time to understand 
 or adjust himself to the surging impulses which have broken 
 out within him, he finds that he has committed some act 
 which is condemned by the Law. It is difficult to avoid the 
 impression that we have in vv. 8, 9 a generalised description 
 of the psychic disturbances incidental to puberty and 
 adolescence : though the language which describes an almost 
 personified Sin as using the Commandment for a fulcrum 
 whereby to push the tempted soul into spiritual death is 
 equally applicable to the moral struggles of adult life. 
 
 The idea which St. Paul endeavours to express by this 
 picture of an awakened ‘ endopsychic’ demon of Sin utilis- 
 ing the Law as a zoé or@ for accomplishing its fell designs, 
 is that summed up in the proverbial phrases ‘ mitimur in 
 velitum semper,’ “ Stolen fruits are sweetest.’ It is an idea 
 which is, perhaps, rather less perplexing to us than it was 
 to him: for we now know that the singular attraction 
 exercised by the thought of forbidden conduct, merely 
 because it is forbidden, over child-like and undisciplined 
 minds, and it may be over others, arises from certain funda- 
 mental facts of human nature. A modern neurologist 
 
 1 €lwv: Civ means to‘ be alive’ in a merely animal sense, Bidoxerv to 
 ‘live’ a fully developed human, rational, and civilised life ; cf. the English 
 words zoology, biography. 
 
144 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 might describe these facts in physiological terms, pointing 
 out that it is impossible for the thought of a given action 
 to be suggested to consciousness without a concomitant 
 stimulation, in however minute a degree, of the kinaesthetic 
 area of the cerebral cortex: and that such stimulation in- 
 evitably causes a discharge of energy, however infinitesimal 
 in quantity, into the efferent nerves connected with the 
 appropriate muscles, thereby producing a faint impulse 
 towards the externalisation in act of the suggested thought. 
 A psychologist, on the other hand, might prefer to speak of 
 the ‘ phantasy ’ of a particular action as exciting the cognate 
 ‘complex,’ and of this latter as thereupon tending to release 
 its accumulated libido into the conational channels leading 
 to the realisation of the ‘phantasy.’ But, in whichever 
 way we choose to envisage the mechanism of conduct, 
 whether psychologically or psycho-physiologically, it remains 
 true to say that the idea of an action, once suggested to the 
 mind, has a slight but distinct tendency to realise itself. 
 The whole curative method associated with the names of 
 M. Coué and M. Baudouin is built upon this principle. Now 
 the Law, by the very fact of prohibiting a certain mode of 
 conduct, necessarily suggests to the mind the idea of such 
 conduct, and therefore cannot help arousing some degree 
 of propension towards that which it is designed to forbid. 
 And when the prohibited conduct happens to be the normal 
 expression of one of the cardinal instincts of human nature, 
 the clumsy threatenings of the Law may well evoke, from 
 the mysterious depths of the unconscious self, mighty forces 
 which are seemingly beyond the power of the conscious ego 
 to bridle or repress. A merely ‘ideomotor’ impulse is 
 doubtless too feeble and evanescent even to make itself felt 
 in consciousness: but an ideomotor impulse reinforced by 
 a flood-wave of animal appetite or elemental emotion 
 inevitably passes over into action, unless dammed in by the 
 barrier of habit or of intense volitional effort. Such spates 
 of psychic energy, released in the way just described, are 
 what the Apostle means by ‘ the sinful passions roused by 
 the Law’; they constitute the ‘second Law’ (érepos 
 vopos) Which hales us along as captives of the law of sin 
 which is in our members. 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 145 
 
 But the question still presses for an answer, With what 
 precisely, in the Apostle’s thought, is ‘ Sin’ in the sense of 
 these verses (that is, ‘ original sin’) to be identified? Is 
 it simply another name for the natural appetites of the body ? 
 or is it the exaggeration of appetite? Is it the psychic 
 energy alluded to above, or the weakness of will which fails 
 to tame its undisciplined uprushes ? We will, nevertheless, 
 postpone these questions for a moment, in order to complete 
 our review of the passage. Verse 13 attempts to account 
 ex parte Det for the paradoxical fact that the revelation of 
 the Law is found in experience to stimulate law-breaking, 
 by suggesting that this has been providentially allowed in 
 order that man may realise the full horror of Sin by seeing 
 that it is capable of utilising the sanctities of the Law as 
 the instrument of its detestable purposes. With v. 14, we 
 pass into a tragic description of the conflict between reason 
 and appetite which once racked the writer’s unconverted 
 soul, a conflict in which appetite was continually victorious ; 
 and the Apostle piles up rugged antithetical phrases (‘it 
 is not what I would that I practise: but what I hate, that 
 I do,’ and the like) to emphasise the complete dissociation 
 which seemed to have taken place between his conscious 
 ego and the control of his body. ‘ Sin,’ like some malignant 
 secondary personality, has got possession of his limbs, and 
 uses them as it thinks fit, quite regardless of the commands 
 of his real self. This real self, the ‘inner man,’ or the 
 intellect (vois), is strongly asserted to be morally sound, 
 perfectly cognisant of the commands of the Law and per- 
 fectly loyal to them; the whole blame for the aberrations 
 of his actual conduct is laid upon ‘ the flesh,’ or ‘ the flesh ’ 
 as controlled by ‘Sin.’ The state of interior schism thus 
 depicted would seem to be exactly identical with what 
 Aristotle terms dxpacia or ‘incontinence,’ the condition 
 of the man who recognises the obligation of the moral 
 law, but is too weak to conform to it, as distinct from 
 the condition of the ozovdaios or ‘ good’ man, who both 
 recognises and obeys the law, on the one hand, and that of 
 the dxkdAaoros or ‘ profligate’ man, who both rejects the © 
 law interiorly and disobeys it exteriorly, on the other.1 
 
 1 Eth. Nic. vii. I-10 (1145 a 15-1152 a). 
 L 
 
146 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 But it is described by the fiery Apostle in words of burning 
 shame and remorse such as would have been quite unintel- 
 ligible to the phlegmatic Stagirite. And the philosopher, 
 unlike the Apostle, can only analyse the moral struggle, 
 and cannot suggest any means of bringing it to a satisfactory 
 end. The whole difference between the spirit of pagan 
 Hellenism and the spirit of Christianity is summed up in the 
 contrast between the cold aphorism with which Aristotle 
 concludes his dissertation on the character of the ‘ incon- 
 tinent man’ (‘ Those who are incontinent through habit 
 are more easily curable than those who are such by nature ; 
 for it is easier to alter a habit than to alter one’s nature ’ 1) 
 and the exultant cry of the redeemed and converted Paul 
 ‘T thank God through Jesus Messiah our Lord.’ 
 
 It is not necessary to dwell for more than a moment 
 upon two other well-known texts which should be noticed 
 in any attempt to elucidate St. Paul’s conception of ‘ the 
 flesh ’"—those, namely, which expound the characteristically 
 Pauline antithesis of ‘ flesh’ and ‘ spirit,’ Rom. viii. 3-13, 
 and what may be described as a rough preliminary study for 
 this passage, Gal. v. 16-24. We observe that in the former 
 of these texts it is not always certain whether the ‘ spirit ’ 
 which constitutes the second member of the contrasted 
 pair is meant to be man’s own spirit, or the Spirit of God ? ; 
 but, whichever it is, the ‘ flesh’ with its physical appetites 
 and cravings is conceived as standing in sharp opposition 
 and hostility to it. The ¢dpovnua, the ‘mind’ or ‘ dis- 
 position’ of the flesh—that is, the subconscious mental 
 qualities revealed in its instinctive desires—is said to be 
 death ; it is hostility towards God : it is not subject to the 
 Law of God, nor indeed can be.? ‘The flesh desires con- 
 
 1 Ar. Eth. Nic. vii. 10, 4. (1152 a29): [edvardrepor] of 8x’ €Oc.apod axparets 
 TOV pvoik@v’ pGov yap eos peraxivjoar dvcews. 
 
 2 As the autographs of St. Paul’s Epistles must have been written 
 in uncials, our modern typographic device of denoting the Spirit of God 
 by means of a capital initial letter was not available for his amanuensis : 
 so that we can only judge in a given passage, whether 7d mvedua, used 
 absolutely, means the Spirit of God or the spirit of man, from the general 
 sense of the context. RV. is, I think, right in translating 70 avedya in 
 Rom. viii. 4-9 as ‘ the spirit’ (= the human spirit) and in Gal. v. 16-25 
 as ‘ the Spirit’ (= the Spirit of God). 
 
 ** Rom). vii. 7: 
 
THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 147 
 
 trariwise to the Spirit, and the Spirit contrariwise to the 
 flesh ; for these two powers are directly opposed to each 
 other, so that you do not actually do what you wish to do 
 (cf. Rom. vii. 15, “ not what I would, that do I practise ”’ 
 etc.). . . . Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which 
 are these, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, 
 sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousies, wraths, factions, divisions, 
 sects, envyings, drunkenness, revellings, and such like.’ ! 
 ’ The ‘flesh,’ in short, is the seat or mzdus, not merely of the 
 bodily appetites which may be summed up under the head 
 of sensuality, but also of the self-assertive instincts which 
 fall more naturally under the head of pride. All these 
 hateful impulses, however, are believed, in accordance with 
 the absolute view of the efficacy of baptism noted above, to 
 have been destroyed once and for all, in Christians, by the 
 mystic death through which they were united to the Saviour 
 and initiated into the fellowship of the Church. ‘ Ye are 
 not in the flesh, but in the spirit, ifi—as you know to be the 
 case 2—the Spirit of God dwelleth in you.’% ‘ They that 
 belong to Messiah Jesus have crucified the flesh with its 
 passions and its appetites.’ 4 
 
 Our survey of the relevant passages of the Pauline 
 writings has now placed us in a position to essay a solution 
 of this most subtle and difficult of exegetical problems, the 
 exact nature of ‘inbred sinfulness’ and of its relation to 
 ‘the flesh,’ as conceived in the Apostle’s thought. It will 
 clear the ground if we deal briefly, first of all, with a popular 
 theory, not devoid of a superficial simplicity and attractive- 
 ness, which sees in the famous antithesis of ‘ flesh’ and 
 ‘spirit ’ a reproduction of the Platonic dualism of matter 
 and mind,°* in which the former, when organised as a“ body,’ 
 
 praliv. 19; 2 elmep, siquidem, appeals to an admitted fact. 
 
 3 Rom. viii. 9. = ral aVietA, 
 
 5 The most noteworthy exposition of this theory is that given by 
 O. Pfleiderer, Paulinism (E. tr. 1877),i. 47-68. W. Bousset (fel. des Juden- 
 tums, p. 386, 1903) isin general agreement with Pfleiderer : ‘ Wenn Paulus 
 mvedua und odpé als zwei den menschlichen Willen unbedingt beherr- 
 schende und diesen niederzwingende Machte anschaut, und wenn er die 
 Wurzel der odp& doch wesentlich in dem leiblich-sinnlichen Wesen des 
 Menschen sucht, so geht er damit seine Wege abseits von rabbinischer 
 Theologie und bringt eine specifisch hellenische Auffassung an das Christ- 
 entum heran.’ 
 
148 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 is regarded as the impure clog or fetter which weighs down 
 the heavenward strivings of the latter.1 It would not be 
 difficult, did time allow, to rebut this contention by an 
 extended demonstration of the intensely Hebraic character 
 of St. Paul’s thought in general which certainly betrays no 
 other trace of Platonic influence; and it would be even 
 easier to set against it the passages in which the body is 
 clearly conceived as a holy thing, created ‘ not for fornica- 
 tion}; but forthe Lord,’ ? the temple) ofithe) Holy spin 
 destined at the Last Day to be transubstantiated, by some 
 celestial alchemy, into a ‘ body of glory,’ 4+ an ethereal 
 envelope which will be the perfect instrument and vehicle 
 of the immortal soul. But the simplest and, I venture to 
 think, the most convincing reply to this suggestion is one 
 which bases itself directly on the logical structure and 
 interrelation of the ideas which form the subject-matter of 
 our enquiry. It may be phrased as follows: We may 
 admit that the passages just cited, which find the seat of 
 sin in the body and its appetites, if considered by themselves 
 and in isolation from the rest of the Apostle’s teaching, 
 might appear to pre-suppose some kind of Platonic or 
 Oriental dualism, were it not for the fact that the Apostle, 
 in two classical texts (Rom. v. 12-19 and I Cor. xv. 21, 22), 
 has left on record his conviction that the origin of evil, 
 physical and moral, is to be traced, not to the essential 
 constitution of human nature or of the material universe, 
 but to the voluntary transgression of the first man—in other 
 words, to the ‘ Fall.’ It is the idea of the Fall, with its 
 necessary implication of the contingency and temporality, 
 as opposed to the eternity and necessity, of evil, which 
 makes all the difference; without the belief in the Fall, the 
 doctrine of ‘ Original Sin’ 7s Manicheism. It is doubtless 
 unnecessary to repeat the warning that we are not at the 
 moment discussing the question of the Fall on its merits ; 
 
 1 This point of view actually appears in Wisdom, a book which is 
 permeated by Alexandrine-Jewish Platonism: ‘ For a corruptible body 
 weigheth down the soul, And the earthy frame lieth heavy on a mind that 
 is full of cares’ (ix. 15). 
 
 4. rCor./ Wii 3. 
 
 3 zbid. 19. 
 
 4 t Cor. xv. 35 ff. 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 149 
 
 that question belongs to the second or constructive part 
 of our enquiry, in which we shall see that, from the purely 
 intellectual point of view, there is much to be said for 
 Manicheism ; we are only concerned now to emphasise 
 the consideration, explained at length in Lecture I, that 
 the Fall-theory and dualism are in principle, and always 
 have been in history, mutually exclusive hypotheses. It 
 follows that St. Paul’s emphatically asserted allegiance to 
 the first is the surest proof that he cannot have held the 
 second. There are those who would reply that strict logic 
 was not the Apostle’s strongest point; that he may well 
 never have had time to think the matter out with so much 
 thoroughness as to become clearly conscious. of the con- 
 tradiction ; and that the occurrence of a * Fall-theory ’ in 
 Rom. v. 12 ff., and of:a ‘ flesh-theory ’ immediately after- 
 wards, in cc. vi. and vil., merely constitutes one more 
 instance of that power of simultaneously holding incom- 
 patible theories, and of using each in turn as his dialectical 
 exigencies require, which is most conspicuously displayed 
 by his successive assumption of the predestinarian and of 
 the libertarian standpoints, in the great Theodicy of 
 Rom. ix.-xi. But the argument just advanced, that if 
 St. Paul believed in a Fall he cannot have held any sort of 
 dualistic theory, is based upon foundations which go far 
 deeper than the canons of formal logic. Dualism, with its 
 assertion of a realm of being (namely, matter) from which 
 the will and power of the Most High are partially or entirely 
 excluded, assumes a conception of God differing toto caelo 
 from that ethical monotheism which was the supreme 
 achievement of the Jewish Church, and a conscious relation 
 to God fundamentally other than that possessed by the 
 illustrious line of its prophets and saints. Dualism is 
 treason to everything that is summed up in the Shema‘, the 
 Apostles’ Creed of Judaism—‘ Hear, O Israel, Yahweh thy 
 God, Yahweh is One.’ To suppose that St. Paul was capable 
 of such treason is to suppose not merely a psychological 
 but an ethical and spiritual impossibility. 
 
150 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 THE ‘ MIND OF THE FLESH’ AND THE 
 ‘Evit IMAGINATION ’ 
 
 In point of fact, the student who remembers that 
 St. Paul was before all things a ‘Hebrew sprung from 
 Hebrews,’ 1 an ‘ Israelite,’? ‘brought up at the feet of 
 Gamaliel,’ ? has not very far to look for the true answer 
 to the question, What precisely was it that St. Paul believed 
 to have been introduced into the human stock by Adam's 
 sin, to reside in ‘ the flesh,’ and to constitute the psycho- 
 logical ground of actual transgression? The various phrases 
 which we have passed in review during our exposition of 
 the chief relevant texts—‘ Sin,’ ‘ the old man,’ ‘ the sinful 
 body,’ ‘ the body of this death,’ ‘ the sinful passions aroused 
 by the Law,’ ‘the mind of the flesh —are all, I would 
 submit, so many picturesque and paraphrastic names for 
 the yécer ha-va‘. Indeed, it may be tentatively suggested 
 that the last of these terms—the ¢povnya tis capKkos— 
 almost amounts to a literal translation of the Hebrew 
 phrase: we have seen that Hellenistic Judaism never fixed 
 upon any one Greek word as the standing equivalent of 
 yécer, and the dpdovnpna of Rom. viii. 6 would seem to come 
 as near to its meaning as the word employed by the grandson 
 of Ben Sirach, dcaBovAov (Ecclus. xv. 14). If the genitive 
 ‘of the flesh’ may be taken as a Hebraism (=‘ fleshly’), 
 the words 76 dpdvnpa THs capkos then represent ‘ the fleshly 
 yécer;..and the corresponding phrase, ro dpdvnna Tob 
 avevpatos (‘the mind of the spirit’), might be translated 
 ‘the spiritual yécer’ ; so that the passage Rom. viii. 6, 7 
 would embody the first occurrence in Christian literature 
 of the doctrine of the Two Yecavim, bad and good, which 
 strive for the mastery within the soul of man.+ But, 
 
 PPP Di ati. Se Oley chisel $< Acts xcxi."3. 
 
 4 This development of the yé¢ev-conception appears first in Test. x11. 
 Paty., Test. Asser, I-IV. 6: ‘ Two ways hath God given to the sons of 
 men, and two inclinations (8vo dSuaBovAua)’ ..., etc.; see the whole 
 passage. The idea of the ‘ Two Ways,’ which is built upon that of the 
 Two Ye¢arim, is found in the Didache, 1-6, and in the Epistle of Barnabas, 
 18-20. The Two Ye¢avim themselves reappear in Hermas, Mand. xii. 
 (cf. Lecture IV, p. 172). 
 

 
 THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 151 
 
 whether this be so or not, it remains true to say that there 
 are a thousand chances to one in favour of any explanation 
 of a given Pauline concept which traces its genesis to Jewish, 
 rather than Greek, Persian, or other Gentile sources; and 
 that, in this particular instance, the idea of the ‘ evil 
 imagination,’ as we have met with it in Rabbinical thought 
 —of the turbulent stream of psychic energy perpetually 
 boiling up from the depths of the soul and appearing in 
 consciousness as sensual and self-assertive impulses—pro- 
 vides us with precisely the category which we need in order 
 to subsume into a unity the various aspects of inbred evil 
 in man which are reflected in the Apostle’s passionate words. 
 
 When, however, we suggest that the key to the Pauline 
 doctrine of “ Original Sin ’ lies in the hypothesis that he has 
 brought over with him into Christianity, from his Rabbinical 
 training, the idea of the yécer ha-ra*, we must add that, in 
 embodying it into his own system, he has stamped it with 
 a threefold difference. 
 
 (x) In the first place, he has permanently welded into 
 it the idea of the Fall of Adam as its source, thereby creating 
 that synthesis of the apocalyptic and the scholastic theories 
 of the origin of evil, which (as we have seen) the author of 
 4 Ezra, writing in complete independence of Pauline and 
 Christian influence, seems to have achieved a generation later. 
 We may surmise that he had learnt of the yécer-theory from 
 Gamaliel, and already held it prior to his conversion to 
 Christianity, but that he only came to hold the Adamic 
 Fall-theory as the result of intercourse with the original 
 Apostles and other Galilean followers of our Lord. It is 
 doubtless true that his combination of the two theories is 
 more in the nature of a mechanical conjunction than of a 
 complete organic fusion ; for, whilst implicitly affirming the 
 yécer to be the effect—and not, as the Rabbinical theology 
 asserted, the cause—of Adam’s transgression, he nowhere 
 explains why a single act of wrongdoing should have had 
 such a mighty reflex consequence as the birth of an interior 
 power of evil, universally propagated by physiological 
 heredity, and unconquerable save by supernatural assist- 
 ance; the classical Fall-text, Rom. v. 12 ff., passes over this 
 
 1 See above, Lecture II, p. 79. 
 
152 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 question in silence; nor, as we shall see, has this patent 
 gap in his exposition ever been satisfactorily filled by any 
 of his commentators or successors. But the Pauline blend — 
 of the two Jewish traditions, the popular and the official, 
 possesses a strength which cannot be attributed to either 
 of them separately: it supplies intellectual reinforcement 
 to the Fall-idea by giving it a more or less defined psycho- 
 logical content, and it heightens the spiritual value of the 
 yécer-conception by denying that God is the author of the 
 ‘evil impulse,’ and so bringing the idea into full accord 
 with ethical monotheism. Abstracting from the question 
 of its objective truth—a question with which, as has often 
 been said, we are not in this the first and historical stage of 
 our enquiry concerned—we may attribute its survival in 
 great measure to its association of ethical and religious value 
 with a tolerable, though by no means excessive, “degree of 
 conceptual precision. 
 
 (2) The second difference which St. Paul has impressed 
 upon the yécer-idea consists in the striking fact, already 
 noticed, that—breaking away from the wusus loquendi 
 common to the prophets and the Rabbinical theologians, 
 and endorsed by our Lord Himself, according to which the 
 seat of the evil power in man is the ‘ heart ’ 1—he insists 
 again and again that the inbred disease resides in the 
 ‘flesh,’ the ‘ body,’ or the ‘members.’ This is by no means 
 a mere variant in terminology. In the rough and ready 
 psychology of the Old Testament which lies behind all the 
 Apostle’s thought and language with regard to these subjects, 
 the ‘heart’ (lébh), paradoxically enough, is not a part of 
 the ‘ flesh’ (badsar) : it is the whole personality, or perhaps 
 rather that deep hidden part of the personality which we 
 now call the Unconscious. The ‘ flesh,’ on the other hand, 
 means the literal flesh, the organic tissue of which the body 
 is composed: and as such it is for the Old Testament 
 writers morally neutral. When, therefore, St. Paul transfers 
 the seat of innate evil from the ‘ heart’ to the ‘ flesh,’ he 
 is to be understood—so far as his words go—as exempting 
 the mental and psychic life of man, even in its subconscious 
 processes, from the infection of sin, and concentrating this 
 
 1 See above, Lecture II, p. 65; Lecture III, p. 97. 
 
THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 153 
 
 almost exclusively in the physical body. Actually, he fails 
 to maintain a sharp line of demarcation between body and 
 mind or to keep inherited sinfulness strictly on the physical 
 side of the line. But it is difficult to escape from the 
 impression that his language in this connexion is dictated 
 by the fact that (like many of his predecessors and also of 
 his successors in the path of hamartiological speculation) 
 he is in the main, perhaps unconsciously, thinking of ‘ sins 
 of the flesh’ in the most restricted sense of the term; 
 though, in the passage before noticed, Gal. v. 19, 20, he 
 endeavours to correct the balance of his thought by expressly 
 including amongst the ‘ works of the flesh ’ those sins which 
 arise from cruelty and pride. 
 
 (3) It must be noticed, in the last place, that for St. 
 Paul the innate ‘impulse towards sin’ is unreservedly evil, 
 and that he shows no traces of sympathy with that more 
 humane view held by some of the Rabbis, who (as we saw 
 in Lecture II) taught that the yéger is, considered in itself, 
 a morally neutral libido: which, in the uninstructed man, 
 may and generally does discharge itself in unlawful acts, 
 but which is also the driving force behind all creative 
 achievement, whether in the economic, the political, or the 
 intellectual spheres, and which by the study of the Law can 
 be completely ‘sublimated’ and diverted into socially 
 useful channels. The Apostle will have none of this: for 
 him sin, even as innate and potential, is “quite super- 
 latively sinful’! (ka@’ daepBodrjv dpaptwdAds), and the 
 Law, however long or intently it may be studied, quite 
 impotent to subdue it (on the contrary, as we have 
 seen, the Law merely stimulates the sinful impulse to fresh 
 vigour) ; nothing less than the living power which flows 
 forth from the Incarnation and the Atonement can quench 
 the flames of temptation. ‘ That which the Law could not 
 do—that in which its impotence was exhibited through 
 (the power of Sin dwelling in) the flesh—God (actually did, 
 namely this)—having sent His own Son in the likeness of 
 sinful flesh and as a sin-offering, He condemned sin within 
 (that very sphere of) the flesh (in which it had hitherto 
 reigned without a rival).’2 So deep is St. Paul’s conviction 
 
 a VEC OL uV il 1 37 2 Rom. viii. 3 (freely translated). 
 
154 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of the sinfulness of the sinful impulse, and of its intimate 
 and subtle diffusion throughout man’s physical nature, that 
 he is prompted to describe the stainless humanity of the 
 Incarnate Son in a phrase which trembles on the verge of 
 Docetism—‘ the Izkeness of sinful flesh.’1 Though, as will 
 be argued later, the Augustinian doctrine of ‘ Original Sin ’ 
 represents a one-sided distortion of the fundamental Pauline 
 ideas, it cannot be denied that the Apostle’s language 
 affords some excuse for those later Christian thinkers who 
 saw in it an affirmation of the essentially sinful nature of 
 “concupiscence,’ both in its general and in its specifically 
 sexual significance. 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF ST. PAUL’S TEMPERAMENT UPON HIS 
 DOCTRINE 
 
 In the light of the facts reviewed in our previous Lectures, 
 it will be clear that the special characteristics of the Pauline 
 doctrine summed up under the last two heads (2) and (3)— 
 that is, the affirmations of the intensely evil nature of the 
 innate disease and of its close connexion with the physical 
 organism—are idiosyncratic: they represent the stamp 
 which the Apostle’s vivid and passionate temperament has 
 impressed upon the materials combined by his genius. 
 - Not merely has he driven out the Watcher-theory, and 
 exalted the Adam-story to the position of the one and only 
 Christian Fall-narrative ; not merely has he remedied the 
 fatal weakness of the apocalyptic Fall-theories, which lay 
 in the extreme vagueness with which the disastrous conse- 
 quences of the primal sin were conceived, by formulating 
 those consequences in terms of the scholastic yéger-theory ; 
 he has embodied part of himself, of his living experience, 
 in the great theologumenon which he has bequeathed to 
 posterity. The finished, or relatively finished, product has 
 been deeply coloured by the crucible in which it has been 
 compounded. It will be appropriate to conclude our 
 survey of the Pauline doctrine of Man and of Sin with a 
 few words drawing out the significance of this fact. 
 
 1 Rom. Viii. 3. 
 
THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 155 
 
 We have seen that all the theories with which we are 
 immediately concerned take their rise from introspective 
 reflection upon the experience of repentance. In the case 
 of most religious men, repentance, and its corollary ‘ con- 
 version ’—that is, the complete detachment of all impulses 
 and desires, conscious or unconscious, from unworthy 
 objects, and their complete concentration on the supreme 
 good, however that may be conceived—are gradual ever- 
 deepening processes, spread out over the whole life, and 
 never, perhaps, consummated on this side of the grave. 
 But in souls of a rarer mould, endowed with that highly 
 sensuous temperament which is common to the voluptuary 
 and to certain types of saint, the whole current of emotional 
 and conative energy which ceaselessly wells up from the 
 depths of the Unconscious may—through some minute and 
 apparently accidental shock, physical or psychical—be in 
 a moment diverted from one mental channel to another, 
 and its manifestation in consciousness may be transformed 
 from fleshly desire into the mystic thirst for God and good- 
 ness, in the experience known as ‘ instantaneous conversion.’ 
 It is no mere accident that the three great dominating 
 figures in the history of the Christian Fall-doctrine—Paul, 
 Augustine, Luther—belonged to this type, and passed 
 through this experience. We shall have occasion again to 
 examine the subtle influence exercised upon the more 
 developed versions of the Fall-doctrine by the temperaments 
 of their chief expounders ; it must suffice here to point out 
 that the ‘ twice-born’ man (as William James has taught 
 us to call him?) is usually an extremist, both as a sinner and 
 as a saint; that the same emotional energy which before 
 his conversion expressed itself in sensuality or sensual 
 temptations usually appears after conversion as a fanatical 
 horror and hatred of sensuality ; and that this horror of 
 sensuality is apt to cover everything even remotely connected 
 with the senses, so that the suddenly converted man is less 
 capable of viewing the fact of bodily appetite calmly, and 
 of distinguishing between natural impulse and its excessive 
 or anti-social indulgence, than his ‘ once-born’ fellows. 
 Such a one is prone to an ultra-ascetic and puritanical 
 
 1 Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), Lecture VIII. 
 
156 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 condemnation of physical appetite as such, and specially of 
 the sexual appetite ; it is noticeable, in this connexion, that 
 St. Paul, in what may perhaps be described as a moment of 
 unguarded soliloquy, expresses the wish that all men were 
 celibates.1 It is to the Apostle’s ‘ twice-born’ tempera- 
 ment, and to intensity of feeling rather than to reasoned 
 theory, that we must ascribe the causes which prompt him 
 to an occasional, and possibly incautious, use of words which 
 appear to identify the hereditary tendency to sin with the 
 natural appetites of the body ; though, as we have already 
 pointed out, it is not difficult to correct the prima facie 
 impression which these words might produce by counter- 
 balancing them with other passages in which the body and 
 its divinely implanted instincts receive their proper honour, 
 and ‘ the flesh’ is given the neutral meaning which it bears 
 in the Old Testament Scriptures. 
 
 If we eliminate this accidental and temperamental 
 colouring which clings to St. Paul’s language about ‘ the 
 flesh,’ and endeavour to state the permanent essence of his 
 conception of ‘ Original Sin’ in the terms which we may 
 suppose that he would have used if he had been on his 
 guard against the unconscious bias mentioned above, we 
 shall be justified in describing the inherited moral disease 
 as the hypertrophy, even the elephantiasis, of those non- 
 rational and non-volitional elements in human nature which 
 are summed up under the names of ‘ emotion,’ ‘ feeling,’ 
 ‘instinct,’ ‘appetite. But the Apostle’s letters contain 
 no word which definitely asserts that guilt is attached to 
 the state of subjection to this disease. Even though, in a 
 highly rhetorical passage, inbred Sin is said to ‘ prove itself 
 superlatively sinful,’ this dictum must be understood in an 
 abstract and proleptic sense, in other words, as implying no 
 more than (a) that the inherited infirmity is, so to speak, 
 aesthetically objectionable seen from God’s point of view, 
 and (b) that it may be described as ‘ sin’ in a metaphorical 
 and improper sense, in virtue of its tendency to produce 
 actual transgressions; for only so can it be harmonised 
 with the deeper, more deliberate, and more authoritative 
 sentence, that where there is no consciousness of Law (as 
 
 tyr Corevil.7. 
 
THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 157 
 
 in the race between Adam and Moses, and in the individual 
 before the dawn of reason) sin is not accounted to be sin 
 (that is, does not involve guilt), St. Paul knows nothing 
 of a mystical or pre-natal participation of Adam’s posterity 
 in the sin of their first father, nor of the idea that inherited, 
 and therefore involuntary, infection with ‘ concupiscence ’ 
 is in itself deserving of punishment, even prior to and apart 
 from actual offences ; in other words, he knows nothing of 
 the conception of Original Guilt. 
 
 THE CONTEXT OF EVIL IN MAN 
 (a2) EVIL IN THE SUB-HUMAN WORLD 
 
 It might well be supposed that the foregoing exposition, 
 lengthy as it has inevitably been, would have exhausted 
 the hamartiological doctrine even of so profound and original 
 a thinker as the Apostle of the Gentiles. But the problem 
 of evil in man presents yet a further aspect, with which we 
 should expect a great Christian teacher to deal; and that 
 is the problem of its relation to evil outside man, to evil as 
 it exists, or may be thought to exist, in the planes of being 
 which lie above and below him, in the world of sub-human 
 nature, animate and inanimate, and in the world of super- 
 human spirits. And we shall find that, unlike many lesser 
 thinkers who have been content to ignore this question and 
 to treat evil as though it were a purely human phenomenon, 
 St. Paul has faced it in his private communings with God 
 and his own soul. His explanation of the evil which prevails 
 in Nature is enshrined in words of almost lyrical beauty 
 and power, to paraphrase which would be a profanation : 
 
 For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not 
 worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed 
 towards us. For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth 
 for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was sub- 
 jected to vanity, not of its own will, but by reason of him who 
 subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also shall be delivered 
 from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory 
 
 of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation 
 groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. 
 
 1 Rom. viii. 18-22. 
 
158 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Commentators are not agreed whether the mysterious 
 reference to ‘him who subjected the creation to vanity ’ 
 is meant to indicate Adam or the Creator; in any case, 
 however, the meaning is that the woes of the animal creation 
 are directly due to the Fall. The roots of this idea, as of 
 the other elements which make up the Adamic theory, lie 
 deep in the thought of the pre-Christian apocalyptists. The 
 belief that Nature was corrupted by the Fall of Adam is 
 derived ultimately from the primal curse pronounced, 
 according to the Genesis-story, upon the earth—‘ Thorns 
 also and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee’!; and 
 this was expanded by the pseudepigraphic writers so as 
 to include among the consequences of the Fall inclement 
 seasons, earthquakes and all destructive or terrifying natural 
 phenomena, the ferocity of the animal tribes. 
 
 The Apostle reproduces this belief, but with an impressive 
 difference. The apocalyptists had thought of the discords 
 in Nature as evil merely from the point of view of man, 
 as prejudicial to man’s comfort or physical well-being, as 
 entailing fear, or pain, or death upon man. With amazing 
 modernity of feeling, St. Paul merges himself in Nature, 
 and looks at the terror of existence, if we may so say, from 
 Nature’s point of view and through Nature’s own multi- 
 tudinous eyes. The vanity and futility which mark the 
 sub-human universe, the prodigal waste of life which the 
 teeming generative forces of the world inevitably involve, 
 procreating a million seeds to perish and decay for one that 
 attains to full development, the ceaseless, silent, ruthless 
 struggle for existence that underlies the smiling beauty of 
 a summer landscape—these things appear to him as evil 
 and God-defying in themselves, and not merely as perceived 
 by, or in their relations to, man. ‘ He is one of those, like 
 St. Francis of Assisi, to whom it is given to read the uncon- 
 scious thoughts of plants and animals. He seems to lay 
 his ear to the earth, and the confused murmur which he 
 hears has a meaning for him. It is creation’s yearning for 
 that happier state intended for it and of which it has been 
 defrauded.’ 2 We cannot, indeed, in the light of modern 
 knowledge, accept his naive theory that waste, and vanity, 
 
 +(5EN Hallet GS. 2 Sanday and Headlam, op. cit., p. 212. 
 
THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 159 
 
 and internecine hostility have been inflicted upon. sub- : 
 human life as a sort of vicarious punishment for the sin of 
 man; for we know that pain and death existed upon this 
 planet millions of years before man was born. But.we may 
 see beneath the Apostle’s words an intuition of the profound 
 truths that man is organic to nature, inseparable from his 
 context in the sub-human creation, and that evil in man 
 is homogeneous with, and not explicable apart from, evil 
 in the world at large. These vast problems cannot be 
 adequately dealt with now; but we may confidently claim 
 St. Paul’s authority in support of our modern faith 
 That nothing walks with aimless feet, 
 That not one life shall be destroyed, 
 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
 When God hath made the pile complete,! 
 
 and that, whether individual immortality be the destiny of 
 the lower animals or no, the sub-human universe of sentient 
 life can claim the ultimate fulfilment and perfection of its 
 being from the justice and love of its Creator, with no less 
 assurance, though with infinitely less of comprehension, 
 than the favoured race of man.? 
 
 THE CONTEXT OF Evit IN MAN 
 (6) Evil IN THE WORLD OF SPIRITS 
 
 Evil in man thus appears as set in a context or frame, 
 of which one side is the unconscious evil with which the 
 sub-hyman world is infected. The other side of this frame 
 is constituted by the evil which St. Paul believes to exist 
 on the superhuman plane, the ‘ spiritual powers of wicked- 
 ness in the heavenly places.’ The Pauline demonology is 
 in complete continuity and identity with that which we 
 have already noted in the Synoptic Gospels, and like it 
 
 1 Tennyson, In Memoriam, liv. 
 
 2 Cf. the great description of the Messianic millennium in Isaiah xi. 
 1-9. G. A. Smith draws attention to the fact that ‘ Isaiah and Paul, 
 chief apostles of the two covenants, both interrupt their magnificent odes 
 upon the outpouring of the Spirit, to remind us that the benefits of this 
 will be shared by the brute and unintelligent creation’ (The Book of Isaiah, 
 1889, vol. i. chap. x. III). 
 
 * For a detailed treatment of this subject see O. Everling, Die paulin- 
 ische Angelologie u. Daémonologie (1888). 
 
160 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 reproduces the main characteristics of current Jewish 
 opinion with regard to Satan and his aery host. The 
 demons have the power of plaguing men with physical 
 evils, such as the infirmity to which the Apostle alludes 
 under the name of a ‘ stake in the flesh,’ and which he 
 regards as a ‘messenger of Satan to buffet him’?; they 
 foment dissension in the Church,? and contrive hindrances 
 to St. Paul’s missionary plans *; they torment the faithful 
 with sinful solicitations and temptations.® (It is to be 
 observed that St. Paul’s extant letters do not contain any 
 attempt to synthesise the theory which finds the origin of 
 temptation in diabolic suggestions from without and that 
 which regards it as rooted in sinful impulses, connatural 
 with the flesh, welling up from within; doubtless it had 
 not occurred to him that these views required harmonisa- 
 tion.) But the chief théatre of their power is the pagan 
 Graeco-Roman world lying outside the spheres both of 
 Law and of Grace. They give reality and personality to 
 the imaginary gods of heathendom, communicating their 
 impure essence to their benighted votaries through the 
 pagan Mysteries, even as Christ bestows the participation 
 in His Body and Blood upon His worshippers through the 
 Christian Eucharist ®; their power over this outlying 
 domain of darkness and sin is so great that they are 
 described as ‘ the princes of this age’ ’ who (through the 
 agency of Pilate, the representative of the heathen empire) 
 crucified the Lord of glory, and their chief is even styled 
 ‘the god of this age.’ ® In the Epistle to the Ephesians, 
 which, if not Pauline in authorship, is at least thoroughly 
 Pauline in sentiment and thought, some of them are 
 apparently identified with the ‘ world-rulers,’ ® the malignant 
 
 1 The Church can in a sense utilise this diabolical power for discip- 
 linary purposes, by handing the excommunicate person over to Satan 
 ‘for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day 
 of the Lord Jesus’ (1 Cor. v. 5); cf. also1r Tim. i. 20. 
 
 ee Wy Oa is.) ey. Bek O00 ths Bae ht 40y Dhessii...te- 
 
 5 r Cor. vii. 5; this conception would also seem to be implied in Rom. 
 XVi. 20. 
 
 Ora (Cor x20} 20. PPT COLA ..8, 8 2 Cor. iv. 4. 
 
 ®° Eph. vi. 12; cf. also the reference to the orowyeia or elemental 
 spirits, in Gal.iv. 9. For information about the xoopoxpdaropes in Gnosti- 
 cism, see Edwyn Bevan, Hellenism and Christianity (1921), pp. 77 ff. 
 
THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 161 
 
 planetary spirits who, according to the lore of the Gnostics, 
 drawn from the astral cults of Babylonia, shed disastrous 
 influence upon the destinies of men: others, of humbler 
 rank, find their home in the lowest or sublunary firmament, 
 through which they ride the midnight gales, under the 
 leadership of the ‘ prince of the power of the air.’ } 
 
 It is natural at this point to raise the question, How, in 
 St. Paul’s view, had the evil spirits become evil? (We must 
 assume that the ethical monotheism, in which, as a devout 
 Israelite, he believed, would have prevented him from 
 holding that they had been created evil by God, or that 
 they were co-eternal with God.) Various answers were 
 given by the Apostle’s Jewish contemporaries to this 
 question. Josephus holds that the demons are the souls 
 of wicked men departed.2. The apocalyptic writers who 
 were influenced by the older Fall-tradition identified them 
 with the fallen Watchers and the spirits of the dead giants 
 their sons  ; those who adhered to the newer Adamic theory 
 doubtless believed in some sort of ultimate pre-mundane 
 “fall of the angels,’ such as is described by the Slavonic 
 Enoch in the following passage : 
 
 And one from out the order of angels, having turned away 
 with the order that was under him, conceived an impossible 
 thought, to place his throne higher than the clouds above the 
 earth, that he might become equal in rank to my [that is, God’s] 
 power. And I threw him out from the height with his angels, 
 and he was flying in the air continuously above the bottomless 
 (abyss).4 
 
 It might be presumed a priori that St. Paul, as a believer 
 in the Adam-tradition, would have given his allegiance to 
 
 1 Eph. ii. 2. For the idea that the earth’s atmosphere is the special 
 haunt of evil spirits, cf. the passage 2 Enoch xxix. 4, quoted above, and the 
 parallels adduced by Morfill and Charles, Book of the Secrets of Enoch 
 (1896), note 7m loc. 
 
 Abies f.Vit.. 6; 3: 
 
 8 So 1 Enoch vi.-xi., cvi. (fragments of the ‘ Book of Noah’); xv., 
 xvi. (from the original ‘ Book of Enoch’). But it should be noted that 
 the ‘ Similitudes’ distinguish sharply between the ‘ Watchers’ who fell 
 in the days of Jared, and the ‘ Satans’ who are said to have corrupted 
 them, and who must therefore be presumed to have become wicked them- 
 selves at some earlier period (Ixix. 4, 5). 
 
 4 2 Enoch xxix. 4. 
 
 M 
 
162 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 this last view ; and in point of fact the language which he 
 uses in 2 Cor. xi. 3 (the passage already quoted regarding 
 the seduction of Eve by the serpent) and Rom. v. 12 
 (‘ through one man sin entered into the world ’—presumably 
 from some already existing external source) presupposes a 
 tempter who is already corrupt himself before he corrupts 
 our first parents. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that 
 in the Apostle’s thought there lies, dimly descried behind 
 the historical, or supposedly historical, Fall of Adam, a much 
 more ancient, remote, and mysterious ‘ Fall’ of conscious 
 and intelligent beings, an ultimate and transcendental 
 ‘Fall’ from which the malign infection of evil has percolated 
 downwards through the transgression of Adam into the 
 human stock, and through the Divine sentence consequent 
 upon that transgression into the sub-human creation. 
 Immense vistas of speculation are opened up by these 
 audacious conceptions: but the attempt to penetrate them 
 must be reserved for the constructive and concluding part 
 of our enquiry. 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 We have thus seen that the doctrines of the Fall and 
 Original Sin come to us on the authority of St. Paul and of 
 the Church, rather than on that of Christ, though it is not 
 unreasonable to claim for them at least as much Dominical 
 sanction as is implicit in the fact of non-prohibition. It is 
 possible that in the final lectures of this course we may be 
 able to go further ; if our examination of these beliefs on 
 their intrinsic merits shows that they correspond to the 
 facts of human life, we shall be entitled to conclude that 
 they represent the working out, into clear-cut and explicit 
 form, of what is tacitly implied in our Lord’s undoubted 
 teaching as to man’s universal need of salvation. Mean- 
 while, it is impossible not to be impressed by the extreme 
 humanity and reasonableness of the Apostle’s teaching, as 
 compared with some of the more rigid products of later 
 theology. Though he seems to assume the natural immor- 
 tality of unfallen man,! he teaches no doctrine of ‘ Original 
 
 1 See above, p. 124. 
 
THE DOCTRINE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 163 
 
 Righteousness’ or perfection; the Rabbinical fictions 
 which represent Adam as surpassing the angels in glory, 
 intellectual power, and conscious holiness are totally absent 
 from his pages. Nor can his words be cited in defence of 
 the idea of ‘ Original Guilt’; despite a few rhetorical turns 
 of phrase, no trace is to be found in his Epistles of the 
 irrational paradox, that we are morally culpable for pos- 
 sessing instincts which we cannot help possessing. And 
 blended with this Pauline thought, which is so reasonable 
 precisely because so little defined, is the great conception 
 which we may well be disposed to borrow, at a later stage, 
 as the foundation-stone of a modern and constructive inter- 
 pretation of the doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin: 
 the conception of the unitary nature of Evil as pervading 
 the three planes of life, sub-human, human, and superhuman. 
 It was St. Paul’s prophetic intuition which first saw clearly 
 that moral evil in man is no unique and isolated pheno- 
 menon, standing out with stark inexplicability in the midst 
 of an otherwise moral and orderly cosmos; that it has 
 upward connexions, joining it with the ‘ spiritual things of 
 wickedness in the heavenly places,’ and downward rami- 
 fications, running into the ferocious egotism and the 
 diabolical cruelty which mar and ravage the infra-human 
 world. The moral struggle in man is not a single combat 
 waged within the narrow lists of the individual soul: it is 
 part of a vast battle-front formed by the interlocked forces 
 of Good and Evil, swaying to and fro in a conflict which is 
 not indeed eternal (for to admit that would be a surrender 
 to the ancient foe of dualism) but which is as old as Time 
 and as wide as space, and which moves to the predestined 
 climax of a Redemption in which not man alone, but the 
 whole extra-human universe, in all its ordered hierarchical 
 gradations from the highest discarnate intelligence + to the 
 lowliest speck of animated tissue may be delivered, through 
 the all-prevailing Blood of Jesus Christ, from the servitude of 
 corruption into the liberty of the glory of the Children of God. 
 
 1 Col. i. 19, 20 asserts that the benefits of the Atonement extend even 
 to the hostile spirit-world: ‘ For it was the good pleasure of the Father 
 . . . through him to reconcile all things unto himself, having made peace 
 through the blood of his cross ; through him, I say, whether things upon 
 earth or things in the heavens.’ 
 
¥ 
 ey. 4 ; 
 rua ee 
 Ry ee oe 8) 
 » Bs | 
 
 te 
 
 aa 
 f 4.) beter tie 
 Br ae ei 4 inte 
 
 
 
IV. 
 
 THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 
 OF THE FIRST FOUR CENTURIES 
 
” tM ta A / ‘ 
 €oTw avayKns pha, Jeadv widiopa madaov, 
 atdvov, mAaréeco. KaTeodhpnytapevov SpKots, 
 
 Ss / > / / / a / 
 evTé TiS GuTrAakinor dovw dira yvia pinvn 
 <veixet 8 > Os Kk’ ErlopKov auaptyaas €mopdcon, 
 Saipoves oltre paxpaiwvos reAdyaor Biovo, 
 Tpis pv puplas Wpas amo paxdpwy aAdAnoba, 
 dvopevovs travtota ba yxpovov eidea Ovntar, 
 
 > / / 4 / 
 apyaXéas Bidtovo petaAAdacovta KeAevous, 
 aifépiov pev yap ade pévos movTovde SidKee 
 
 / > > \ A > / a 9.07 > ‘ 
 movtos 0° €s xOoves ovdas amémtuace, yaia 8’ és adyas 
 Hhertov dacBovtos, 6 8 aif€pos euBadre Sivas, 
 addXros 8 €€ aGANov SéxerTaL, atuyéovar Se mavres. 
 
 a Nee \ A #28 \ / Ne ed / 
 Tov Kal €yw viv etl, pvyas Oed0ev Kal adyjrns, 
 velket pravoueve mlavvos. 
 
 EMPEDOCLES. 
 
 Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach ! in meiner Brust, 
 Die eine will sich von der andern trennen ; 
 Die eine halt in derber Liebeslust 
 
 Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen ; 
 Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Duft 
 
 Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen. 
 
 GOETHE: Faust, Teil 1. 
 
LECTURE LV. 
 
 THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH OF THE 
 PIKRST BPOURIVEN TU RIES 
 
 Rom. v. 19: ‘ As through the one man’s disobedience the many were 
 made sinners, even so through the obedience of the 
 one shall the many be made righteous.’ 
 
 HITHERTO our research into the origin and growth of the 
 doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin has moved in an 
 exclusively Semitic and Jewish environment. With the 
 missionary labours of St. Paul, Christianity crosses from 
 Asia into Europe, and the point upon which our historical 
 research is focussed crosses with it. The transplantation 
 of our religion from its Syrian birthplace into the Western 
 and Aryan world, the world of Graeco-Roman culture, of 
 science and philosophy, inevitably involved the subjection 
 of its main constitutive ideas to a process of intellectual 
 scrutiny, analysis, and discussion, out of which grew up the 
 great fabric of Catholic theology, broad-based upon the 
 foundations laid by St. Paul and St. John: and the ideas 
 of the Fall and of the hereditary taint or weakness, vague 
 and ill-defined as they had been in Jewish and primitive 
 Christian thought, were now destined to share in this 
 process, to shed the pictorial and mythological guise which 
 they had hitherto worn, and, within the realm of Western 
 Christian theology, to assume an armour of clear-cut 
 conceptual forms, moulded in the furnace of acrimonious 
 controversy. It is clear that the somewhat general and 
 elastic doctrine of St. Paul described in our last Lecture 
 was bound, when subjected to rigorous examination, to 
 raise certain great issues which have dominated the sub- 
 sequent history of these ideas, and it will facilitate the 
 further course of our study if we define these issues at once. 
 
168 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 They may be formulated in the shape of five questions, as 
 follows : 
 
 Firstly. Is the Paradise-story of Gen. iii. to be regarded 
 as literal history or merely as an allegory symbolising 
 ethical and spiritual truths ? 
 
 Secondly. What was the condition of man before the 
 Fall? Is this to be described as one of ‘ non-moral 
 innocence, analogous to the state which we attribute to 
 the animals ? or is it possible and necessary to assume that 
 he enjoyed that exalted state of moral and _ spiritual 
 perfection which is described, by those theologians who 
 accept this hypothesis, as ‘ Original Righteousness’ ? 
 
 Thirdly. What is the precise nature of the damnosa 
 haereditas alleged to have been bequeathed, as the result 
 of the Fall, by the first man to his descendants? Is ita 
 positive infection or corruption, or merely a negative 
 weakness ? Is it the fact of physical desire, or inability to 
 control it? Is it merely a psychological state, involving 
 liability to sin in the future, or does it also include a 
 juridical status of responsibility for the sin committed by 
 our first ancestor thousands of years before we were born ? 
 In other words, what is ‘ Original Sin’ ? and does it include 
 * Original Guilt ’ ? 
 
 Fourthly. Assuming that Adam communicated ‘ Original 
 Sin’ to his descendants, in what way is the mode of this 
 communication to be conceived? Is it to be regarded as 
 consisting in the entail of physiological heredity, or merely 
 in the concatenation of example and imitation, such as is 
 called ‘ social heredity’? Or are we to assume that Adam, 
 when he fell, actually was the whole of humanity, mystically 
 or literally, in such a way that, as we were in him, his sin 
 is Our sin ? 
 
 Fifthly. What, in the light of any conclusions which 
 may be reached with regard to the foregoing issues, is the 
 present state of human nature, with which Redemption 
 now has to deal? Is it totally depraved and corrupted in 
 all its faculties, or is the hereditary wound to be regarded 
 aS a comparatively unimportant scratch ? or, if the truth 
 lies somewhere between these two extremes, at what precise 
 point is it to be fixed ° 
 
= 
 
 THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 169 
 
 These are questions which are both momentous and 
 subtle, and it must therefore be expected that the task of 
 determining the outlines of the really ‘ Catholic ’ or universal 
 doctrine will become more complicated as our research 
 moves down the centuries. In order to decide what 
 precisely has been believed ubique, semper, et ab omnibus, 
 it will be necessary to enquire, not merely whether the Fall- 
 doctrine can be said to have been held by the Christian 
 Church as a whole during a given period, but also (if we 
 conclude that it was) what answers were returned to these 
 crucial questions during the epoch under discussion. It 
 need not, however, be feared that the subject-matter of our 
 research will swell to unmanageable dimensions. As the 
 ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin, despite their apparent 
 logical dependence upon the story of Adam and Eve, are 
 really rooted in, and derive their long-continued vitality 
 from, the facts of spiritual and ethical experience, in 
 particular from the experience known as repentance, we 
 shall find that the opinions held by Christian thinkers with 
 regard to these five cardinal issues tend to group and com- 
 bine themselves into two well-defined versions of the Fall- 
 doctrine, corresponding to those two contrasted types of 
 religious temperament which William James has con- 
 veniently labelled as the ‘ once-born’ and the ‘ twice-born ’ 
 respectively.t The ‘ once-born’ or ‘ healthy-minded’ man, 
 whose religious life has unfolded itself in equable and 
 passionless development, exempt from crises or storms, 
 thinks of sin in the light of human freedom and responsibility, 
 and tends to minimize, ignore, or deny the suggested element 
 of inherited obliquity within his soul. So far as he concedes 
 its existenceat all, it is for hima weakness, a lack or deficiency, 
 not a corruption or an offence, and deserves the compassion 
 rather than the wrath of an all-just Creator. But the 
 ‘ twice-born’ man, the ‘ sick soul,’ the Augustine or the 
 Bunyan blessed or cursed from birth with the mysterious 
 heritage of neural and emotional instability, whose passions 
 have been transformed, whose communion with God and 
 peace of mind have been won through the paroxysm of an 
 
 1 This distinction has been already mentioned in connexion with 
 St. Paul’s doctrine of sin: see above, Lecture III, p-155f. 
 
 “se 
 
170 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 instantaneous conversion, thinks of himself as a ‘ brand 
 plucked from the burning,’ by no effort or volition of his 
 own, and of his unconverted nature as saturated with moral 
 evil and intrinsically hateful to God even before and apart 
 from any particular or concrete transgressions of His law. 
 That portion, therefore, of our historical survey which deals 
 with the evolution of the ideas of the Fall and of Original 
 Sin within Christianity after the Apostolic age will be 
 largely devoted to the task of tracing the parallel growth 
 and studying the mutual interactions of the two classical 
 versions of the Fall-doctrine, to which these two types of 
 spiritual experience have necessarily given birth. 
 
 This post-Apostolic history falls naturally into three 
 sections, concerned respectively with Christian opinion 
 between St. Paul and St. Augustine, with the teaching of 
 St. Augustine himself, and with the subsequent developments 
 of Augustinianism. The figure of Augustine, probably the 
 greatest man, next to St. Paul, whom the Christian Church 
 has ever known, stands like a Colossus upon a mountain 
 crest, marking the watershed between the ancient and the 
 modern worlds, and casting its shadow far along the road 
 by which the Fall-doctrine was destined to travel. But the 
 overwhelming influence which the Doctor of Hippo exercised 
 both upon the form and upon the content of these ideas, as 
 upon the rest of Christian theology, at any rate in Western 
 Europe, renders it all the more important, for our purpose 
 of arriving at an accurate formulation of the deep under- 
 lying mind of historic Christianity in regard to this subject, 
 that we should give special attention to the thought of 
 the primitive, pre-Augustinian Church, the Catholic Church 
 of the first four Christian centuries. If, without inelegant 
 abruptness, a second and entirely different metaphor may 
 be employed to illustrate this great man’s place in the 
 history of Christian thought, we will venture to suggest 
 that a giant personality such as his might be expected to 
 have the effect of warping and drawing out of proportion the 
 thought of his age, much as the passage of a comet near the 
 solar system has the effect of perturbing and distorting the 
 orbits of the planets. But, in the writers of the epoch which 
 preceded the transit of Augustine across the theological 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 171 
 
 firmament, we may be confident that we shall find nothing 
 but the unruffled, uncorrupted thought of historic Chris- 
 tianity, free from the tremors and oscillations which the 
 gravitational influence of this majestic luminary might 
 a priort be deemed likely to produce. 
 
 THE FALL-DOCTRINE DURING THE SUB-APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 Without further preface, then, we resume the thread of 
 our historical investigation, which now leads us into the 
 obscure and dimly lighted region of the sub-Apostolic age ; 
 by which term I mean for the purposes of the enquiry to 
 denote the hundred and twenty years, more or less, which 
 elapsed between the deaths of the chief Apostles, St. Peter 
 and St. Paul (which probably took place in the year A.D. 64), 
 and the birth of systematic theology in the writings of 
 Irenaeus (c. A.D. 180). Our evidence for this period consists 
 in the remains of the so-called ‘ Apostolic Fathers,’ and of 
 the early Apologists (Aristides, Justin Martyr, Tatian, 
 Theophilus). It is a striking fact, the significance of which 
 will presently be discussed, that amongst the documents 
 which have survived from the first ninety years after the 
 deaths of the chief Apostles, that is which are of a date 
 anterior to the works of Justin Martyr (who wrote c. A.D. 
 150-155), only one can be found containing an apparent 
 allusion to the Adamic Fall-theory. This is the anonymous 
 treatise known as the Efzsile of Barnabas, dated by 
 Lightfoot as early as A.D. 70-79, but by the majority of 
 scholars about A.D. 130,! in which it is asserted that there 
 is a parallelism between the serpents which attacked the 
 Israelites in the wilderness 2? and the serpent through which 
 ‘the transgression’ (7) aapaPaows, the technical term em- 
 ployed by later Greek theology for the ‘ Fall’ 8) was wrought 
 in Eve. 
 
 1 See Harnack, Chronol. der alichristl. Littevatur (1897), 1. 410-428. 
 Bardenhewer, Patrology (E. tr.), p. 24, following Hilgenfeld, dates it during 
 the reign of Nerva, A.D. 96-98. 
 
 2 Numbers xxi. 6-9. 
 
 3 See below, p. 252 n. 4. 
 
x 
 
 172 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 ‘For the Lord caused all manner of serpents to bite 
 them, and they died (forasmuch as the transgression was 
 wrought in Eve through the serpent) that He might convince 
 them that by reason of their-transgression they should be 
 delivered over to the affliction of death.’ 4 
 
 But this passage stands by itself. Not a word can 
 be quoted from Clement of Rome, the Teaching of the 
 Apostles, the Epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp, or the 
 earliest surviving Apology, that of Aristides, as evidence 
 for the existence of a belief in the Fall of Adam as the fount 
 of human sin. In short, it would seem true to say that 
 (with the exception of the doubtful allusion just mentioned) 
 no trace is found of the Adamic Fall-theory in what survives 
 of the Christian literature written between the Epistle to 
 the Romans and the works of Justin Martyr. It is further 
 to be noted that this solitary allusion (if such it is to be 
 deemed) to the Fall-theory based upon Gen. ii. is balanced 
 by allusions to the two other Jewish theories regarding the 
 origin of evil, one to each, occurring in the documents of 
 this period. The canonical ‘Second Epistle of Peter’ 
 (which is now admitted on all hands to be a polemical 
 treatise, cast, in accordance with a literary convention 
 common in the ancient world, into the form of a letter 
 supposed to have been written by the martyred Prince- 
 Apostle, and dating from c. A.D. 150) refers twice to 
 the Watcher-theory?; whilst the Shepherd of Hermas 
 (written not earlier than A.D. go or later than A.D. 140) 
 appears in one passage ® to assume the doctrine of the yé¢er 
 ha-ra‘ (émvOvpia wovynpa), which it asserts to be a‘ daughter 
 of the devil.’ We will content ourselves for the moment with 
 noting the fact that each of the three Jewish theories of the 
 origin of sin can claim one reference in the scanty literary 
 detritus which has come down to us from the dark period 
 
 1 xii. 5. énolncev yap Kupios mavta odw Sdxvew adtovs, Kal anébvnoxov, 
 €mevd1) 7) mrapd Baous dua Too Odhews ev Eva éeyévero, va edéyEn adrovds or dia 
 Thy mapaBpaow adrayv eis Ort Oavarov tapadoOjnaovrat. 
 
 23. 45 11.4. 3see Lecture 11], p.,114. 
 
 3 Mand. xii. ; this passage, in fact, contains a statement of the doctrine 
 of the Two Yecarim (emOupia movnpa and émiOvpia dyaby)—an interesting 
 instance of the way in which Rabbinical influences continued to penetrate 
 the Christian Church long after its formal separation from Judaism. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 173 
 
 between the deaths of the Apostles and the point at which 
 the nascent Catholic Church begins to stand out in the light 
 of comparatively full documentary evidence. When we 
 pass this point, a change comes over the scene. The last 
 thirty years of the ‘ sub-Apostolic age’ (c. A.D. 150-180) are 
 marked by a constellation of three Apologists, Justin, 
 Tatian, Theophilus; each of whom contains testimony to 
 the existence of the Adamic doctrine, testimony which is 
 perhaps vague enough when contrasted with the rigid 
 confessional statements familiar to us, but which (at any 
 rate in the case of the two last-named writers) wears an 
 appearance of almost startling definiteness to one who 
 approaches it fresh from the apparent blankness and incon- 
 clusiveness of the records of the first ninety years. To 
 these authors, therefore, our attention must now be turned. 
 (1) Justin Martyr. This philosophic convert to Chris- 
 tianity must be pronounced even by the most indulgent 
 critic to be a singularly hazy and confused thinker. We 
 need adduce no further proof of this than his interpolation 
 of the ‘ host of good angels’ between the Son of God and 
 the Holy Spirit in his enumeration of the objects of Christian 
 worship.t_ We shall therefore be prepared to find that such 
 passing allusions to the subject as are contained in his 
 writings are marked by confusion of thought and lack of 
 mental grip. There is no systematic treatment of the sub- 
 ject, but there are scattered and incidental observations 
 which, when collected, would seem to imply the presence in 
 his thought of something like the Pauline doctrine. The 
 empirical universality of sin is affirmed in the Dialogue with 
 Trypho the Jew (c. 95) in which it is asserted that the whole 
 race of man lies under a curse.2. Though the immediate 
 grounds of the curse are subsequently defined as actual sins, 
 it is natural to suppose that there is a connexion between 
 the idea of the empirical universality of sin and the ideas 
 expressed in the preceding chapter (94) in which Justin 
 borrows the curious conceit of ‘ Barnabas’ with regard to 
 the parallelism between the serpent which tempted our first 
 parents and:the serpents which attacked the Israelites in the 
 
 1 1 Apol. 6. 
 
 2 ‘ ‘ ~ , > cA , ¢ a e€ ‘ ie ” 
 Kat yap Tap yévos avOpwruv evpeOrjceTat UO KaTapay Ov. 
 
174 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 wilderness, and affirms that the purpose of the Incarnation 
 was to destroy the power of the old serpent, and to bring 
 man salvation from his bites, which are evil deeds, idolatries, 
 and other acts of unrighteousness. It would seem that the 
 underlying thought implies some sort of causal connexion 
 between the act of the serpent narrated in Gen. ili. and the 
 present sinful condition of mankind, though this connexion 
 is not of so stringent a character as to impair the reality of 
 human free will. Inc. 88 of the Dialogue, the influence of 
 the first man’s sin and the personal guilt of each of his 
 descendants are set side by side, without any attempt at 
 synthesis, in an allusion to— 
 
 . .. the race of men, who from Adam had fallen under 
 death and the deceit of the serpent, not to mention the individual 
 responsibility of each member of the race who sinned on his own 
 account.? 
 
 But the Fall finds its predestined counterpart in the 
 Redemption wrought by Christ ; and in c. 100 of the same 
 treatise we meet for the first time the famous parallel of 
 Eve and Mary, which was seized upon by Christian imagi- 
 nation as a natural pendant to the Pauline comparison of 
 Adam and Christ : 
 
 He was made man of the Virgin, that by the same way in 
 which the disobedience which proceeded from the serpent took 
 its rise, it might also receive its destruction. For Eve when a 
 virgin and undefiled conceived the word of the serpent, and 
 brought forth disobedience and death. But Mary the Virgin, 
 receiving faith and joy, when the angel Gabriel told her the good 
 news that the Spirit of the Lord should come upon her 
 answered, Be it unto me according to thy word.? 
 
 Little or nothing is explicitly said as to the exact nature 
 of the causal link between the first man’s sin and the sins of 
 
 1 ey: 4 ~ > A \ ~ e > 4 4 e , 
 ovde TO yevvnOijvat avTov Kal oTavpwOfvar, ws evdens ToUTWY, UmépeveV, 
 3 +) e \ ~ / ~ ~ > 4 a > A a? A e A 4 A Ul 
 GAN’ vmep Tod yevous Tod THV avOpwrwr, 6 amd Tob Addy bro Advatov Kal mAdvnv 
 ~ > / \ > ~ 
 THY TOD Opews EmENTMKEL, Tapa THY LOlav aitiay ExdaTov avTa@v movnpevaapevov. 
 a / ” , “~ A 
 2 kal dua Tis tapfévov avOpwrov yeyovévar, va Kat 8” Hs 6500 7) amo Tod 
 od \ 4 > \ Er \ Ps) AY v4 onl rf.) lot ‘ tA A , 
 ews TapaKkon THY apxiv EAaBe, Kal dia tavTns THs 6800 Kal KatdAvow AaBn. 
 / ‘ s w \ ” A 3 4 > A a ~ 
 maplevos yap ovca Eva Kai apfopos tov Adyov tov amd Tod dhews avddaBoica 
 / ” /, 8 aA 
 mapakonv Kal Odvatov érexe’ miotw S€ Kal yapav AaBotaa Mapia % zapbévos 
 % r / > ae Bi yA > a @ A , 23: cig | >? , 
 evayyeACopevov avi T'aBpunA ayyédov ort mvetpa Kupiou én’ abriy emeAevoeTa.. . 
 > / td od , 
 ameKpivato’ yévo.Td pol KaTa TO phud cov, 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 175 
 
 his posterity. A phrase, indeed, which occurs in the first 
 Apology (c. 10)—‘ the universally evil and manifold appetite 
 which exists in each man’ 1—is reminiscent of the idea of 
 the ‘ evil imagination.’ But it is possible that a vague and 
 fugitive allusion to some kind of hereditary taint or flaw 
 may be discovered in his exposition of the regenerating 
 effects of baptism, in which we are told that man by birth is 
 ‘a child of necessity and ignorance,’ but that by baptism 
 he becomes ‘a child of choice and knowledge.’ ? It is evident 
 that Justin regarded the sin of Adam as having had some 
 kind of evil influence upon the race, but it is not clear 
 whether he regarded this evil influence as having been 
 propagated by way of physical or merely of social heredity. 
 In other words, his ideas on the subject would seem to be 
 considerably vaguer than those of St. Paul; and it is certain 
 that the explanation of evil which interests him most, and 
 occupies the forefront of his thinking on the subject, is to be 
 found in his conception of the ‘ evil demons,’ who according 
 to primitive Christian thought swarmed everywhere, speak- 
 ing through the pagan oracles, working lying wonders, and 
 obsessing the bodies and souls of men. 
 
 Much more explicit and exhaustive treatments of the 
 subject are to be found in the Apology of Tatian, the Syrian 
 ascetic and student of the Gospels, and in the treatise 
 To Autolycus of Theophilus, reckoned by tradition as the 
 sixth Bishop of Antioch after St. Peter; both of which 
 documents may be dated somewhere between A.D. 170 and 
 180. 
 
 (2) Tatian tells us that man was created free and non- 
 moral. He was not created good, for God alone is good by 
 nature, but was created with a capacity for goodness ; and 
 the assistance of the Spirit or the Logos (Christian theology 
 
 1 qq ev ExdoTw KaKiv mpos TavTAa Kal ToiKiAny dvoet EmOvplav. It is 
 noteworthy that the ‘ evil demons’ are in this passage said to take the 
 kak? emOupuia as an ally (ovupayos)—an anticipation of the familiar homiletic 
 method of combining the theories which respectively attribute temptation 
 to the suggestion of Satan and to the inbred fault of human nature. 
 
 21 Apol. 61. éaws ph avdykns téxva pyndé ayvolas pévwpev adda 
 mpoaiptcews Kal emoTHuns. But see the whole passage, which appears in 
 a vague and elusive way to bracket together ‘ physical’ and ‘ social’ 
 
 heredity as grounds of the evil tendency in man. 
 3 ovatio contra Graeécos, 7. 
 
176 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 is still not very clear as to the distinction between the two) 
 was given him in order to help him to realise this capacity. 
 As a result of his sint the guidance of the Spirit was with- 
 drawn ; man became mortal, and was shut out from inter- 
 course with God. Hence the human soul is afflicted by an 
 inherent weakness which renders it susceptible to the 
 assaults of the demons. This weakness, however, is not so 
 grave as to destroy the power of self-determination and 
 consequent responsibility, on which Tatian strongly insists. 
 If we allow for the difference of times and the absence of 
 technical terminology, this is almost exactly the doctrine 
 of Duns Scotus, which finds the essence of ‘ Original Sin ’ 
 in the lack of the supernatural gifts of grace enjoyed by 
 the first man in his paradisal condition.2 (3) A similar pre- 
 sentation of the subject is found in the Apology addressed 
 by Theophilus to Autolycus.2 Man was created neither 
 mortal nor immortal, but capable of either state. God gave 
 him ‘ a starting-point for progress ’ (afoppx) tpoxomyjs), and if 
 he had made good use of this he would have developed 
 rapidly in the way of sanctification and intellectual per- 
 fection, finally becoming refined into pure spirit and 
 assimilated to the divine nature. His unfallen state is said 
 to have been infantile and undeveloped,’ and it is on this 
 basis that Theophilus explains the divine prohibition 
 against man’s acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge in 
 itself is good, but some kinds of knowledge are undesirable 
 for children. If man had followed the upward path of 
 development, as his Creator had intended, the ban upon the 
 acquisition of knowledge might possibly have been removed 
 at a later date. All the physical woes of human life are to 
 be reckoned as the consequences of man’s expulsion from 
 Paradise ; but there is no mention of a train of interior and 
 psychological effects flowing from the sin which merited this 
 expulsion. Again, however, as in the case of Justin, though 
 both Tatian and Theophilus seem to accept the general 
 
 1 This is vaguely described as ‘ following that one of the angels who 
 was wiser than the rest, because he was the first-created’ and ‘ regarding 
 
 him as God.’ 
 2 See Lecture VI, p. 410. 3 ad Autol. ii. 24, 25. 
 
 © 
 
 4 ibid. 25: 6 "Addp Ere vimos wv: cf. also dua 8é Kal emi mdciova, 
 xpovov €BovrAeTo arAoby Kal axépatov diapetvar Tov avOpwrov vnmialovra, 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 197 
 
 teaching of St. Paul as to the entrance of sin into the world 
 through Adam, it is nevertheless clear that the theory 
 which really dominates their minds, and is instinct with the 
 poignancy born of direct experience (real or supposed), is 
 that of an airy multitude of demons which haunt the earth 
 and the lower atmosphere, sometimes appearing visibly in 
 the character of the pagan gods and perpetrating monstrous 
 crimes, and always assailing the individual Christian with 
 the invisible weapons of evil imaginations and thoughts. 
 As we have before pointed out, the hypotheses of diabolical 
 suggestion ab extva and of evil auto-suggestion ab intra, 
 arising from an inherited inclination or predisposition of the 
 soul towards sin, are by no means to be considered as 
 mutually irreconcileable explanations of the fact of wrongful 
 impulse ; but they are distinct, and at least potentially 
 alternative, explanations ; and it would seem that in the 
 minds of these three Apologists, typical, we need not doubt, 
 of the Roman? and Syrian Churches of their day, whilst the 
 second is formally believed, it is the first which is most 
 intensely felt and which has the greatest share in determining 
 Christian practice. All the writers of this epoch insist 
 strongly upon the reality of man’s free-will.3 
 
 THE RELATION OF ST. PAUL’S TEACHING TO THE THOUGHT 
 OF THE SUB-APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 At the close of the sub-Apostolic age it is natural to 
 pause for a moment, in order, if possible, to discover an 
 
 eeecture. LIT, p. 169, 
 
 2 After his baptism, Justin appears to have resided at Rome (Eus. H.E. 
 iv. 11) and to have been martyred there (7b7d. iv. 16). 
 
 8 It may be added, for the sake of completeness, that the literature of 
 this period contains three allusions, other than those discussed in the text, 
 to the Paradise-story of Gen. ili.: namely, Epistle to Diognetus, 12 (a 
 rhetorical allegorisation of Paradise) ; a saying of an unnamed‘ Presbyter ’ 
 (that is, one who had been taught by Apostles) preserved by Irenaeus, adv. 
 haer. 11. xxxiii. 2 (Harvey); and another saying of unnamed‘ Presbyters,’ 
 ibid., V.v.1. None of these allusions, when examined, yields any testimony 
 to the existence of a Fall-doctrine. Athenagoras, libellus pro Christianis, 24, 
 25 (ed. E. Schwartz, in Texte u. Untersuch. iv. 2) alludes to the Watcher- 
 story of Gen. vi., but uses it merely as an explanation of the origin of the 
 demons, whom he (doubtless following 1 Enoch) identifies with the lustful 
 angels and the spirits of the giants their sons. 
 
 N 
 
178 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 explanation of certain remarkable phenomena disclosed by 
 our survey of its literary remains. These are, firstly, the 
 fact that—whereas St. Paul, writing to the Corinthian and 
 Roman churches, in A.D. 52 and 56 respectively, seems to 
 assume the Adamic Fall-doctrine with the greatest con- 
 fidence, as an idea entirely familiar to his readers, and there- 
 fore presumably to all Christians—no other trace of this 
 doctrine (with the exception of the doubtful passage in 
 ‘ Barnabas ’ mentioned above) is found in Christian literature 
 until we come to Justin Martyr, nearly a hundred years later 
 than the dates of 1 Corinthians and Romans ; and, secondly, 
 the fact that when we have once passed the mysterious 
 date c. A.D. 150, unmistakeable allusions to the Fall-doctrine 
 begin to occur, and, as we shall see, are found in ecclesiastical 
 writers with increasing frequency the further we descend the 
 stream of the centuries. It is tempting to explain the (all 
 but complete) silence of the first ninety years by the sugges- 
 tion that this is merely apparent, due to the scantiness of the 
 literary evidence ; and that, for all we know, the Expositions 
 of Papias, the Apology of Quadratus, the Dialogue of Aristo 
 of Pella, and other writings of this remote epoch which have 
 perished through the lapse of time or the rage of persecutors, 
 may have abounded in references to the sin of Adam and 
 its disastrous results. But the historical causes—accident, 
 persecutions, and the like—which have destroyed so many 
 of the documents produced during this period, must clearly 
 be deemed, precisely because from our point of view they 
 were blind and fortuitous, to have operated with complete 
 impartiality as between the ideas which may have been 
 expressed in those documents. The doctrine of chances, 
 therefore, compels us to assume that, on the whole, the 
 proportion which the various ideas of the Faith bear to each 
 other in such sub-Apostolic literature as actually survives 
 does roughly represent the balance of the collective mind of 
 Christendom as it existed during this epoch. If this be so, 
 we are driven to the conclusions that the Church of the first 
 three generations after the Apostles, whilst holding, in 
 undefined and rudimentary form, the great beliefs in the 
 Godhead of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in Christ’s death 
 for man, and in the Divine power of the sacraments, had 
 
THE’ FALL-DOCTRINE: IN THE CHURCH 179 
 
 made little effort to grapple with the question of the ultimate 
 origin of evil; that, so far as this question had been raised 
 at all, Christians were still divided between the three views 
 which had prevailed in the Jewish Church (namely, the 
 Adam-theory, the Watcher-theory, and the doctrine of the 
 yécer ha-va‘) ; and that St. Paul’s teaching, as contained in 
 x Corinthians and Romans, had had comparatively little 
 effect on Christian thought. The question becomes all the 
 more insistent—If{ the Pauline doctrine was in practice 
 ignored down to the middle of the second century, what was 
 the unknown factor which at that time suddenly came into 
 play, disseminating and popularising this doctrine in such a 
 manner that within another two generations it had become 
 the sole official and ecclesiastical theory of the origin and 
 ground of sin ? 
 
 In order to answer this question satisfactorily, it is 
 necessary to find a hypothesis which will at once explain 
 St. Paul’s confident assumption of the Fall-theory, its 
 apparent eclipse for nearly a hundred years after the date 
 of Romans, and its re-appearance in the writings of Justin 
 Martyr and the later Apologists. To do this, we are con- 
 strained to re-traverse some of the ground which was 
 covered in our last lecture. It was there suggested that St. 
 Paul derived this belief, along with the essential Christian 
 message, from the elder Apostles and other Galilean followers 
 of our Lord, who themselves may be supposed to have 
 imbibed it, not so much from any direct teaching of the 
 Master, as from the apocalyptic literature with which they 
 had been familiar long before they met Him. If the Fall- 
 doctrine came to St. Paul as part of the setting of the Gospel, 
 on authority so impressive as that of the original friends and 
 Apostles of Jesus, it is natural that he should have taken it 
 for granted as an indisputable truth ; and, as we have seen, 
 his own ethical and spiritual sense is a sufficient explanation 
 of his emphatic preference for the ‘ Adamic’ as against the 
 ‘angelic’ version of the theory. But it was pointed out 
 at the same time that the fact of St. Paul’s taking this idea 
 for granted in writing to Corinth and Rome does not neces- 
 sarily prove that it was already accepted, consciously and 
 explicitly, by all of his readers: it merely proves that no 
 
180 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 other theory held an exclusive dominance of the field.t 
 It is characteristic of men of sanguine and enthusiastic 
 temperament, such as was the Apostle of the Gentiles, to 
 assume that those consciously agree with them who are 
 merely not prepared to contradict them. The most, there- 
 fore, of which we can be certain with regard to the state of 
 opinion in Gentile Christendom when St. Paul wrote his 
 Epistles amounts to this—that the ‘Adam-theory’ was 
 known to some Gentile Christians, and not denied by 
 any. 
 
 It may, however, be asked ‘ Even if this were the case at 
 the moment when St. Paul wrote, should we not expect that 
 the unhesitating assumption of the Adamic Fall-doctrine by 
 so mighty a teacher as the Apostle of the uncircumcision, 
 the Primate and Father of the Gentile Churches, would have 
 had the effect of causing all his readers to give their allegiance 
 to this doctrine at once, in submission to his inspired 
 authority ?’ In reply to this question, it must be pointed 
 out that St. Paul, when he wrote his letters, had no idea that 
 he was writing ‘ Scripture,’ nor were those letters regarded 
 as ‘ Scripture,’ though they were doubtless treated with the 
 greatest respect and veneration, by their immediate recipi- 
 ents. For the first century of its existence, the Christian 
 Church possessed no ‘ Scriptures,’ recognised as such, other 
 than the Scriptures of the Jewish Church ; the only ‘ Bible’ 
 known to St. Paul’s converts, to the Apostolic Fathers, and 
 to the earliest Apologists was roughly identical with what 
 we should call the Septuagint Old Testament ?; and even 
 with reference to a date as late as A.D. 120, it would be true 
 to say that the whole conception of a ‘New Testament,’ 
 composed of authoritative Christian writings, and claiming 
 a canonicity and inspiration equal to that of the Law and the 
 Prophets of the elder dispensation, still lay in the womb of 
 the future. Hence it is not to be expected that a couple of 
 obiter dicta, one of them couched in somewhat obscure 
 language, would immediately leaven the whole of Christian 
 
 1 See above, Lecture III, p. 117. 
 
 * See three articles by Sir Henry Howorth on ‘ The influence of St. 
 Jerome on the (Biblical) Canon of the Western Church,’ JTS, July 1909, 
 April 1910, Oct. 1911, 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 181 
 
 thought, or meet with instant comprehension and acceptance 
 by the totality of Gentile believers. If it be remembered 
 that the minds of St. Paul’s readers must have been super- 
 saturated with the belief in demons as the immediate authors 
 of all evil—a belief which would be reinforced, not merely 
 by the influences of their pagan environment, but by many 
 recorded sayings of the Lord Himself—it is easy to see that 
 the Pauline teaching about Adam and the consequences of 
 his sin would be likely, so far as it was noticed or com- 
 prehended at all, to remain for some considerable time in 
 the dim background or penumbra of the Church’s thought ; 
 and that its gradual penetration into the central areas of that 
 thought would naturally proceed at a very slow rate, until 
 accelerated, towards the middle of the second century, by 
 the canonisation of the documents in which it was embodied 
 as part of the Pauline corpus, the second main constituent, 
 after the Gospels, of the ‘ New Testament.’ 
 
 It is, I would suggest, with this event—the formation of 
 the Canon of the New Testament—that the sudden revival 
 of the Fall-doctrine, after a period of apparent abeyance, is 
 in the first instance to be connected. It will have become 
 clear from the foregoing exposition that some occurrence of 
 ecclesiastical or theological importance, the beginnings of 
 which may be dated c. A.D. 140-150, 1s needed in order to 
 explain the silence of Christian writers prior to that date, 
 and the ever-increasing crop of allusions which springs up 
 immediately after it; and the canonisation of the New 
 Testament is precisely what we require. The exaltation of 
 the First Epistle to the Corinthians and the Epistle to the 
 Romans from the rank of venerable monuments of primitive 
 devotion to that of divinely inspired oracles, co-ordinate 
 with the Law and the Prophets, would implicitly carry with 
 it the promotion of the Adamic Fall-doctrine from the status 
 of a ‘ pious opinion’ to something like that of a revealed 
 dogma: and it may well seem that, within the sphere of 
 external or superficial causes, no further explanation need 
 be sought. 
 
 _ But no serious student of human ideas will need to be 
 reminded that the procession of visible external happenings, 
 controversies, definitions, and the like, which makes up 
 
182 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 what is called the ‘ history of dogma’ (Dogmengeschichte) 
 in the text-book sense of the term, is but the epzphenomenon, 
 the surface ebullition and agitation which both veils and 
 symbolises the play of mightier and more primary causes 
 beneath, operating in the dim region of instinct and sub- 
 conscious thought which must be assumed to lie at the base 
 as well of a ‘ group-mind’ like that of the Christian Church, 
 considered in respect of its corporate organic life, as of an 
 individual human mind. It is not difficult, in the present 
 instance, to descend from the outer to the inner, and to lay 
 bare the deeper causes to which, in the last resort, the 
 seemingly sudden popularisation of the Fall-doctrine which 
 took place towards the end of the second century must be 
 attributed. The formation of the Canon of the New Testa- 
 ment, like the elaboration of baptismal creeds, and the 
 universal adoption of monarchical, in the place of collegiate, 
 episcopacy, was part of the half-conscious process whereby 
 the still young and tender Church developed, as it were 
 automatically, a hard protective shell or armour, doctrinal 
 and institutional, to safeguard the principle of its life 
 against the vast, creeping, impalpable menace of Gnosticism. 
 This extraordinary movement—the forms which it assumed 
 were too bewilderingly manifold, and its intimate essence 
 was too chameleon-like and elusive, to justify us in describing 
 it as a doctrine or a system—arose prior to the birth of 
 Christianity and in purely heathen environments. But, 
 immediately upon coming into contact with our religion, 
 Gnosticism discovered a peculiar and, so to speak, parasitic 
 affinity with it, adhering like a fungoid growth to the body 
 of the ‘ Great Church’ and striving to penetrate it at every 
 pore, deftly disguising itself in Christian forms, borrowing 
 the names of Christ and the Holy Spirit, claiming, finally, 
 to be the true and authentic version of Christianity, handed 
 down by a secret tradition known only to an inner circle of 
 adepts, and standing in sharp opposition to what it alleged 
 to be the vulgar, ‘ psychic,’ or carnal version transmitted 
 by the public tradition of the Apostolic Churches. The 
 beginnings of these syncretistic infiltrations are already a 
 source of anxiety to some of the New Testament writers: 
 witness the Apostolic denunciation of philosophy, ex- 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 183 
 
 aggerated asceticism, and angel-worship directed to the 
 Colossians,! and the Pauline, or deutero-Pauline, condemna- 
 tion of ‘ Gnosis falsely so called.’ 2 
 
 It is impossible here to analyse the genesis of this primi- 
 tive theosophy, or to disentangle the diverse elements, 
 Mazdean, Babylonian, Hindu, Egyptian, which entered into 
 its composition ; nor indeed are those scholars who have 
 devoted long years of research to the subject of Gnosticism 
 as yet agreed upon a single theory of its origin? The two 
 facts which emerge with unmistakeable clearness from the 
 welter of conflicting systems are these—(a) that the root- 
 idea of Gnosticism, underlying equally all its multitudinous 
 shapes, was cosmic pessimism, the conviction that evil is 
 eternally and necessarily bound up with the existence of 
 the universe of finite, relative, and material being, and 
 (0) that its redemptive method was conceived as purely 
 intellectual, mediated through the acquisition of esoteric 
 knowledge. The basal pessimism of .the movement ex- 
 pressed itself sometimes in a monistic world-theory, such as 
 that of Valentinus, with its hierarchy of aeons or emanations 
 bridging over the gulf between the Absolute and matter, 
 sometimes in an explicit dualism, which maintained a 
 Demiurge or evil Creator, co-eternal with the good God; 
 of this latter tendency, Marcion, who identified the Demi- 
 urge with Jehovah, the God of the Jews and of the Old 
 Testament, is perhaps the most typical representative. But, 
 whichever type of Gnosticism—monistic or dualistic—at any 
 given moment confronted her, the instinctive reaction of 
 the ‘Great Church’ towards it was always the same: she 
 recognised intuitively that she was in the presence of the 
 ancient and most deadly foe of that ethical monotheism 
 which she had inherited from Judaism as the foundation 
 and presupposition of the Gospel message. The lists were 
 set for the next battle in the agelong struggle of the Asiatic 
 
 1 Col. ii. 16 ff. See Bishop Lightfoot’s commentary im /Joc., and his 
 Introduction, § II, ‘ The Colossian Heresy.’ 
 
 per big: vii20. 
 
 8’ The most recent survey of the data now available with reference to 
 this vast problem seems to be the latest edition (1911) of W. Bousset’s 
 Hauptprobleme dey Gnosis ; see also the articlesin PRE, vi. p. 728 (‘ Gnosis, 
 Gnosticismus,’ G. Kriger) and ERE, vi. p. 231 (‘ Gnosticism,’ E. F. Scott). 
 
184 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 philosophies which affirm the eternity and necessity of evil 
 with the Judaeo-Christian belief in the supremacy of good 
 and the consequent contingency of sin; and the inevitable 
 effect of the pressure of Gnosticism upon the Church was 
 to compel Christian thinkers to face the question of the 
 ultimate origin of evil, and, we may reasonably surmise, » 
 to force them back upon a neglected element in St. Paul’s 
 teaching, namely, the doctrine of the Fall. As in the 
 Maccabean period of the elder dispensation, so also at the 
 close of the sub-Apostolic age, the doctrine that evil is not 
 eternal or necessary, but traceable to a primitive self- 
 perversion of finite wills—a self-perversion which ex hypothest 
 need not have happened—was brought out of the Church’s 
 armoury, where it had rested unused and almost unnoticed 
 for a hundred years, to serve as the sure shield for safe- 
 guarding the Biblical conception of God. We shall have 
 occasion again in the course of our historical survey to note 
 the significant fact that the invasion of Christendom by a 
 wave of Oriental pessimism or dualism is usually followed 
 by a striking development of Fall-speculation within the 
 Church. Meanwhile, we may be content, so far as this 
 stage of our enquiry is concerned, with the conclusion— 
 paradoxical enough at first sight, yet fitting the known facts 
 so accurately as to admit of little doubt, in the present state 
 of our knowledge—that it was Gnosticism which indirectly 
 saved St. Paul’s teaching with regard to the Fall and 
 ‘Original Sin’: partly by its claim to be authentic Chris- 
 tianity, which brought about the canonisation of the first 
 Epistle to the Corinthians and the Epistle to the Romans, 
 but mainly by its fundamental affirmation of the necessity 
 of evil, which stimulated in the Catholic Church a revival of 
 the only authoritative doctrine in which the idea of the 
 contingency of evil was enshrined. 
 
 THE VINCENTIAN CANON AND THE SUB-APOSTOLIC AGE 
 
 If the preceding argument is well founded, our map of 
 the route by which the Fall-doctrine found its way into 
 accepted Christian teaching is now complete. The line of 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 185 
 
 that route, starting in the immediately pre-Christian 
 pseudepigrapha, runs first through Galilee and the beliefs 
 of our Lord’s earliest disciples and followers, then through 
 the mind of St. Paul, as instructed by St. Peter and the 
 original Apostles, then, from the letters of St. Paul, after 
 they had been canonised and placed on a level with the 
 Jewish Bible, into the speculations of the later second- 
 century Apologists, and so into the developing fabric of 
 orthodox Christian theology. We have already drawn atten- 
 tion to the fact that the line does not, so far as we have been 
 able to gather, run directly through the primary source. 
 of specifically Christian doctrine, namely the teaching of 
 our Lord Himself, but rather, if we may say so, leaves it 
 somewhat to one side. But it was at the same time pointed 
 out that this fact would not in itself militate against the 
 right of the Fall-doctrine to be considered as a member of 
 the system of Christian truth, if the constructive part of 
 our enquiry were to justify its claim to be a necessary out- 
 come of the experience of penitence and an inevitable 
 inference from the Christian conception of God and of His 
 relation to the world. Our review of the sub-Apostolic age 
 has, however, raised another question, of a formal rather 
 than of a material nature, which must be disposed of before 
 our research can proceed upon its way. ‘If,’ it may be 
 asked, ‘the object of your historical survey is to discover 
 the precise maximum of Fall-doctrine which may be said 
 to have been accepted by the Christian Church as a whole 
 —and if the criterion of acceptance by the Church is that 
 defined by the Vincentian Canon, namely, acceptance 
 ubique, semper, et ab omnibus—is not a serious obstacle to 
 further enquiry created by the conclusions which you have 
 just formulated with regard to the sub-Apostolic age? For, 
 according to those conclusions, the Church of the period 
 between St. Paul and Justin Martyr had not yet decisively 
 made up its mind between the three Jewish theories of the 
 ultimate origin of evil, and was not in possession of any 
 one universally accepted Fall-doctrine. The Adamic-theory, 
 therefore, fails to fulfil the test embodied in the word 
 semper ; and it would seem useless to proceed any further 
 down the stream of history. If the Fall-doctrine as a whole 
 
186 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 is ruled out of the sphere of ideas which have been accepted 
 semper—that is, on your own hypothesis, out of the sphere 
 of ideas to which the Christian Church as such may be said 
 to be traditionally committed—by this disconcerting gap 
 of a hundred years at the beginning of its Christian 
 history, it will be waste of time to discuss its later 
 developments.’ 
 
 It is undoubtedly true that—despite its prima facie 
 lucidity and convenience as a working ‘ rule of thumb “— 
 the Vincentian Canon can easily be made to generate a host 
 of logical puzzles, if severely analysed. And it may be 
 admitted at once that if the terms ‘ everywhere,’ ‘ always’ 
 and ‘ by all’ are to be tightly shackled together, so as to 
 constitute one single criterion, instead of three loosely 
 connected and potentially alternative criteria—and if the 
 single criterion so obtained is to be rigorously pressed, in 
 the strict and literal sense of each of its three component 
 terms—the consequence suggested by the objector necessarily 
 follows. But this mechanical method of construing the 
 Vincentian test speedily reduces itself ad absuvdum ; for it 
 would also rule out the canonicity of the New Testament 
 itself, and compel us to assert that ‘ Catholic’ belief can 
 only be said to recognise the Bible of the Jews, that is the 
 Old Testament, as inspired, inasmuch as during the greater 
 part of the sub-Apostolic age the idea of a ‘ New Testament ’ 
 parallel to and of equal authority with the Hebrew Scriptures 
 was unknown. And yet no reasonable person would deny 
 that, if there are any principles to which the whole Church 
 may be said to be committed (however ‘ the whole Church ’ 
 may be defined), the authority of the New Testament is one 
 of those principles. It may be added that such a rigorous 
 interpretation of the Vincentian Canon would render it 
 useless for the purposes of the modern critical student. of 
 Christian doctrine ; for he could not employ it in this form 
 without accepting the assumption, which it would then im- 
 ply, that the essential ideas of historical Christianity must 
 constitute a static, crystalline, lifeless system, incapable 
 of growth or development in respect either of verbal ex- 
 pression or of logical articulation—an assumption which 
 is contradicted by the most patent facts of history, 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 187 
 
 and indeed was repudiated by St. Vincent of Lerins 
 himself.? 
 
 It will be clear that the sense in which we adopted, and 
 propose to employ, the Vincentian Canon as a working 
 standard is considerably more elastic than that presupposed 
 by our hypothetical critic. We have already been at pains 
 to point out that our use of this principle is meant, not to 
 guarantee the objective truth of the ‘ Catholic’ doctrines 
 of the Fall and of Original Sin—for that is precisely the 
 question which we have reserved for discussion in our last 
 two lectures—but merely to enable us to define their exact 
 content. In any case, however, it follows from the fact of 
 doctrinal evolution that the Vincentian test must always 
 be employed with a certain spirit of accommodation, as a 
 poorvBdwos Kavev or flexible rule,? continuously adapting 
 itself to the differing stages of development which Christian 
 thought and belief had reached at successive epochs of their 
 history. The reasonable enquirer, who recognises that 
 historic Christianity is a living growth, to be interpreted 
 by means of biological rather than mechanical categories, 
 will not expect to find all the lineaments characteristic of 
 adult maturity present with equally sharp definition in the 
 plastic vagueness of infancy; nor will he be surprised if 
 the Christian ideas regarding human nature and the sinful 
 tendency prove at their beginnings to have passed through 
 an ambiguous or neutral phase, analogous to that disclosed 
 by science in the foetal life of animals, a phase during which 
 it would have appeared uncertain to an external observer 
 which of two alternative characters the fully grown organism 
 was destined to bear. Supposing, in short, that the Fall- 
 doctrine is eventually shown to fulfil the tests of acceptance 
 ubique and ab ommbus for the immensely greater part of the 
 Church’s history, such an one will consider that the test of 
 semper has been sufficiently satisfied if the idea in question 
 was accepted at least by some members of the Church during 
 
 1 commonitorium, c. xxiii. ‘ sed forsitan dicit aliquis: nullusne ergo 
 in ecclesia Christi profectus habebitur religionis? habeatur plane, et 
 maximus.’ See the whole of this chapter, which treats of dogmatic 
 development. 
 
 *NAT Eth. Nic. v. X, 78 (1137 b. 30). 
 
188 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 its infantile and formative age. Our description of Christ’s 
 methods of instruction! will have prepared him for the fact 
 that the history of Christian doctrine begins with a period 
 of intellectual immaturity and (relative) indetermination, 
 during which the general diffused mind of the Church was 
 slowly clearing itself in regard to the question, which parts 
 of the apocalyptic theology current in our Lord’s lifetime 
 were so intimately presupposed by His explicit teaching 
 that they must needs be regarded as smplicitly belonging to 
 the essence of Christianity, and which parts deserved to be 
 discarded as useless lumber or pernicious superstition.?, And, 
 in the light of this fact, he will not quarrel with a slight 
 glossatory expansion of the Vincentian formula which would 
 make it read “ quod semper quidem ab aliquibus, iam pridem 
 vero ubique et ab omnibus creditum est.’ 
 
 That the Fall-doctrine must have been believed by some 
 during the sub-Apostolic age is guaranteed by its occurrence 
 in two of St. Paul’s chief epistles, which, though not yet 
 formally canonised, can be shown from the fragments 
 surviving from the literature of this age to have enjoyed 
 great veneration and authority.* We shall, accordingly, 
 deem that its claim to have been believed semper is not 
 prejudiced by the fact that the Pauline teaching took a 
 hundred years to sink into the general mind of the Christian 
 society, and (humanly speaking) was only stereotyped 
 as a fixed idea in that mind by the assaults of the 
 rival doctrines (‘ unmoral monism’ and ‘ dualism’) which 
 inspired the Gnostic movement. How, and when, it 
 came to be accepted ab omnibus, we must now proceed 
 to enquire. 
 
 Lecture LL proof: 
 
 2 The belief in a millennial reign of the Messiah and His saints upon 
 this earth is an instance of a Jewish apocalyptic idea which, though widely 
 held by primitive Christians, including Irenaeus, Lactantius, Methodius 
 of Olympus, and, for a time, Augustine himself (de civ. Dei, xx. 7), was 
 eventually discarded by the collective mind of the Church as not contained 
 or implied in our Lord’s teaching : it will be argued in the following pages 
 that the belief in a‘ Fall’ of some kind is an instance of an idea of similar 
 provenance which, on the contrary, has been recognised and accepted by 
 the Church as tacitly presupposed by the Gospel message. 
 
 ® See The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers (Oxford, 1905). 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 189 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF THE FALL IN IRENAEUS 
 
 The Christian literature of the ‘ sub-Apostolic’ age, so 
 far as we can judge from its surviving fragments and from 
 notices of now lost works in Eusebius and other later 
 writers, consisted in the main of occasional and unsystem- 
 atic! compositions, written to deal with particular emer- 
 gencies or to fulfil special purposes, homiletic, apologetic, or 
 polemical. No synoptic treatment of the whole.body of 
 Christian ideas is therefore to be found in what remains 
 of it; the scope of the Apologies designed to vindicate the 
 Faith in the judgment of the Roman Government and of 
 the educated non-Christian public was limited by the natural 
 unwillingness of the Church to disclose more than could be 
 helped of her mysteries to profaneeyes; and it may, indeed, 
 be doubted whether the great constitutive conceptions of our 
 religion had as yet attained to a degree of fixity and 
 definiteness sufficient to allow of their being formulated 
 in any shape approximating to that of a text-book or 
 Summa of dogmatic theology. But the increasing pressure 
 of the Gnostic movement, which found its spear-head in 
 the organisation of the first Christian schism, the powerful 
 Marcionite Church, compelled the ‘ Great’ or ‘ Catholic ’ 
 Ecclesia to follow up the measures of instinctive self-defence 
 which we have already noted (the development of the Canon 
 of the New Testament, of the baptismal Creeds, and of the 
 universal Episcopate) by the production of more or less 
 systematic expositions of orthodox Christianity, endeavour- 
 ing to embody the whole contents of the Apostolic tradition 
 and to exhibit them as a coherent corpus of truth. The 
 first ecclesiastical writer to undertake the task of framing 
 such an exposition was Irenaeus (c. A.D. 130—-Cc. 202), native 
 of Asia Minor, pupil of Polycarp and other unnamed 
 ‘Elders,’ and Bishop of Lyons in Gaul, whose great treatise 
 
 1 The lost Syntagma of Justin, as its name suggests, may have been 
 “ systematic’ in the sense of possessing a logical order or arrangement ; 
 but it is not likely to have been a work of ‘ systematic theology’ as the 
 term is now used, inasmuch as its purpose would seem to have been rather 
 
 that of refuting heresies than of formulating orthodoxy (Justin, 1 Apol 
 xXvi. 8), 
 
190 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 against Heresies may with probability be assigned to the 
 period A.D. 175-185. 
 
 Substantially the same doctrine as to the Fall and 
 Original Sin is found in the work just mentioned and in the 
 lately discovered Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching,* 
 though we may note that the latter embodies the Watcher- 
 story 2 in a form which is clearly based upon r Enoch vii. I ; 
 here, however, the sin of the angels isnot regarded as being 
 itself the ‘ Fall,’ but is merely narrated as a consequence of 
 the Fall, which, in conformity with the now all-powerful 
 teaching of St. Paul, is identified with the transgression of 
 Adam. The doctrine of Irenaeus in the main continues 
 and develops that which we found hazily presupposed in 
 Justin and more clearly stated in Tatian and Theophilus. 
 The main points of the fundamental Pauline scheme, 
 namely, that sin came into the world mediately or immedi- 
 ately through the first man’s transgression, that there is a 
 causal connexion of some kind between Adam’s sin and the 
 sinfulness of his posterity, and that the infirmity or taint so 
 attaching to human nature is cancelled and done away by 
 baptism, are such commonplaces of his teaching that it is 
 unnecessary to refer to individual passages. We may con- 
 tent ourselves with noting the interesting fact that he 
 repeats the famous parallel first drawn by Justin Martyr 
 between the virgin Eve and the Virgin Mary,® adding to it 
 
 1 eis émiderEw Tod amooToAKod Knpvyparos. An Armenian translation of 
 this long-lost work of Irenaeus was discovered at Eriwan in Armenia, by 
 Dr. Karapet Ter-Mekerttshian, in 1904; the text with a German trans- 
 lation was published by him in collaboration with Dr. Erwand Ter- 
 Minassiantz, in Texte u. Uniersuch. xxxi. 1. An English translation, with 
 introduction and notes, was published by Dr. J. Armitage Robinson in 
 1920 (S.P.C.K. ‘ Translations of Christian Literature’): I have used it 
 for the quotations which occur in the text. The passages in this work 
 which deal with the Fall are cc. 12-18, 31-33. 
 
 BTCO LS: 
 
 8 Justin, Dial. 100 (see above, p. 174); Irenaeus, adv. haer. III. 
 XXxXil. I, ‘eam quae est a Maria in Evam recirculationem significans’ ; 
 V. xix. 1, ‘ et si ea inobediret Deo, sed et haec suasa est obedire Deo, uti 
 virginis Evae virgo Maria fieret advocata’ (see the whole context of both 
 these citations). All references to the adv. haer. in the following pages 
 are given in accordance with Harvey’s edition of Irenaeus. Demonstration, 
 33, For it was necessary that Adam should be summed up in Christ, that 
 mortality might be summed up and overwhelmed by immortality; and 
 Eve summed up in Mary, that a virgin should be a virgin’s intercessor, 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH ror 
 
 the second, equally celebrated parallel between the Tree of 
 the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Calvary ! ; 
 and with summarising certain striking and original views 
 which he holds with reference to three of the five cardinal 
 issues formulated at the beginning of this lecture. It will 
 be noticed that Irenaeus is the first author whose Fall- 
 doctrine possesses a content rich and stable enough to 
 necessitate the employment of these logical subdivisions of 
 the subject, which can hardly be applied to the vague and 
 unsystematised ideas of the writers reviewed so far. 
 
 (i) The first of the cardinal issues is that of the literal 
 historicity of the Adam-story. There can be no doubt that 
 Irenaeus, like St. Paul and most of the Fathers, believed in 
 the reality of a first man (he seems to recognise that ‘ Adam’ 
 is not a proper name?) and of a first woman, called Eve. 
 But, if the long fragment of a lost treatise of his preserved 
 by Anastasius Sinaita,® a seventh-century writer, be genuine 
 (as there seems no reason to doubt), he took a remarkably 
 modern view of the story of the serpent and the forbidden 
 fruit. The quotation of a few sentences will make this 
 clear. 
 
 How is it possible that the serpent which was created by 
 God naturally devoid of speech and reason should utter reasonable 
 and articulate language? If it spontaneously acquired for 
 itself reason and discernment and understanding and the power 
 to answer what was said by the woman, then there is no reason 
 why any serpent should not do the same. But if they [pre- 
 sumably the Ophites, against whom these words were written] 
 assert that it was enabled to address Eve with a human voice 
 by a Divine plan and dispensation, then they set up God as the 
 author of sin. Nor, moreover, was it possible for the wicked 
 
 and by a virgin’s obedience undo and put away the disobedience of a 
 virgin.’ Cf. Tertullian, de carne Christi, 17, ‘ crediderat Eva serpenti : 
 credidit Maria Gabrieli. quod illa credendo deliquit, haec credendo 
 delevit.’ 
 
 1 adv. haer. V. xvi. 2; xvii. 4; Demonstr. 34. 
 
 2 adv. haer. II1.°xxxiii. 1. 
 
 8 Inconsidervationes anagogicae in Hexaemeron, X (PG LXXXIX, 1013B- 
 1o14C). Anastasius says that the passage was written by Irenaeus against 
 the Ophites, the Gnostic sect which worshipped the serpent of Gen. iii. 
 Harvey, who numbers the fragment XIV (vol. ii. of his edition, pp. 483-6), 
 doubts its genuineness, but merely on the subjective ground that it deals 
 too brusquely with Holy Scripture. 
 
192 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 demon to bestow reason upon a nature devoid of reason, and so 
 to summon an endowment out of non-existence into existence ; 
 for <if this had been possible > he would never have ceased to 
 converse with men, with a view to deceiving them, by means 
 of serpents and beasts and birds, and so to lead them astray. 
 
 He proceeds to apply a similar rationalising criticism to 
 other details of the Fall-story, such as the serpent’s know- 
 ledge of the Divine command, his accosting Eve in the first 
 place instead of Adam, the weakness which Adam displayed 
 in falling without a struggle. If we set this fragment side 
 by side with the passages in the adversus haereses and the 
 Demonstration in which the Fall is alluded to—noting that 
 in most of these passages, whilst insisting upon the reality 
 of our first parents’ transgression, he seems carefully to 
 refrain from specifying its exact nature—we shall conclude 
 that he must have taken the episode of the serpent and the 
 fruit in a purely allegorical sense, as veiling some sin of 
 which the character is unknown to us. 
 
 It does not follow that he interpreted the rest of the 
 Biblical history of Adam and Eve in the same way; from 
 his treatment of Eve’s creation, the expulsion from Paradise 
 and Cain’s fratricide, we should naturally infer that his 
 view of these incidents was strictly realistic. Modern 
 readers may, indeed, find it difficult to believe that Irenaeus 
 does not mean to allegorise the whole story from beginning 
 to end, when they come across expressions of ideas which 
 he shared with and doubtless inherited from the Slavonic 
 Enoch and St. Paul: namely that the ‘ Paradise ’ from which 
 our first parents were ejected is situated outside the world 
 which we know, on some transcendental super-terrestrial 
 plane (described in terms of Rabbinical cosmology as the 
 ‘third heaven ’!); that it is identical with the Paradise in 
 which repose the spirits of just men made perfect, and that 
 even in this life the favoured saint may be for a brief space 
 caught up thither in mystic rapture, as was the Apostle 
 of the Gentiles in the ecstasy which he has himself described.? 
 
 1 See 2 Enoch, viii (Charles, A pocr. and Pseudepigr. ii. p. 433 £.) ; 2 Cor. 
 
 xii. 2-4. 
 2 adv. haerv. V. v. 1: mob obv éré0n 6 mpOtos avOpwros ; ev TH mapadeiow 
 , ‘ / \ > A > v4 ? / 4 , 
 dnrovdtt, Kabws yéypamta... Kai exetOev €€eBAHOn eis TOvde TOV Kdopov 
 
 , A] ‘ , < 4 wn > / , A 
 mapaxovoas. 6.0 Kat A€yovow ot mpeoBUrepa, Tov arogTdAwy padytal, Tods 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 193 
 
 But it must be remembered that Irenaeus lived long before 
 the days of Copernican astronomy, and that, at a time when 
 the firmament was believed by all to be a solid vault arching 
 over the earth, the affirmation of a geographical Paradise 
 situated in ‘ the third heaven ’—that is, somewhere above 
 this vault—would not have appeared to his readers as meant 
 to be other than a statement of objective fact. Hence the 
 assertion that Adam, ‘ having disobeyed God, was cast out 
 from thence into this world,’ 1 is to be taken quite literally. 
 No doubt the conception of Paradise as placed at a vast 
 distance above the terrestrial globe, which is not uncommon 
 in the Greek Fathers, easily lent itself to a process of refine- 
 ment and sublimation, which tended to transform the idea 
 of a material and spatial garden into that of a metaphysical 
 and transcendental state. We shall find this metamorphosis 
 complete in Origen; but it would be an anachronism to 
 read it into the thought of Irenaeus. 
 
 (ii) The second of the great issues, in regard to which this 
 pioneer of systematic theology has expressed a definite view, 
 is the question of the condition of Man before the Fall. We 
 have seen that St. Paul asserts nothing about Adam’s para- 
 disal state, save in so far as he implies that it included the 
 possession of free-will and physical immortality.2. Irenaeus 
 strongly re-affirms the position of Tatian and Theo- 
 philus, that unfallen man was an imperfect, undeveloped, 
 and infantile creature,? thereby denying by anticipation 
 
 
 
 
 
 petatebevtas exeice perateOfvar’ Sixaios yap avOpwois Kal mvevpatoddpots 
 ‘ , e , vdah er AR TT ye aie , se ie ¥ xe 
 HToLLdoOn 6 mapddeioos, ev @ Kal IIatAos amdatodos eioxopiobels AKovaEV appynTa 
 phuata, ws mpos Huds ev TH mapdvTt, Kakel pevew Tovs petarebevras ews 
 ouvtedelas, mpooysalopévous tiv ad0apaiay. Cf. also Demonsty. 12: ‘ And, 
 that man might have his nourishment and growth with festive and dainty 
 meats, He prepared him a place better than this world . . . and its name is 
 Paradise’ ; 17: ‘ when they were put out of Paradise, Adam and his wife 
 Eve fell into many troubles of anxious grief, going about with sorrow and 
 toil and lamentation in this world.’ 
 
 1 adv. haer. V. v. 1, quoted above. * Lectoretil, iA. 
 
 3 adv. haer. IV. |1xii. This original imperfection of man is asserted 
 to be a necessary consequence of his creaturely status: ta d€ yeyovdra 
 (as opposed to the eternally self-subsistent Creator) xa0o perémerta yevéoews 
 apxiy tdiav oye, Kata TOTO Kal vaTepetoAar Set adra Too meToLnKdTOS* ov yap 
 novvavTo ayevyynra elvat TA vewaorl yeyervnueva’ Kalo dé py eoTW ayévvynta, Kara 
 TovTo Kal votTepotvTa Tod Tedeliov. Kald Sé vedrepa, KaTa TobTO Kal VATA, KATA 
 TobvTo Kal dovv7On, Kal adyvpvaora mpos TH TeAElay aywyrv. ws odv Hh UNTHP 
 
 O 
 
194 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the doctrine of ‘ Original Righteousness.’ According to 
 this great primitive writer, perfection, moral, spiritual, and 
 intellectual, was not the original endowment of mankind, 
 but the goal which it was intended to attain, presumably 
 after long centuries of evolution. Human nature was 
 indeed capable of immortality and incorruptibility ; but at 
 the beginning it was not actually possessed of these gifts. 
 It is true that man was created in the ‘ image and likeness ’ 
 of God: but whilst the divine ‘image’ (ekwyv) is 
 expressed in man’s flesh,? the divine ‘ likeness’ (dpotwoats) 
 is developed in his soul gradually and slowly, through the 
 possession of the Spirit and fellowship with God 8 ; it there- 
 fore can have existed in the first man only asa germ. His 
 ethical condition was one of innocence, not of virtue, 
 inasmuch as he was unable to distinguish between good 
 and evil.4 If it is permissible, with Harnack,® to refer the 
 rhetorical question ‘ quemadmodum igitur erit homo Deus, 
 qui nondum factus est homo? quomodo autem perfectus, 
 nuper effectus?’® to man’s unfallen condition, it will 
 be hardly an exaggeration to suggest that the Adam of 
 
 
 
 
 
 Svvara TéAevcov mapacxetv TH Bpédher To EuBpwya, to S€ Ett advvaret tv adrod 
 mpeaBurepav déEacbat tpod7jv' ovtTws Kal 6 Deds adros pev olds Te Hv mapacyeiv 
 an’ apxyfis TH avOpwiaw To Tédevov, 6 S€ advOpwaos advvatos AaPeiv adtd* vHmos 
 yap hv. This position is emphatically repeated in Ixiii. 1. Cf. also Demon- 
 stration, 12: ‘ The lord (of the earth), that is, man, was but small; for he 
 was a child ; and it was necessary that he should grow, and so come to 
 his perfection’; ‘Man was a child, not yet having his understanding 
 perfected ; wherefore also he was easily led astray by the deceiver.’ 
 
 1 adv. haer. IV. \xiii. 2: rod 5€ avOpamouv jpéua mpoKdnrovros (cf. the 
 adopui mpoxonts of Theophilus) cat mpdos réAevov avepyouévov . . . €der dé Tov 
 GvOpwrov mp@tov yevécbar, Kal yevouevov avéjoa, kai avfjoavta avdpwlFjvar, 
 Kat avdpwlévra mAnOvvOjvar, Kat mAnOvvOévTa Evicydoa, Kal enoxtoavTa 
 dofacbfva, cat Sdo€acbévra deity tov €avtos Seandryny (that is, God). The 
 vision of God is that which ultimately produces df@apola or incorrupti- 
 bility. Inthe Demonstration, however, man is said to have been physically 
 immortal before the Fall (c. 15). Too great consistency must not be 
 expected from the first systematic theologian. 
 
 2 adv. haer. V. vi. 1: ‘ perfectus autem homo commixtio et adunitio 
 est animae assumentis Spiritum Patris, et admixta (? legendum admixtae) 
 ei carni, quae est plasmata secundum imaginem Dei.’ 
 
 3 ibid. ‘cum autem spiritus hic commixtus animae unitur plasmati, 
 propter effusionem Spiritus spiritalis et perfectus homo factus est ; et hic 
 est qui secundum imaginem et similitudinem factus est Dei.’ 
 
 4 adv. haer. IV. Ixiv. 1. 
 
 5 History of Dogma (E. tr.), il. 270, n. 2. 6 adv. haer. IV. |xix. 2. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 195 
 
 Irenaeus belongs, in respect of his moral status, to the 
 category of hominidae or ‘ sub-men’ rather than to that of 
 homo sapiens; but for the fact that his early home was 
 in an extra-mundane ‘third heaven,’ he might pass for 
 the immediate progenitor of the semi-human race of 
 Neanderthal. If this primitive Hellenic-Christian concep- 
 tion of man’s primaeval state had never been overlaid by the 
 Rabbinical imaginations as to Adam’s supernatural per- 
 fection and splendour, later Christianity might have been 
 spared even the appearance of a conflict with Darwinism. 
 In the light of this conception, it will not appear sur- 
 prising that Irenaeus does not attach a very high degree 
 of guilt or culpability to the ‘Fall.’ God Himself pities, 
 rather than condemns, His frail, imperfect, inexperienced 
 creature for succumbing to the wiles of a cunning and power- 
 ful foe. Man’s first sin was one of thoughtlessness rather 
 than of malice; the devil acquired power over him unfairly, 
 by a trick.2 Closely connected with these ideas is the even 
 more startling speculation that the Fall was in some ways 
 positively beneficial to mankind. Viewed objectively, and 
 in regard to its historical effects, it almost becomes what 
 has been called a ‘ Fall upwards,’ inasmuch as it conduced 
 to man’s fuller and richer ethical evolution; just as the 
 individual learns the meaning of a ‘ bitter’ taste by actual 
 sensation, so man learnt by painful experience that sin 
 brings separation from God and spiritual death. This, 
 1 adv. haer. III. xxv. 2: ‘ eum enim odivit Deus, qui seduxit hominem ; 
 ei vero qui seductus est, sensim paulatimque misertus est’; IV. Ixvi. 2: 
 
 “eum autem, qui negligenter quidem sed male accepit inobedientiam, 
 hominem miseratus est.’ 
 
 2 That is, by promising him equality with God, a gift which it was not 
 in the devil’s power to bestow. adv. haer. III. xxxii. 2: ‘ primum enim 
 possessionis eius vas Adam factus est, quem et tenebat sub sua potestate, 
 hoc est, praevaricationem inique inferens ei, et per occasionem immortali- 
 
 tatis mortificationem faciens in eum’; cf. V. 1. 1: ‘ quoniam iniuste 
 dominabatur nobis apostasia.’ 
 3 adv. haer. IV. |xiv. 1: ‘ quemadmodum enim lingua per gustum 
 
 accipit experimentum dulcis et amari, et oculus per visionem discernit 
 quod est nigrum ab albo, et auris per auditum differentias sonorum scit, 
 sic et mens per utrorumque experimentum disciplinam boni accipens, 
 firmior ad conservationem eius efficitur, obediens Deo: inobedientiam 
 quidem primum respuens per poenitentiam, quoniam amarum et malum 
 est ; deinde ex comprehensione discens, quale sit quod contrarium est 
 bono et dulcedini, ne tentet quidem unquam inobedientiam gustare Dei.’ 
 
196 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 however, does not mean that God directly decreed the Fall, 
 but merely that He foresaw and tolerated it (not willing to 
 interfere with man’s free-will) and overruled its consequences 
 for good ends. 
 
 (iii) The third crucial issue which emerges in the writings 
 of Irenaeus is the question of the exact nature of the causal 
 link between Adam’s sin and the sinfulness of his posterity. 
 The task of bringing to light the unexpressed assumptions 
 underlying the vague language of a primitive writer is 
 necessarily delicate and precarious ; but it must, neverthe- 
 less, be attempted. So much, at least, would be generally 
 admitted, that in Irenaeus we find (for the first time, if our 
 analysis of St. Paul’s doctrine has been sound) that con- 
 ception of the causal link which may be described as the 
 ‘mystical identity ’ of Adam and his descendants—the idea 
 being that Adam was in some undefined sense the represen- 
 tative of mankind and that, therefore, the race was somehow 
 - committed by his transgression to an attitude of defiance 
 towards God, in much the same way in which a nation may 
 be committed to a war with its neighbours by a speech or 
 an act of its Prime Minister. This theory is nowhere 
 formulated in express words ; but it appears in many turns 
 of phrase and diction, as when he asserts that ‘men’ in 
 general, or ‘we, transgressed God’s law and _ forfeited 
 Paradise.2, Such a conception clearly contains the poten- 
 tiality of a theory of ‘ Original Guilt,’ though this is not 
 explicitly developed. 
 
 It must, however, be pointed out that the theory—if 
 such it can be called—of a merely ‘ mystical’ identity can 
 only maintain itself in a mind which has not the time or is 
 unwilling to probe very deeply into the problem. If it is 
 
 1 adv. haer. III. xxi. 1, 2. (God allowed Jonah to be swallowed by 
 the great fish, not that he might perish, but that he might be delivered and 
 glorify God the more: so also He permitted man to be swallowed by the 
 author of the Fall, z.e. the devil, that man might learn not to consider 
 himself like unto God.) Cf. also IV. Ixi. 2: ‘Deo quidem magnanimi- 
 tatem praestante in apostasia hominis; homine autem erudito per eam, 
 quemadmodum propheta ait: emendabit te abscessio tua; praefiniente 
 Deo omnia ad hominis perfectionem, et ad aedificationem, et manifesta- 
 tionem dispositionum.’ 
 
 2 ¢.g,in II]. xix.6; xxi.2; xxxiii.; V. xvi. 2; xvii. 1 ‘<Deus>inquem 
 peccaveramus in initio’ ; and many other passages. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 197 
 
 seriously reflected upon, it must either relapse into meaning- 
 lessness or transform itself into the theory of ‘ Seminal 
 Identity,’ according to which Adam represented humanity 
 precisely because, at the time of his Fall, he was humanity, 
 the whole of his posterity existing seminally in his loins, 
 and consequently sharing in his sin; just as (according to 
 the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews) Levi existed 
 seminally in Abraham when he met Melchisedek, and 
 consequently participated in Abraham’s payment of tithes 
 to the mysterious priest-king.t The indefinite character of 
 Irenaeus’ language debars us from attributing this theory to 
 him in anything like that precise and fully articulated shape 
 which it wears in the thought of Ambrosiaster and Augus- 
 tine, some two centuries later. But I must needs think that 
 a rude and inchoate form of it is implicit in his frequent use 
 of the phrase ‘in Adam’ to describe the rationale of man’s 
 subjection to sin and death.? I find it very difficult to affix 
 any other significance to passages such as the following : 
 
 (Christ was incarnate) that, what we had lost in Adam, that is, 
 being after the image and likeness of God, we might recover in 
 Christ Jesus.* 
 
 In the first Adam indeed we offended (God), not performing 
 His command; but in the second Adam we have been recon- 
 ciled to him, having been made obedient unto death. 
 
 But ‘ the grief of their wound’ is the grief of that wound 
 by which at the beginning man was smitten in Adam, namely, 
 Beaten. 
 
 This conception underlies, and forms the logical prius of 
 that view of redemption which is characteristic of Irenaeus, 
 and is denoted by the term ‘ Recapitulation’ (avaxedadAaiwats). 
 The passages in which this word and its cognates occur are 
 somewhat obscure, and its usage is not absolutely invariable ; 
 though that which the Redeemer ‘ recapitulates ’ or ‘ sums 
 
 1 Heb. vii. 9, 10. 
 
 2 I here diverge from Dr. Tennant, Sources, p. 289 f. 
 
 3 adv. haey. III. xix. 1. This passage contains a classical statement 
 of the idea of ‘ Recapitulation,’ on which see the text above. 
 
 4V. xvi. 2: ev pev yap Td mpdrw ’Adau mpocexdpapev, pty ToujoavTes 
 avtob Thy evroAjv' év S€ Td Sevtépw ?Addy aroxarynAddynper, bayjKoou péxpt 
 Gavarov yevopevor. 
 
 5 V. xxxiv. 2: ‘ doloy autem plagae est, per quam percussus est homo 
 initio in Adam inobediens, hoc est, mors... .’ 
 
 =. 
 
198 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 up’ is ordinarily ‘man’ or “ Adam’ or ‘ human life,’ yet 
 Christ is said in one place to have ‘ recapitulated’’ Adam’s 
 disobedience,! and in another the primal enmity of man 
 towards the serpent.2. If, however, we neglect these two 
 passages as employing the word in a somewhat abnormal 
 sense, it is possible to draw out the sequence of thought 
 which the great Gallican bishop has constructed by com- 
 bining St. Paul’s parallelism between the first and the 
 second Adams, drawn in two of his earlier Epistles,? with 
 the hints contained in Eph. 1. and ii. as to a ‘ summing up’ 
 (avaxedhadaiwois) of all things and a union of Jew and 
 Gentile into ‘one new Man,’ in the Mystical Body of the 
 exalted Christ * somewhat as follows. 
 
 Adam, being in his paradisal state co-extensive with 
 humanity, possessed the ‘image and likeness’ of God, and 
 then lost it by the Fall: the subsequent multiplication of 
 _ the human race is nothing other than the proliferation and 
 | subdivision > of this original Adam into’ myriads of indi- 
 vidual men, each, in consequence of the Fall, destitute of 
 the divine image. Christ then came as the Logos, who is 
 the perfect divine image, and as the second Adam, the 
 Ideal Man or Son of Man, who sums up in Himself all the 
 splendours which man’s unfallen state had potentially ° 
 
 RAGAUARAEY.\N,. SURAT: 2 ibid. V. xxi. 2. 
 
 ST COP XV a Olle vs SFO One Seyler ate 
 
 5 Nevertheless, although Adam as the universal of humanity splits up 
 into a multiplicity of descendants, considered as a particular man he retains 
 his own identity ; for Irenaeus is at pains to assert, as against Tatian, that 
 (the individual) Adam has been saved (adv. haer. 1. xxvi. 1; II]. xxxvii.). 
 
 6 I here assume that the passages quoted above (p. 193, n. 3) which 
 portray unfallen man as a ‘ babe,’ that is, a frail and undeveloped 
 creature, represent Irenaeus’ real belief with regard to the state of man 
 before the Fall—an assumption which involves the consequence that this 
 Father cannot have attributed to our first parents more than a rudimentary 
 form of the‘ image and likeness ’ of God, or more than a potential possession 
 of perfection. Harnack, however, maintains (History of Dogma, E. tr., 
 ii. 273) that the idea of ‘ Recapitulation’ presupposes the doctrine of 
 ‘ Original Righteousness’ or ‘ Perfection,’ on the ground that what is 
 summed up and restored in the Second Adam must be supposed to have 
 had an actual and not only a potential existence in the First. I cannot 
 follow him in deducing this momentous consequence from the mere word 
 “ Recapitulation’; and, though adv. haer. Il]. xxxv. 1 explicitly attri- 
 butes a ‘ robe of sanctity’ to unfallen Adam (‘ eam quam habui a Spiritu 
 
 Sanctitatis stolam’), this is no more than a verbal inconsistency with 
 Irenaeus’ general ascription of vymdryns to the first man, an instance of 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 199 
 
 possessed, and purposes to gather into Himself, by sacra- 
 mental incorporation into His Mystical Body, the countless 
 individuals into which the ancient protoplast has split up, 
 thereby re-uniting humanity into one single organism, 
 endowed with the image and likeness of God, as at the 
 beginning. 
 
 It is worth noting that Irenaeus make no effort to 
 develop St. Paul’s teaching with regard to the flesh as the 
 seat of the hereditary infirmity and the connexion of sin 
 with physical appetite. This element in the Pauline 
 anthropology is almost entirely 1 absent from his writings— 
 a circumstance doubtless to be accounted for by the fear of 
 Gnosticism, all forms of which (as we have seen) agreed in 
 regarding the material world, and therefore the body, as 
 essentially evil. 
 
 THE BIFURCATION OF THE ‘ ONCE-BORN’ AND ‘ TWICE- 
 BORN’ VERSIONS OF THE FALL-DOCTRINE DURING THE 
 THIRD CENTURY 
 
 Our study of these primitive Greek-Christian writers 
 has thus revealed, gradually taking shape within the 
 Catholic Church of the late second century, an interpretation 
 of the Fall-doctrine which, whilst preserving the essential 
 outlines of the Pauline teaching, wears a humane, reason- 
 able, and curiously modern complexion. It does not, 
 indeed, betray any suspicion that Adam and Eve may not 
 
 
 
 which, indeed, occurs in the same section (‘indolem et puerilem amiserat 
 sensum,’ 2b7d.). 
 
 It may be added that Eusebius (H.E. v. 27) bears witness to the interest 
 aroused by the question of the origin of evil at the end of the second century, 
 and mentions a treatise written on this subject against the heretics (pre- 
 sumably the Gnostics) by one Maximus. Nothing of this book now 
 remains: the passage quoted by Eusebius elsewhere (Praep. Evang. vii. 22), 
 which purports to be an extract from it, but is verbally identical with a 
 section of the Dialogue of Methodius of Olympus on Free Will (Bonwetsch, 
 Methodius, Schriften i. 15-38), has been shown by Dr. J. A. Robinson 
 (Onigenis Philocalia, p. xl ff.) to be the work of the latter author. 
 
 1 A suggestion of itis found in adv. haer. III. xxv. 1, which, describing 
 the immediate consequences of the Fall, tells us that Adam clothed himself 
 with fig-leaves ‘ retundens petulantem carnis impetum.’ 
 
200 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 have been historical personages. But it gives us a picture 
 of primitive man as frail, imperfect, and child-like—a picture 
 which is on the whole unaffected by the Rabbinical figment 
 of Adam’s ‘ Original Righteousness,’ and is by no means 
 incapable of harmonisation with the facts revealed by the 
 science of to-day. It exaggerates neither the height from 
 which, nor the depth to which, the first men are alleged to 
 have fallen. It finds in the inherited disorder of our nature 
 rather a weakness to be pitied than an offence to be con- 
 demned ; and, in so far as man is conceived as being under 
 a curse or enslaved by the power of evil, a large part of the 
 blame for this is divided between his own folly and the 
 malice of a personal Satan. As held by the Apologists, it 
 would seem to have contained no hint of the conception of 
 ‘Original Guilt ’—a conception which presents equal diffi- 
 culties to a reasoned faith in the Divine justice, whether the 
 supposed ‘ guilt ’ be regarded as accountability for the sin 
 of a remote ancestor or accountability for the possession 
 of instincts which we cannot help possessing. We must 
 admit that (if our exposition of the theory of ‘ Recapitula- 
 tion’ is correct) Irenaeus seems, in some passages, to have 
 given what must be regarded as a wrong direction to the 
 progress of Fall-speculation by interpreting the vague 
 Pauline phrase ‘in Adam ’ in a sense which would assimilate 
 it to the ‘in Abraham ’ of Heb. vii. 9, and would harden the 
 undefined idea of our hereditary connexion with Adam 
 into a stiffly realistic idea of our pre-natal existence in his 
 loins. But this implied theory as to the link between 
 Adam and his posterity is only used to account for our 
 de facto lack of the Divine image, and the idea of our present 
 personal responsibility for our first father’s primaeval sin 
 appears hardly, if at all. 
 
 This earliest patristic version of the Fall-doctrine, which 
 we have reconstructed from the passing allusions of Justin, 
 Theophilus, Tatian, and Irenaeus, is the natural product 
 of the ‘ once-born ’ type of religious experience, which alone 
 would seem to be characteristic of the sunny genius of 
 Hellenic Christendom, at that time the sole laboratory of 
 Christian theology ; and in some ways it might have been 
 well if this version had continued to prevail without a rival. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH or 
 
 But a universal Church must embrace all nations and all 
 types of religious temperament ; and the sterner and more 
 terrifying elements of our religion had yet to receive their 
 due recognition within the sphere of Christian anthropology. 
 If the ‘ once-born’ temperament constitutes the ballast of 
 the Church, the ‘ twice-born’ is, under God, its motive 
 power; and both modes of religious feeling should be 
 represented, through their appropriate intellectual expres- 
 sions, in the final and balanced estimate of human nature 
 which a fully reasoned theory of Redemption requires as 
 its presupposition. The point at which the single rivulet 
 of primitive Christian Fall-tradition bifurcated into two 
 distinct, and in some important respects divergent, streams 
 of doctrine—the one preserving the relative indefiniteness 
 of the Pauline conceptions and the emphasis on human 
 freedom characteristic of Hellenic optimism and sanity, the 
 other flowing in specifically Western and Latin channels, 
 and deeply coloured by the pessimism of the ‘ twice-born ’ 
 religious temperament—lies in the early decades of the 
 third century ; a review of which, in regard to its influence 
 upon the developing doctrines of Man and of Sin, must form 
 the next section of our narrative. The elemental force 
 which stimulates the further growth of Fall-doctrine during 
 this period is still the unquenchable determination of the: 
 Christian society to safeguard the ethical monotheism, [ 
 inherited from the ancient Israel, which was the heart of | 
 its message and the mainspring of its life, against the 
 slackening, but yet formidable, assaults of Gnosticism. 
 
 The writers whose opinions now demand our study are 
 the illustrious Platonists of Alexandria, Clement and Origen, 
 leaders of Christian thought in the East, and the fierce 
 Tertullian, father of the characteristic theology of the West. | 
 It is in the Alexandrine and the African schools respectively 
 that the two classical versions of the Fall-doctrine begin to 
 appear differentiated from each other; and their teaching » 
 must therefore be examined in some detail. The Eastern 
 school has a prior claim to consideration, as standing in 
 more direct continuity with the early Greek-Christian 
 thinkers discussed above, and as having produced, in the 
 speculations of Origen, some remarkable and _ brilliant 
 
202 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 developments of the Fall-doctrine, which will require 
 attention in due course. A few words must be devoted in 
 the first place to certain traces of the Fall-theory which, as 
 I believe, may be discerned in the writings of Clement of 
 Alexandria, side by side with much which appears to deny 
 or ignore it. 
 
 CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA ON THE SIN OF ADAM 
 
 These traces appear in two passages, which shall be 
 reproduced at length. The first of them runs as follows: 
 
 But contemplate for a moment, if you will, the Divine 
 benefits bestowed upon us, looking back to their very beginning. 
 There was indeed a time when the First Man sported in Paradise, 
 free from all constraint, seeing that he was a child of God; but 
 there came a time when he fell under the power of pleasure (for 
 by the serpent pleasure creeping on its belly is in a figure signified, 
 and earthborn wickedness, which is nourished up as fuel for the 
 flames). So then the child was led astray by lusts, and grew to 
 manhood in disobedience, and having disobeyed his father he 
 dishonoured his God. What was the might of pleasure! man, 
 who by reason of his simplicity had been free from constraint, 
 was found bound with sins. This same man (rotvrov) the Lord 
 then willed to loose from his bonds; and being Himself bound 
 in flesh (a divine mystery), by this mystery worsted the serpent 
 and enslaved the tyrant, even Death. And—the most as- 
 tounding thing of all—that same man who had been led astray 
 through pleasure, that same who had been bound by corruption, 
 him the Lord shewed set free with hands unfettered. O mystical 
 wonder ! the Lord is bowed down, and man raised up! and he 
 who fell from Paradise receives as the prize of obedience some- 
 thing greater than Paradise, namely, heaven itself.? 
 
 1 protrepticus, xi. 111 (ed. Dindorf, 1859): puxpov dé, ef BovrAa, avwHev 
 wy x , > , € an | ees § \ > , ” / 
 abper THv Oeiav evepyeciav. Oo mpa@rTos ore pev ev Tapadelaw Emale AcAvpEvos, 
 > A , > ~ ~ Less \ ¢€ / ¢€ lod 4 > a e ~ : PT 
 Emel TaLdiov Av Tob Oeod, Ore SE UrémimTEv HSovH—Odis adAnyopetrat HSov7 Ertl 
 
 / ¢ s > a 
 yaotépa eptovaa, Kakia yytvn, els tAas tpehouevn—mapHyeto emOvpias 6 mais 
 > > lot 
 avdpilopevos amreOcig Kal mapaKxovoas Tob matpdos Haxvvero Tov Oedv’ olov taxvaev 
 ¢€ / ¢ > € / ” ¢ / € / / ~ 
 d0vy ; 6 dv amddtnta AcAvpevos avOpwros auaptias nopéOn Sedepevos. Tav 
 Seop@v Adcat TobTov 6 KUp.ios adOis HOEAnoEV, Kal capKi évdeHels, wvaTHprov Beiov, 
 > ff 
 ToUT@ TOV Odw ExELpWoaTo Kal TOV TUpavvoyv edovAWcaTo, TOV OdvaTov. Kal TO 
 2 mal a a ~ 
 mapadofdratov, exeivov Tov avOpwrov Tov Hdov memAavnpevov, Tov TH POopa 
 / / lot , 
 dedepevor, xepaly AaAwpevars Eder~Ee AcAVEVoV. @ GavpaTos pvatiKod KéKALTAL 
 \ ¢ la \ A Fug 2 ~ a ~ 
 fev 6 KUptos, avéotn dé dvOpwmos, Kal 6 €x Tob mapadelaoov Tmeawy petlov brakojs 
 GOAov ovpavods amoAapBaver. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 203 
 
 In this passage we notice, first of all, the naturalisation 
 within Christian thought of the allegorical method of ex- 
 egesis borrowed from Philo, which we shall find used with 
 such striking results by Clement’s great pupil and successor, 
 Origen. Secondly, we remark that—continuing what has 
 been the uniform teaching hitherto of those Christian 
 teachers who have alluded to the subject at all—Clement 
 affirms the condition of the first man to have been that of 
 a child, characterised by imperfection and innocence; in 
 other words, he knows nothing of the doctrine of ‘ Original 
 Righteousness.’ Thirdly—and this is the point of greatest 
 interest for our present enquiry—it is to be observed that 
 the ‘man’ who was freed by Christ from the chains of sin 
 and from bondage to corruption is emphatically, even though 
 implicitly, asserted to have been identical with the ‘ man’ 
 who had been seduced by pleasure ; that is to say, ‘ Adam ’ 
 and the human race are identified as one entity. I venture 
 to suggest that sufficient weight has not been allowed by 
 previous students of the passage to the equation which it 
 clearly presupposes between the universal ‘man’ and the 
 individual ‘ first man.’ Such an allegorisation of the figure 
 of Adam is by no means unnatural, because, as Origen later 
 points out,? the Hebrew word Adam (’ddhdam, n78) is not a 
 proper name at all—it is the ordinary word for ‘ man,’ 
 homo. The paragraph is, of course, highly poetical in 
 character ; but none the less it would seem clear that the 
 underlying thought is that which we have already found in 
 Irenaeus, the vague idea of a certain solidarity of mankind 
 with Adam, which is capable of being expressed in terms 
 of either ‘ mystical’ or ‘ physical’ identity, a solidarity 
 which necessarily involves mankind in the bondage to 
 ‘ pleasure,’ that is, to the sensual appetites, first incurred by 
 its common father. This is at least a minimal doctrine of 
 ‘ Original Sin,’ even though, as Dr. Bigg justly points out, 
 it contains no suggestion of the idea of ‘ Original Guilt.’ 4 
 
 1 Cf. strom. iv. 23, 150 (Adam was only ‘ perfect’ in the sense that no 
 specifically human characteristics were lacking to him): bid. vi. 12, 96 
 (Adam was created, not morally perfect, but capable of acquiring virtue). 
 
 2 See below, p. 229. 8 See Lecture II, p. 41, n. 1. 
 
 4 Christian Platonists of Alexandria (1913 edn., with some additions 
 and modifications by F. E. Brightman), p. 112, n. 1. 
 
204 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 The second passage contains an interesting speculation 
 as to the exact nature of the first sin: it occurs in a context 
 which is devoted to a defence of marriage against the attacks 
 of the Gnostic Julius Cassianus, who had cited 2 Cor. x1. 3— 
 ‘I fear lest, by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve in 
 his craftiness, your minds should be corrupted,’ etc.—to 
 show that St. Paul disapproved of marital intercourse. 
 
 For (human) generation is a created thing and a creation 
 of the Almighty, who assuredly would never depress the soul 
 from a better to a worse state. Nay, rather was it the case that 
 the Saviour came unto us who had gone astray as to our minds, 
 which had been corrupted as the result of the disobedience com- 
 mitted by us, pleasure-loving as we were, against the command- 
 ments; the first-formed man, perchance, having anticipated 
 our season [that is, presumably, the season at which God willed 
 that we, Adam’s posterity, should be begotten] and before the 
 time of the grace of matrimony having experienced desire and 
 committed sin (for ‘ every one that looketh on a woman to lust 
 after her hath committed adultery with her already,’ not awaiting 
 the season of the Divine Will).! 
 
 Here it is suggested that the ‘ Fall’ may have consisted 
 in the first stirrings of lustful appetite, which may have led 
 to the premature union of Adam and Eve, before the time 
 appointed by God for their marriage. (We notice once more 
 the tendency to which attention has already been drawn, to 
 assign a sexual character to the first sin.2) The passage is 
 elusive in style: but there is clearly meant to be implied 
 some connexion between the sensuality attributed to Adam 
 in the last clause and the ‘love of pleasure’ which is, 
 immediately before, said to be the source of our disobedience 
 or actual sin. Is this connexion that of cause and effect, or 
 merely that of type and antitype? If the latter, it would 
 seem that the whole sentence about Adam becomes an 
 irrelevant rhetorical flourish. But if a causal connexion 
 
 1 styom. iii. 15, 94: KTLOT?) yap 7 yéveots Kal KTicts TOO TaVvTOKpaTOpoS, 
 ds odK dv mote €& ayewdvav eis Ta yeipw KaTdyo. uynv, GAN els Tovs © 
 memAavnpevouvs Ta vonuata els Huds 6 owTnp adixeto, a 51) ex THS KaTa TAs 
 evtoAds mapaxots epldapn piAndovovyvrwy judy, Taxa tov mpoAaBovTos Hud@v Tov 
 Katpov TOO mpwromAdoTov Kal mpd Wpas THs Tod ydpouv ydpiTos dpexEevTos Kal 
 Stapaptovros, Ste mas 6 PrenwV yuvaika mpos TO emiOvpoa. Won epolyevocer 
 atTHv, ovK dvapetvas Tov KaLpov TOD DeAHpaTos. 
 
 2 Perhaps Clement may have borrowed the idea set forth in the passage 
 under discussion from the Apocalypse of Abraham; see Lecture II, p. 58. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 205 
 
 may be assumed, the whole argument at once falls into place, 
 and aligns itself with the thought of the passage quoted 
 above from the protrepticus. It may then be paraphrased 
 as follows: ‘ St. Paul’s saying about the deception of Eve by 
 the serpent cannot be quoted as a disparagement of conjugal 
 union. This was ordained by God, and cannot therefore in 
 itself be an evil thing. It is true that the serpent signifies 
 bodily pleasure, and that the inordinate love of pleasure 
 which lies at the root of our concrete sins flows from a 
 primitive act of surrender to bodily pleasure committed by 
 our first parents. But the wickedness of this act consisted 
 not in its sexual nature, but in its frematureness ; and 
 this judgment is based upon a permanently valid ethical 
 principle, which is embodied in our Lord’s words recorded 
 in Matt. v. 28. What He condemns is, not the appetite, 
 but the unwillingness to wait for the time when the satis- 
 faction of the appetite will have become legitimate.’ 
 
 There is a third passage relative to the sin of Adam which 
 deserves mention in this connexion, though its purport 
 
 appears to be designed rather to refine away ‘ Original . ~ 
 
 Sin,’ on what would later have been called ‘ Pelagian ’ lines, 
 than to affirm it in the sense which we have found in the 
 two places just discussed. This is a sentence occurring in 
 the adumbrationes, or ‘ Outline Notes,’ on the Catholic 
 Epistles,t which are recognised by most scholars as coming 
 in substance from the hand of Clement. Commenting on 
 
 1 Printed in vol. ii. of Dindorf’s edition, pp. 479-489. These adumbra- 
 tiones are generally believed to be a dogmatically expurgated Latin version, 
 made by Cassiodorus, of the commentaries on 1 Peter, Jude, 1 and 2 John, 
 contained in Clement’s now lost hypotyposes (émorumdces, = ‘ out- 
 lines’). For discussions of them, see Zahn, Forschungen zury Gesch. des 
 neutestamentl. Kanons, ili. (1884), pp. 79-103 ; Preuschen, in Harnack’s 
 Gesch. der alichristl. Literatur, i. p. 306 f. Westcott, however, (art. ‘ Clement 
 of Alexandria,’ DCB, vol.i. p. 564,) doubts whether the adumbrationes as 
 they stand are the work either of Clement or of Cassiodorus, though he 
 thinks that they may include important fragments of Clement’s Com- 
 mentary; and Bigg (Christian Platonists, p. 112, n. 1), though not, 
 apparently, raising any question about the authenticity of the adumbra- 
 tiones as a whole, doubts the context in which the sentence ‘ sic etiam 
 peccato Adae’ stands, on the ground that it goes on to lay down ‘ the 
 doctrine of reprobation.’ I do not myself think that it does: but space 
 forbids a discussion of the matter here. I have felt justified in quoting 
 the sentence as Clement’s in view of the agreement of the majority of 
 scholars. 
 
206 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Jude r1— Woe unto them! for they went in the way of 
 Cain ’—he observes, according to the Latin translator, 
 ‘Sic etiam peccato Adae subiacemus secundum peccati 
 similitudinem.’ The fact that the Adumbrationes are no 
 more than summaries of the Greek original makes it difficult 
 to be certain of the precise sense intended by the author: 
 but it seems clear that the phrase ‘secundum peccati 
 similitudinem ’ is reproduced from Rom. v. 14 (‘ after the 
 likeness of Adam’s transgression ’).4_ In view of its context, 
 the only meaning which I can assign to the sentence is as 
 follows: ‘ (The sinners denounced by Jude are said to have 
 . gone in the way of Cain, that is, to have imitated the sin of 
 Cain) ; and in the same way we all are subject to the sin of 
 Adam, by imitating his sin.’ So interpreted, this aphorism 
 would not directly deny the hypothesis of the solidarity of 
 the race with its sinful parents; but it must be admitted 
 that it looks very like an attempt to supersede the conception 
 of ‘mystical identity ’ by that of ‘ social heredity,’ which 
 regards Adam’s transgression as influencing his posterity 
 towards evil only in so far as it provided a bad example for 
 this imitation.’ | 
 
 We have thus two passages in which the Adamic Fall- 
 doctrine appears to be affirmed or implied, and probably 
 one in which it is recognised, but recognised only in order to 
 be rationalised away. But these passages, taken together, 
 bear an exceedingly small proportion to the total contents of 
 Clement’s surviving works ; and against them we must set 
 the whole trend and predominant tendency of his general 
 treatment of the moral life, which, in strict accord with 
 Hellenic-Christian tradition, insists strongly upon the 
 autonomy of the will,? and makes little allowance for the 
 fact of the moral struggle. It would not be justifiable to 
 
 1 It is a probable inference from this sentence that Clement’s text of 
 Rom. v. 14, like Crigen’s, did not contain the word y7 before auapryoartas : 
 see Lecture III,’p. 125; m:,2: 
 
 2 The following curious passage should perhaps be mentioned in this 
 connexion: Protvept. ii. 12: Aidvucov pawdAnv dpyialovar Baxxyou dpodayia 
 THY tepopnviay ayovtes Kal TeAtcKovat Tas Kpeavoulas TOV ddvwv, aveaTeupevor 
 tots odeow, eroAodvlovres Evav' Evav éxeivny, 8. hv 4 mAdvyn mapnKodovbnaev. 
 Kal onpetov opyiwy Baxyix@v odis orl TereAcopevos. adtixa yoov Kata THY aKpLpA 
 Tov ‘EBpalwy dwviv 76 dvona TO Evia dacvvdpevov épunveverat dduis 7 Onreva. 
 
 3 Cf. strom. ii. 14, 60; 15,66; and frequently. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 207 
 
 assume that a belief in free-will is logically incompatible 
 with the belief in any kind of inherited handicap ; and we 
 have seen that both convictions were simultaneously held by 
 the second-century writers reviewed above. But it cannot 
 be denied that Clement’s expression of the former is emphatic 
 and enthusiastic, whilst his admission of the latter is scanty 
 and grudging. In the Fall-passages which we have noticed, 
 he conveys the impression of one who is rendering lip- 
 homage to an idea which has too much traditional and 
 Scriptural authority to be totally discarded, but which is 
 really alien to the general direction of his own thinking. 
 The truth is that Clement’s own temperament is as defi- 
 nitely and typically ‘ once-born’ or ‘ healthy-minded’ as 
 Augustine’s or Luther’s was to be ‘ twice-born’?! ; and it 
 may be doubted whether his feeling of the sinfulness of sin 
 was not somewhat less intense even than that of the normal 
 ‘“once-born’ religious man. Such a conclusion is at least 
 suggested by a sentence which defines the causes of moral 
 evil as consisting in the “ weakness of matter,’ that is of 
 man’s material body, and the ‘involuntary impulses of 
 ignorance.’? Hence, it is not surprising to find that in one 
 place the conception of ‘ Original Guilt’ is rejected in 
 scornfully explicit terms,? and that elsewhere words are used 
 which, if taken at their face value, would deny even the 
 mildest interpretation of ‘ Original Sin.’ 4 
 
 1 Compare Bigg’s phrase, ‘the blithe geniality of Clement, whose 
 cloistered life seems never to have felt a storm’ (Christian Platonists, p. 168). 
 
 2 strom. vii. 3, 16: Kaxdv dé aitiay Kal BAns av tis dabeverav broAdBor Kal 
 Tas aBovAnrous THs ayvolas Opyuds. 
 
 8 ibid. ili. 17, 100: Aeyérwoav Huiv mot emdpvevaev TO yevvynbév madiov, 
 } 7Hs bro TH To ’"Adau tromémTwKev apav TO wndev evepyfoav .... Kal drav 
 6 AaBiéd cizn, Ev dpaprias cvvedndOnv cat év dvoplas exicono€ev pe  ULATHP Lov, 
 Aéyer pev mpodntiKds pntépa tiv Evav* adda Caévrwv Eta pyrnp éyévero, Kat 
 ei €v dpaptia avveAnddn, aA od« adros ev aduaptia odd5é uy apuaptia adrds. 
 “Let them tell us, where the newly born child committed fornication, or 
 how a thing that has performed no action at all has fallen under the curse 
 of Adam? ... And when David says ‘‘ I was conceived in sins and in 
 iniquities did my mother bear me,” he is alluding in prophetic wise to Eve 
 as his mother; but Eve became the mother of all living, and even if 
 David was ‘‘ conceived in sin,” yet he is not thereby involved in sin, nor 
 indeed is he himself sin.’ 
 
 4 strom. iii. 9, 64. Here the crucial passage Rom. v. 12 is quoted ; 
 but Clement’s only comment on it consists in the assertion that death is 
 produced by natural necessity, flowing from the Divine governance of the 
 
208 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 The exaggerated optimism with which Clement regards 
 human nature reflects itself in his failure to appreciate the 
 saddening and perplexing facts of evil in the extra-human 
 universe. Theapparently purposeless cruelty which ravages 
 the animal world, which, as we have seen, so deeply affected 
 the imagination of St. Paul,? and which has led many 
 thinkers, both ancient and modern, to take refuge in dualism 
 as the easiest explanation of the present state of sub- 
 human Nature, seems to have made no impression upon him. 
 And as he never realised the genuine weight and force 
 of Marcion’s case against the monotheistic belief of the 
 Great Church, he lacked the incentive to study and develop 
 the one existing theory of the origin of evil which was 
 capable of shielding that belief. Hence the great architec- 
 tonic idea of the parallelism between and the mutual 
 implication of the Apostasy and the Redemption, which 
 had been sketched out by St. Paul and elaborated by 
 Irenaeus, is all but absent from the pages of Clement ; and 
 the doctrine of the Fall is little more than a useless excre- 
 scence on his theology, only of significance in so far as the 
 fact that he does not feel able to ignore it altogether may be 
 regarded as testifying to the measure of acceptance which it 
 had already won in contemporary Christian thought. 
 
 ORIGEN AND THE ‘ TRANSCENDENTAL’ FALL-THEORY 
 
 Far different is the place held by the Fall-doctrine in the 
 writings of Clement’s famous pupil Origen, perhaps the 
 mightiest doctor of pre-Augustinian Christendom, the 
 austere and fiery spirit of whom it has been said by one of 
 my most eminent predecessors in this Lectureship ‘ There 
 has been no truly great man in the Church who did not love 
 him a little.’ 3 
 
 
 
 
 
 universe. He proceeds (in 65) to say that Eve was called ‘ Life,’ because 
 she was the mother of all, both of just and of unjust, ‘ each one of us 
 justifying himself or again making himself disobedient’ (éxdorov mud 
 €auTov OtKaobvTos } Eutradw ameO7 KatacKevalovtos). 
 
 1 Cf. R. B. Tollinton, Clement of Alexandria (1914), ll. p. 254; Bigg, 
 Christian Platonists, p. 109. 
 
 2 Rom. vill. 18-25 ; see Lecture III, pp. 157 ff. 
 
 3 Bigg, Christian Platonists, p. 329. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 209 
 
 In order to elucidate the successive phases through 
 which his peculiarly daring and imaginative Fall-speculations 
 passed, it is necessary to refer briefly to the circumstances 
 of his life. Origenes Adamantius was born A.D. 185-6, under 
 the Emperor Commodus, and died in his sixty-ninth year, 
 in the reign of Gallus (A.D. 251-254).1 According to the 
 generally accepted statement of Epiphanius,? he was a Copt, 
 sprung from the native population of Egypt; his father 
 was the martyr Leonides, and shortly after his eighteenth 
 year he was appointed by the Bishop Demetrius to succeed 
 Clement in the headship of the great Christian institution 
 known as the Catechetical School of Alexandria. Until 
 A.D. 231 his days were devoted to the vast encyclopaedic 
 labours, critical, philosophical, and theological, which made 
 him the dominant intellectual force in the Eastern Christen- 
 dom of his day, and to the public exposition of the Scriptures 
 in the lecture-room andin the church. The stern asceticism 
 of his private life, which aspired to an unreserved conformity 
 with the precepts of the Gospel, even to the extent of a 
 literal acting upon the commendation of those who have 
 “made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s 
 sake,’ marks him as a typically ‘ twice-born’ Christian, 
 standing in this respect at the opposite pole to his master 
 Clement ; but this temperamental bias was to a certain 
 extent corrected by the Hellenic sanity, balance, and sense 
 of proportion with which he was imbued by his studies at 
 the Museum, or University of Alexandria? ; and we shall 
 see that the character of his Fall-doctrine has been largely 
 determined by the interplay of his passionate African 
 idiosyncrasy and the calming influences of the philosophic 
 culture, with its ‘ once-born’ associations and tone, which 
 he inherited from the Macedonian conquerors of his country. 
 
 1 Westcott, art. ‘ Origenes’ in DCB, iv. p. 98, calculates these dates 
 from the statements of Eusebius, H.E. vi. 2, vii. 1 ; for slightly different 
 
 estimates by other scholars (not, however, varying by more than a year 
 or two) see Weingarten, Zeittafeln u. Uberblicke zur Kirchengesch. (1905), 
 Pir. 
 
 2 haey. \xiv. 1: Aly’nrws 7H yever: a statement which is confirmed 
 by the etymology of his name Origen (Qpryévns, ‘ sprung from the god 
 Horus’). 
 
 8 According to Porphyry (ap. Eus. H.E. vi. 19), under Ammonius 
 Saccas ; Bigg, however, disputes this (op. cit., p. 156, n. 3). 
 
 P 
 
210 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 In the year last mentioned, he fell foul of Demetrius, the 
 bishop to whom he owed his appointment as head of the 
 Catechetical School, owing to his uncanonical acceptance 
 of ordination to the priesthood, whilst on a visit to Caesarea, 
 at the hands of certain Palestinian bishops. Being con- 
 demned and, perhaps, deposed from the priesthood! by 
 Demetrius and an Egyptian synod, he quitted Alexandria ; 
 and, as the churches of Palestine refused to recognise the 
 censures of Demetrius, took up his abode at Caesarea, which, 
 for the remaining twenty years of his life, was the scene of 
 his multifarious literary activities. His writings conse- 
 quently divide themselves into two well-defined groups, 
 belonging respectively to the Alexandrine and the Caesarean 
 periods of his life ; and, as we shall see, this chronological 
 division corresponds to a significant difference of orientation 
 in their treatment of the Fall-doctrine. 
 
 (i) THE ALEXANDRINE PERIOD—THE ‘ PRE-NATAL FALL’ 
 
 The most notable work of Origen’s first period is the 
 great treatise ‘On First Principles’ (aepi dpydv, de 
 principits), which contains what at first sight appears to 
 be a unique and original version of, or at least substitute 
 for, the Fall-theory. As this work marks the first appear- 
 ance within Christianity of a line of thought which has in 
 more modern times led to some striking speculative develop- 
 ments, and which may well exert an important influence 
 upon the final formulation of our constructive conclusions, 
 it will be well to state the view of the origin of evil therein 
 put forward with some degree of fullness.? 
 
 1 So Photius (bibliotheca, 118, [PG CIII. 398, 93a]), following the 
 Apology of Pamphilus and Eusebius. 
 
 2 For the text of the de principiits I have used the critical edition of 
 P. Koetschau (1913) in Die griech. christl. Schriftsteller der ersten 3 Jahrhun- 
 derte, hervausg. von der Kirchenvater-commission dey kgl. Preuss. Akademie 
 der Wissenschaften. Reference to this will show that I have relied upon 
 Koetschau’s restoration of the Greek original, in places where Rufinus 
 has apparently altered or suppressed what appeared to him doctrinally 
 objectionable passages, from such sources as the anathemas of the Con- 
 stantinopolitan synod of 543, and the Letter of Justinian to Mennas. I 
 have also used the ‘ Berlin’ text of the commentary on St. John’s Gospel 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH a1r 
 
 Unlike Clement, Origen is deeply sensitive to the 
 inequalities, injustices, and miseries which are plainly 
 manifest in human life, and may be dimly discerned in the 
 superhuman and sub-human worlds. (We note the Pauline 
 sweep and comprehensiveness of his envisagement of 
 reality.) The Apostle tells us that one star differeth from 
 another star in glory,! and for Greek thinkers of the third 
 century (as still for Aquinas in the thirteenth 2) the stars 
 were, Or were moved by, conscious minds; why should 
 there be an apparently arbitrary inequality amongst these 
 glorious beings? The diversities of human fortune present 
 an even more perplexing problem. ‘Some are barbarians, 
 some Greeks; and of barbarians some are more cruel and 
 fierce, some more gentle. Some men live under admirable 
 laws, some under laws which are contemptible or harsh, 
 some are governed by inhuman and bestial customs rather 
 than by laws. Some men from the moment of their birth 
 are placed in a state of humiliation and subjection and are 
 brought up in servile fashion, under the rule of masters, 
 princes, or tyrants; others are reared in a more liberal and 
 reasonable condition. Some are born with healthy bodies, 
 some with congenital disease or defect. . . . Why should 
 I enumerate the whole catalogue of human calamities and 
 miseries, from which some are exempt, and in which others 
 are involved ...?’3 The question of animal suffering is 
 too embarrassing to be faced directly, and is dismissed with 
 the curious observation that ‘ these things are secondary 
 results, not primary causes.’ 4 
 
 To the question, Why is the world vexed by so many 
 inexplicable inequalities and apparently undeserved suffer- 
 ings ? dualistic Gnosticism had an easy reply: these things 
 
 (E. Preuschen, 1903) and of the first four books of the contra Celsum 
 (P. Koetschau, 1899). All quotations from other works of Origen are 
 taken from Lommatzsch’s edition (Berlin, 1831). 
 
 Bes GOT XVi'AT. 
 
 2 See the quotations given by P. H. Wicksteed, Reactions between Dogma 
 and Philosophy (1920), pp. 73-76. 
 
 3 de princ. ii. 9 (Koetschau, p. 166 f.). 
 
 £ So at least I understand Rufinus’ rendering ‘ cum haec non principalia 
 sed consequentia accipi debere certum sit’ (ibid., Koetschau, p. 167), 
 which presumably represents an original émei radra odk dpxas adda, axdAovba 
 xpH vouifew, or some similar phrase. 
 
212 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 are the work of the evil. Power co-ordinate and co-eternal 
 with God. But Origen’s Christian monotheism decisively 
 rules out such a solution. God is the creator of all that is, 
 and His goodness forbids the supposition that He has 
 inflicted unmerited pain on any of His creatures. The 
 inequalities of fortune and opportunity, and the sufferings 
 which are actually endured by men, must therefore be 
 deserved ; and as ex hypothest these evils are congenital, and 
 cannot have been deserved in this life, it follows that they 
 must have been incurred by some transgression committed 
 in a previous life. This is the logical basis of the theory of 
 a pre-natal or extra-temporal ‘ Fall’ of individual souls, 
 which represents the first conscious attempt of Christian 
 theology to remove the origin of evil out of the phenomenal 
 into the intelligible or supersensible sphere, and which 
 may therefore be described as the earliest form of the 
 ‘transcendental,’ as distinct from the ‘ historical,’ Fall- 
 doctrine. 
 
 Origen’s exposition of this audacious speculation starts 
 from the assertion that in the beginning God, of His pure 
 goodness, created a fixed number of intellectual essences 
 (voepat ovata) or rational beings, as many as He could 
 keep. under the control of His Providence. (The God of 
 Origen is not unlimited; for if He were, He would be 
 incomprehensible even to Himself.') 
 
 All these immaterial and bodiless essences were created 
 equal in goodness and like in status; for the Creator, being 
 himself exempt from variety or changeableness, could have 
 had no motive for producing a variety of creatures? ; and, 
 in virtue of their identity of nature and operation, they 
 constituted a Henad (évas) or Unity, a collegiate organism 
 intimately inspired and illuminated by the Divine Logos.’ 
 But, being created, they were necessarily capable of change ; 
 and, being rational, they were gifted with freedom and the 
 faculty of choice. This momentous endowment was used 
 
 1 de prince. ii. 9, 1 (Koetschau, p. 164, where a fragment of the Greek 
 original, from which these statements are taken, is restored from Justinian, 
 ad Mennam). 
 
 2 4i..9, 6. 
 
 3 ii. 8, 3 (Koetschau, p. 159). The affinities of this idea to the Gnostic 
 conceptions of the Pleroma, the Ogdoad, Dodecad, etc., will be obvious. 
 
iA E-DOCERINRINS THE CHURCH” 2r3 
 
 by different groups of them in different ways. Some 
 persevered in virtue and retained the status in which they 
 were created ; others gave way to ‘ idleness, and weariness 
 of the labour of preserving goodness’ (‘ desidia et laboris 
 taedium in servando bono ’!) or to ‘satiety of the divine 
 love and contemplation’ (kdpos rijs Jelas dydmys Kal Pewpias) ,? 
 and fell from the supersensible world to various depths, so 
 becoming enmeshed in matter to a greater or lesser extent 
 and enclosed in corporeal envelopes’ of varying degrees of 
 fineness and subtlety. The most rebellious sank to the 
 deepest abyss, and became demons, clothed upon with 
 ‘cold and dusky’ bodies; the less corrupted, whose love 
 of God was cooled but not extinct, fell only as far as the 
 earth-plane and became (human) ‘ souls’ (%vyai, fancifully 
 derived from yvypds, cold’); those whose error was 
 slightest descended only a little way from the Henad and 
 became angels, Cherubim, principalities and powers in their 
 various ranks, and the spirits animating the sun, moon, and 
 stars. On earth, the fallen ‘souls,’ who are ourselves, 
 immured in human bodies, are meant to 
 
 dree their penance step by step — 
 
 and to win restoration through chastisement and discipline. 
 To such a pre-natal transgression, committed in the 
 transcendental sphere, the Psalmist makes mystical allusion 
 in the verse ‘ Before I was humbled, I went wrong: but now 
 have I kept thy word’ *—meaning by the phrase ‘ before 
 I was humbled ’ ‘ in my pre-natal life, before I was banished 
 from the heavenly place, and confined in this humbling 
 prison-house of flesh.’ 5 
 
 1 ii. 9, 2 (Koetschau, 165). 
 
 2 ii. 8, 3 (Koetschau, p. 159). 
 
 8 ii. 8 (Koetschau, p. 158). The derivation of guyy from véis, 
 cooling, is also found in Philo, de somn. i. 6. 
 
 apis, CS Vill, (CXIX.) 67, L2CX: 
 
 5 de princ. ii. 8 (Koetschau, p. 158). To yap eimety tov mpodyrny, mpiv 
 ] TamewwOhvai pe, eyo éemAnupeAnoa, €& adrtis dyno THs Wuyis 6 Adyos, ws dvw 
 ev ovpav@ éemAnupédAnoe, mplv 7 €v 7TH odpate TeTaTewHobau. The counter- 
 argument from Scripture, based on St. Paul’s words about Jacob and 
 Esau (‘the children being not yet born, neither having done anything 
 good or bad,’ Rom. ix. 11), is parried by the arbitrary glossing of the 
 phrase ‘cum ... neque aliquid egissent boni neque mali’ with the 
 words, ‘ in hac scilicet vita’ (ii. 9, 7). 
 
214 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 This, of course, is the exact theory of the origin of evil— 
 at least of physical evil—which was hinted at by Philo,t 
 and is apparently condemned by the Christ of the Fourth 
 Gospel.2, Whilst in a general sense its source may be said 
 to lie in Origen’s Platonism, it is impossible to fix with 
 precision the particular writings which may have moulded 
 his presentation of it. Perhaps the idea first came to him 
 from Philo, and was impressed upon his mind by the great 
 myth contained in Plato’s Phaedrus® In this, the pre- 
 existent soul is portrayed as a winged charioteer, guiding 
 a pair of unequally yoked steeds, the white steed of Reason, 
 and his dark unruly mate of Desire. Ever and anon one.of 
 these charioteers, as he follows in the train of Zeus, soaring 
 upward to the heaven beyond the heavens, fails to curb 
 the rebellious curvettings and prancings of the dark steed ; 
 and is flung, like Phaethon, from the roof of the firmament 
 down to this gross world of matter, shedding his wings 
 as he falls, and becoming incarnate in the person of an 
 individual man. Or we may find the immediate fount of 
 Origen’s Fall-theory in the Myth of Er,* embodied in the 
 Tenth Book of the Republic, in which the souls who are 
 about to be born into this world freely choose their future 
 lots, drawn from the lap of Lachesis. This splendid fantasy 
 clearly displays the fundamental motif of Origen’s thought 
 on this subject—namely, the determination to save God 
 from the reproach of causing evil which les behind all Fall- 
 theories and all other theodicies—in the heavenly prophet’s 
 mystic cry, aitia éAopevov’ Beds avairios (‘ He who hath 
 chosen shall answer for it: God is not answerable’). Ifthe 
 question of the more remote affinities of Origen’s theory be 
 raised, we may point out that the idea of the fall of the soul 
 froma super-celestial state, acquiring various elements of im- 
 purity from the planetary spheres through which it passes 
 
 4 See Lecture IT, p. 34, 
 
 2 John ix. 2, 3; see Lecture III, p. 98. As the relevant portion of 
 Origen’s Commentary on St. John’s Gospel is no longer extant, we cannot 
 tell how he evaded the difficulty which this passage must have raised for 
 his theory. 
 
 3 Phaedrus, 246 A-257 A. 
 
 4 Republic, 613 E-621 D. On both of these myths see J. A. Stewart, 
 The Myths of Plato. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 15 
 
 on its downward way to be born in this world, was in 
 the third century widely diffused, both within and without 
 Gnosticism+: and Origen, like many other theologians 
 since, may well have been unconsciously influenced by the 
 very beliefs which he set out to refute. Living, too, in 
 Alexandria, the great emporium and meeting-place of East 
 and West, he may have been subtly affected by the Hindu 
 belief in re-incarnation and karma, though he steadfastly 
 refuses to admit more lives than three—pre-natal, present, 
 and future.? 
 
 But, whatever the exact sources from which this theory 
 arose, one thing is clear. Origen has grasped, as no other 
 before him and very few since, the all-important principle 
 laid down in Lectures I and II, that the Fall-doctrine really 
 rests upon an inference from the phenomena of evil con- 
 sidered in the light of ethical monotheism, and not upon the 
 Paradise-narrative of Gen. ili. He has realised that faith 
 in the God of Christianity and ratiocination from observed 
 facts form the only foundation on which a satisfactory 
 theory of the origin of evil can be built, and that the story 
 of Adam and Eve is not and cannot be more than a pictorial 
 facade. Hence the exposition contained in the de principits 
 makes no attempt to base itself upon the Adam-story ; 
 which, in another connexion,? is emphatically declared to 
 
 1 See W. Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, pp. 361-369, Exkurs IV, 
 “ Der anthropologische Dualismus’ ; he gives copious references to ancient 
 authorities, including Servius on Verg. Aen. vi. 714, Xi. 51, Varro, Macrobius, 
 Porphyry, Proclus, the Corpus Hermeticum, and Pistis Sophia. Cf. also 
 Lobeck, A glaophamus, i. p. 932 f. 
 
 2 Passages from Origen’s works expressly repudiating metempsychosis 
 have been collected by Bigg, op. cit., p. 241, n. 1; see also P. D. Huet, 
 Origeniana, ii. q. 6, §§ 18, 19. 
 
 8 de princ. iv. 3, 1 (Koetschau, p. 323): tis yodv vody éxwv oljcerat 
 mpwrnv Kat Sevtépav Kal tpitnv Huéepav éamépay te Kal mpwtay ywpis Alov 
 yeyovevat Kal aeAnvns Kal dotépwv ; tiv dé olovel mpdrnv Kal ywpls ovpavod ; 
 tis 8° ottws HALos ws oinOAvat tpdrov avOpdrov yewpyod Tov Dedv mepuTevKEevat 
 mapadevoov ev "Hdeu Kata avarodds, kat Evdov Cwfs ev adr@ memomKeévar 
 6patov Kal alcbnrdv, Ware b1a TOV GwyaTiKdy oddvTwy yevoduevov Tod KapTod 
 To Civ avadapBavew* Kal mdadw Kadrod Kal movnpod peréxe Twa mapa TO 
 peuachjoba 76 amd Tobde Tod EvAov Aap Bavdpevov ; eav Sé Kal eds TO devAvov 
 €v 7@ wapadelow mepitaretv A€ynrar Kat 6 ’Adapy bao TO EvAov KpdrTecIu, 
 ovK olwar Suotagew Twa rept Tod adTa TpomiKds Sia SoKovons toropias, Kal ov 
 cwpLaTiKOs yeyevvnyéervns, pnv¥ew Tia pvoTHpia. ‘ What man of sense will 
 suppose that there was a “‘ first,’ ‘‘ second,’’ and ‘‘ third day,’’ both 
 
216 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 be a ‘seeming history,’ revealing ‘certain mysteries,’ of 
 which the nature is not explicitly defined. If by these 
 ‘mysteries’ he means, as would seem probable, his theory 
 of the origin of evil, this declaration is an extreme instance 
 of the power of that exegetical alchemy known as 
 ‘allegorism’ to make anything mean anything; for this 
 interpretation of the story generalises ‘Adam’ out of all 
 recognition, and dissolves even the extra-mundane, but 
 still concrete, Paradise of Irenaeus into a rarefied meta- 
 physical abstraction. 
 
 It must be observed, further, that he tacitly abandons 
 (during this period), not merely the literal acceptation of 
 the Adam-narrative, but what is the core of the Adamic 
 theory, namely, the conception of a single collective Fall of 
 humanity involved in or caused by its first parents’ fault. 
 For this he substitutes a multiplicity of individual falls ; 
 the souls which were to become men “ fell ’ independently and 
 one by one. It follows from this that the unity of mankind, 
 gua mankind, though real enough, is a consequence, and not 
 an antecedent condition, of the ‘ Fall,’ or the ‘ falls’; it is 
 the unity of those who have suffered the same misfortune 
 before birth, and now find themselves clothed in the same 
 “muddy vesture of decay.’1 Nevertheless, there is one 
 exception to the rule that birth into this world is a proof 
 of pre-natal transgression—the human soul of Jesus, which 
 like all other human souls pre-existed in the transcendental 
 sphere, preserved its purity intact, and descended voluntarily 
 in order to form part of the human nature which the Logos 
 
 evening and morning, without sun, moon, and stars? and the alleged 
 “first day’’ without even a heaven? And who is so silly as to sup- 
 pose that God literally ‘‘ planted a garden,”’ like a human farmer, in 
 Eden towards the sun-rising, and that He made in it a visible and 
 perceptible Tree of Life, so that one tasting of its fruit by means of his 
 bodily teeth would receive (eternal) life? or again, that a man could 
 receive (the knowledge) of ‘‘ good and evil”’ from having chewed the fruit 
 of the Tree so called ? And if God is said to walk in the garden in the 
 evening, and Adam to hide under the tree, no one, I imagine, will doubt 
 that such words are meant to reveal certain mysteries metaphorically, 
 through a seeming history, not one which happened in concrete fact.’ 
 
 1 The only original and essential unity in which, according to Origen, 
 all men participate is the unity of all intellectual natures, the ‘ Henad’ 
 alluded to above (p. 212). 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH a17 
 
 assumed at His incarnation! ; and the souls of a few of the 
 greatest saints may also be assumed to have left the super- 
 sensible world, not as the result of sin, but obeying a specific 
 Divine command to co-operate in the regeneration of 
 mankind.? 
 
 Such is Origen’s earliest reconstruction of the idea of 
 the Fall. The question still remains to be answered, What, 
 in his view, were the results of the pre-natal transgression, 
 other than the banishment of the peccant soul to this world ? 
 It will be seen at once that the substitution of a series of 
 individual and transcendental ‘ falls’ for a single ‘ Fall’ in 
 time of a common ancestor entirely does away with any 
 idea of an inherited bias towards evil (‘ Original Sin ’) or of 
 an inherited status of guilt (‘ Original Guilt’). Given this 
 hypothesis, it is impossible to speak of any sort of sinfulness 
 as inherited : whatever moral infirmity or consciousness of 
 guilt may inhere in the individual has been acquired by him, 
 as the result of his own act, pre-natal or post-natal. As 
 we have seen, the unity of the human race as such is, for 
 Origen’s individualistic and atomistic anthropology, acci- 
 dental, not essential? ; it is the result of sin, not the basis 
 of sinfulness. It is impossible, therefore, to regard him as 
 having held the doctrines of ‘ Original’ or racial sin or guilt, 
 during the Alexandrine period of his career. 
 
 It might have been supposed that—given the stability 
 which the theory of Adam’s Fall as in some sense the cause 
 of subsequent transgressions had by this time, in virtue of 
 the Pauline teaching, attained within the Church—Origen 
 would at least have felt obliged to provide a substitute for 
 the idea of ‘ Original Sin’ in the shape of a conception of 
 a pre-natally acquired bias towards sin. But no very clear 
 expression of any such conception can be found in the 
 
 1 de princ. il. 6, 3 (Koetschau, p. 142: see the references and parallels 
 given in the foot-notes) ; iv. 4, 4 (Koetschau, p. 353). 
 
 2 Such were Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, John the Baptist (7 Joann. ii. 
 30 [Preuschen, p. 86f.]; this part of the Commentary was written before 
 A.D. 231, according to Eus. H.E. vi. 24). We may perhaps compare the 
 Lamaist idea of the successive incarnations of a series of Buddhas, for the 
 purpose of teaching mankind the way of virtue. For a similar idea in 
 Philo, see Lecture II, p. 84, n. 2. 
 
 3 See note on p. 216, above. 
 
218 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 de principiis.1 (The idea, that the soul begins its life 
 here in a ‘ cooler’ condition, relatively as to its love of God, 
 than that which it enjoyed in the super-sensible sphere, is 
 hardly definite or positive enough to be construed in this 
 sense.) The traditional Hellenic and Stoic? belief in the 
 absolute autonomy of the will, so-‘strongly characteristic of 
 the primitive Greek-Christian writers—a belief which is all 
 but irreconcileable with the hypothesis of an @ priom inclina- 
 tion to wickedness—has really overpowered in his mind the 
 authority of St. Paul, though he is, of course, quite unaware 
 of the fact. So unqualified and inalienable is the power of 
 self-determination in all conscious beings—angels, men, and 
 flends—that the fiends may, if they choose, exalt themselves 
 in the long run to human or angelic status, the angels may 
 correspondingly degrade themselves, and men may either 
 rise to the highest or sink to the lowest point in the scale of 
 created being. Origen quotes, indeed, the Apostle’s words 
 —— The flesh lusteth against the spirit,’ * but explains them 
 away aS meaning merely that the bodily appetites do in 
 point of fact furnish the occasion for and form the raw 
 material of sinful impulse—that they are what a later age 
 called the fomes peccatt, the ‘tinder of sin ’—though in 
 themselves they are morally neutral.° If they are allowed 
 to become hypertrophied, the devil may use them as a 
 fulcrum for pushing us into sin, though even the devil's 
 assaults do not impair the freedom of our choice.® The 
 
 1 Rufinus does indeed employ the term ‘ malitia’ to describe the state 
 in which the fallen spirits find themselves (il. 9, 1) ; but his method of 
 translation is so free and arbitrary that it would be unsafe to build too 
 much upon this word alone. In any case, for Origen, as for subsequent 
 Greek Fathers, evil is a negative concept, the mere privation of good 
 (‘ certum namque est malum esse bono carere,’ zbid.). 
 
 2 For the pre-eminence of the Stoa as the champion of free-will, see 
 Windelband, Geschichte der Philosophie (1892), p. 151, 3. 
 
 8 de princ. 1. 6, 2, 3 (together with this passage should be studied 
 Koetschau’s footnotes, in which are collected summaries of Origen’s specula- 
 tions on this point from the works of Jerome); iii. 1, 21. But this 
 belief in an eternal indeterminateness of volition, with its corollary of an 
 eternal possibility of sin, seems inconsistent with the idea of a necessary 
 restitution of all spirits, which appears in iii. 6, 5, 6; a fact which illus- 
 trates the fluid and provisional character of Origen’s thought on questions 
 belonging to the ‘ fringe’ rather than to the central core of the Faith. 
 
 a aa ha 
 
 ® de princ. iil. 2, 2. begs ails p age 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH ar9 
 
 question why our bodily appetites ever should become 
 hypertrophied is not discussed. It is difficult not to feel 
 that in the de princrpiis the whole treatment of the problem 
 of the ‘ moral struggle’ is superficial, and reflects, not the 
 “twice-born’ fervour of Origen’s Coptic heart, but the 
 ‘once-born’ serenity of his Hellenic brain.t Indeed, the 
 structure of his earliest Fall-theory is, if we may so say, of 
 a different composition and consistency from those versions 
 of the traditional Judaeo-Christian doctrine which we have 
 studied hitherto. They are the spontaneous precipitates, the 
 “rationalisations,’ if you will, of crises of poignant feeling ; 
 but this is an intellectual artefact, a cold philosophical 
 hypothesis, divorced from penitential emotion, and designed 
 rather to solve a cosmological than a religious or ethical 
 difficulty. 
 
 It is fair to add, in concluding our survey of Origen’s 
 first theories in regard to the origin of evil and the pre- 
 existence of souls, that he is at pains to emphasise the 
 tentative and provisional nature of his speculations, and to 
 disclaim any intention of putting them forward as dog- 
 matically certain or as essential parts of the Faith. ‘ haec 
 prout potuimus de rationabili anima discutienda magis a 
 legentibus quam statuta ac definita protulimus.’ 2 
 
 (ii) THE CAESAREAN PERIOD—INFANT BAPTISM 
 
 We now turn to the writings which date from the period 
 of Origen’s residence at Caesarea in Palestine (A.D. 231— 
 2254). In them we shall find—juxtaposed, but by no means 
 synthesised, with the highly ‘ once-born’ version of the 
 Fall-theory sketched in our last section—another, more 
 sombre and pessimistic, view, the unmistakeable product 
 of the ‘twice-born’ elements in his strangely composite 
 personality. According to a very probable hypothesis, 
 first suggested by Bigg? and endorsed by Harnack,* the 
 
 1 Cf. Huet, Origentana, ii. q. 7, §§ I-11. 
 
 2 11.8, 5 ad fin.; cf. alsoi. 8, 4 (Koetschau, p. 105, II). 
 3 Christian Platonists, p. 246. 
 
 4 History of Dogma (E. tr. 1910), ii. p. 365, 0. 5. 
 
220 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 emergence in his mind of a more thorough-going F[all- 
 doctrine, adhering more closely to the Adam-story as inter- 
 preted by St. Paul, and assuming a graver judgment on 
 the weakness of human nature, was due to the fact that 
 at Caesarea he became acquainted for the first time with 
 a custom which is taken for granted by the Churchman of 
 to-day, but which in the third century was not universally 
 practised, or even universally known, amongst Christians— 
 the custom of Infant Baptism. 
 
 Exactly when and how this practice originated it is 
 impossible to say with certainty. There is no recorded 
 saying of Christ which can be quoted as referring to the age 
 of the recipients of baptism; the Acts of the Apostles 
 contain no clear evidence for the administration of the rite 
 to persons other than those of adult age! ; the Epistles 
 assume that the mystery of Christian initiation is normally 
 imparted as the crown and consummation of a process of 
 conscious faith in Jesus as Messiah, of repentance from sin, 
 and of conversion from idols to serve the living God— 
 in other words, that the neophyte is a person of full age 
 and responsibility. On the other hand, none of the sacred 
 writings contain any prohibition of the practice. It must 
 be admitted that the New Testament neither approves 
 nor condemns, but ignores, Infant Baptism 2; and that, if 
 
 1 It has been suggested that the “ households’ which are mentioned in 
 the New Testament as having been baptised (as those of Lydia, Acts xvi. 15, 
 the jailer at Philippi, 2bzd. 33, and Stephanas, 1 Cor..i. 16) may have 
 included children ; but it is obviously impossible to be certain of this. 
 
 2 It is possible to surmise that St. Paul, even if he knew and approved 
 of a custom of baptising the infant children of pagan or Jewish converts 
 to Christianity, would at one period of his life have considered it unnecessary 
 to baptise infants born to parents who were already Christian, or of whom 
 one was a Christian ; see 1 Cor. vil. 14: ‘ For the unbelieving husband is 
 sanctified in the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified in the brother’ 
 (v.e. her Christian husband): ‘ else were your children unclean, but now 
 they are holy (dya).’ This passage may imply a belief that baptism 
 so completely cancelled whatever disastrous entail was inherited from 
 Adam that not only was the baptised person thereby made holy, but his 
 or her subsequent children, even by a heathen spouse, were born in a 
 condition of holiness. Hooker’s rejection of this interpretation (Eccl. Pol. 
 v. 60, 6) seems to be based on dogmatic rather than critical grounds. It 
 is not an argument against the attribution of such a view to St. Paul that 
 according to it the spread of Christianity would eventually make baptism 
 unnecessary and obsolete ; for at the date of the composition of 1 Cor., 
 the Apostle was convinced that ‘ the time was shortened ’ (vii. 29) and the 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 221 
 
 nothing is lawful save what can be certainly demonstrated 
 to have been sanctioned by one of the sacred authors, 
 the Anabaptist has won his case. We may observe paren- 
 thetically that even those who do not accept such a narrowly 
 literal view of the appeal to Scripture, and rely on the 
 auctoritas of the universal Christian society as legitimating 
 a sacramental development which goes beyond what can be 
 shown to have been the practice of the Apostolic Church, 
 must feel that the custom of baptising unconscious infants 
 (in virtue of the exclusive emphasis which it seems to lay 
 upon the ex opere operato aspect of the sacred action, and the 
 complete absence from it of the subjective and ex ofere 
 operantis aspect) is not unattended by theoretical difficulties, 
 such as do not arise in connexion with the normal 
 administration of the other sacraments.t These difficulties 
 will, however, be dealt with in the proper place.? For the 
 purposes of our historical enquiry, it is sufficient to remark 
 that, even if neither our Lord nor His Apostles directly 
 authorised the administration of baptism to those who 
 could not, in the nature of the case, experience either faith 
 or repentance, the custom is one which, in the absence of 
 any explicit prohibition, might well be expected to grow 
 up at an early date and in many places, doubtless as the 
 
 
 
 
 
 Parousia at hand, so that ex hypothest comparatively few children could 
 be born under these favoured conditions. Ifsucha view of the hereditary 
 efficacy of baptism was actually held in the Apostolic Church, it would, 
 from the standpoint of later orthodoxy, have tobe classed with the com- 
 panion beliefs in the validity of vicarious ‘ baptism for the dead’ (1 Cor. 
 XV. 29) and in the impeccability of the baptised (see Lecture III, p. 135) 
 as one of those mistaken but transient inferences from true principles which 
 the student must expect to find in the initial stages of Christian theology. 
 The probability that Christian baptism was, in some quarters, regarded in 
 this way is increased by the fact that a similar view was taken, with regard 
 to the baptism of proselytes, in the Jewish Church; cf. Yebamoth, 78a: 
 ‘If a Gentile woman becomes a proselyte when she is with child, her son 
 has no need for baptism ; for the baptism of his mother counts for him in 
 the place of his own baptism.’ 
 
 1 Except in the case of absolution given to a dying person who is 
 unconscious (Schieler-Heuser, Theory and Practice of the Confessional, 
 1906, pp. 646 ff.). It may be added that the same prima facie difficulties 
 which attach to the custom of Infant Baptism attach also to the customs 
 of Infant Confirmation and Communion, still retained by the Eastern 
 Church. 
 
 2 See below, Additional Note G ‘ Infant Baptism,’ p. 550. 
 
222 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 result of popular sentiment rather than of reasoned logic. 
 It may well have been suggested to Jewish-Christian 
 parents by the practice, vouched for by the Talmud as 
 familiar to first-century Judaism,! of baptising the infant 
 children of proselytes, and to Gentiles by the custom which 
 permitted young children to be initiated into some at least 
 of the pagan Mysteries.? 
 
 It is in any case probable that the beginnings of Paedo- 
 baptism run back into the Apostolic age, despite the fact 
 that it is not mentioned in the New Testament ; Polycarp’s 
 reply to the proconsul ‘ Eighty and six years have I been the 
 slave of Christ ’® must imply that he had been baptised as 
 an infant c. A.D. 69. Infant baptism is mentioned, possibly 
 by Justin Martyr, and certainly by Irenaeus,‘ in the latter 
 half of the second century, and it is strongly opposed by 
 Tertullian ° at the beginning of the third : from the middle 
 of the third the evidence for the recognition of its permis- 
 sibility is continuous, and by the end of the fifth it has 
 become universal and normal, as it is to-day in Christian 
 countries. A careful study of the historical data, which we 
 have only been able to summarise briefly here, will make it 
 reasonably clear that in the practice of Infant Baptism we 
 have a popular development of the earliest use of the sacra- 
 ment, a development not at first deduced from theological 
 principle or imposed from above by Church authority, but 
 arising spontaneously from below, out of the subconscious 
 
 1 See the passages quoted to illustrate Matt. iii. 6 by J. Lightfoot, 
 Hovae Hebraicae (1675), p. 219 f. 
 
 2 G. Anrich, Das antike Mysterienwesen, p. 55, gives instances, based 
 mainly upon epigraphic evidence, of children of seven and ten years of age 
 who had undergone initiation into several Mystery-cults: one such child 
 is described as punfets Ere vijmios. 
 
 3 mariyrium Polycarpt, 9. 
 
 4 adv. haey. II. xxxiii. 2: ‘omnes enim venit per semetipsum 
 salvare ; omnes inquam, qui per eum renascuntur in Deum, infantes, et 
 pavvulos, et pueros, et iuvenes, et seniores.’ The passage from Justin, 
 however, which is often quoted as a proof of the existence of the custom 
 of baptising infants c. A.D. 150 (aoAAoi rwes Kal modAal éEnxovtobrar Kal 
 éBdounKovTobrar, ot ex maidwy eualynrevOnoav 7H XprotH, adOopor Siayevovar, 
 1 Apol. xv. 6) is inconclusive: for é€uabnrevOnoav does not necessarily 
 imply more than admission to the catechumenate, and é€x zaidwy does 
 not mean ‘ from infancy.’ 
 
 5 de baptismo, 18; see below, p. 241. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 223 
 
 instincts of the Christian society, eventually forcing its way 
 into official recognition, and generating, at least in Western 
 Christendom, a not inconsiderable body of doctrinal ideas 
 in order to effect its own ex post facto justification. 
 
 The point last mentioned is of crucial importance for the 
 understanding of that part of the history of the Fall-doctrine 
 upon which we are now entering. In treatises of systematic 
 theology, the necessity of infant baptism is usually stated 
 as an inference from the doctrine of Original Sin, and in the 
 order of thought this may be so; but in order of time the 
 practice was prior to, and largely stimulated the growth of, 
 the doctrine, and not vice versa. Itis not the case that men 
 said ‘ Infants are infected from the womb with a hereditary 
 taint ; they must therefore be baptised as soon after birth 
 as possible’ ; what they did say (after the custom, origi- 
 nating, it would seem, in grounds of popular sentiment, had 
 become thoroughly established) was: ‘ The Church actually 
 does baptise infants as soon as possible after birth, and we 
 cannot suppose that the Church does anything without good 
 reason ; therefore, infants must be infected from the womb 
 with a hereditary taint.’ Legem credendi statut lex orandt : 
 there is no clearer instance of the control exercised by 
 liturgical or devotional practice over the growth of dogma 
 than that provided by the study of the relations between the 
 custom of Infant Baptism and the doctrine of Original Sin. 
 
 Thus it was, apparently, that Origen argued. If he had 
 previously been unacquainted with the custom, the discovery 
 that newly born, unconscious infants could be, and were, 
 with the sanction of ‘ Apostolic tradition,’ + subjected to the 
 same tremendous purificatory ceremonies as adults who had 
 been stained with the darkest vices of the Graeco-Roman 
 world, must have made a profound impression on his mind. 
 Given the rightfulness of the practice (and this it never 
 occurred to him to dispute) it was clear to him that some sort 
 of positive sinfulness or defilement must be supposed to 
 inhere in human nature as such, from the very moment of 
 birth ; and it would seem that the idea of guilt pre-natally 
 acquired by the soul—the only kind of pollution deducible 
 
 1 comm.in Rom. V.9 (Lomm. vi. 397) : ‘ pro hocet ecclesia ab apostolis 
 traditionem suscepit, etiam parvulis baptismum dare.’ 
 
224 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 from his theory of individual pre-natal ‘ falls "—through an 
 act of which the exact nature, and even the bare commission, 
 had ex hypothest been forgotten, now appeared to him far 
 too shadowy and unsubstantial a ground for the introduction 
 of personally sinless babes to the awful mysteries of Christian 
 initiation. His restless mind, therefore, was fain to search 
 in other directions for the required theoretical justification 
 of paedo-baptism. 
 
 He seems for a long time to have experimented with the 
 idea of the quasi-material impurity, or ‘ bad mana,’ assumed 
 by the Levitical law to infect the physiological processes of 
 conception and child-birth and to need ‘ expiation ’ through 
 the oblation of a pair of turtle-doves or of pigeons, one for a 
 burnt-offering and one for asin offering. So, shortly after 
 A.D. 231, he writes, in somewhat hesitating terms : 
 
 Let us now investigate the question, why a woman who lends 
 help to those being born into this world (z.e. a mother) is said to 
 become unclean, not merely when she has received seed but when 
 she has brought forth. Whence she is commanded to offer two 
 young pigeons or turtle-doves for a sin offering . . . as though 
 she required purification of sin, in that she lent help to the birth 
 of a human being into this world . . . I do not venture to lay 
 down any definite dictum in such matters, but I feel that certain 
 occult mysteries are contained in these commands, and that 
 there is some hidden and secret cause, why a woman who has 
 conceived of seed and brought forth should be called ‘ unclean,’ 
 and should be commanded, as though she had been guilty of a 
 sin, to offer a sacrifice for sin and so to be purified. 
 
 He goes on to point out that the child itself is unclean, 
 according to Job xiv. 4, 5 (LXX),? and Ps. li. 5 (° Behold, 
 I was shapen in wickedness ’). 
 
 Dikeve xi. 
 
 2 For a note on the Hebrew version of this text, see Lecture I, p. 17. 
 The LXX give 4 tis yap xafapos €otat ao puov ; GAN ovdeis, 5 édv Kal pla 
 Huepa 6 Blos adrob émt ths yis—‘ Who shall be pure from defilement ? 
 not so much as one, even though his life on the earth be but a day’ ; which 
 Origen takes as proving the innate corruption of infants. The Hebrew 
 is translated by Driver and Gray (ICC., p. 127) as follows: ‘ 4. Oh thata 
 clean thing could come out of an unclean! not one (can). 5. If his (.e. 
 man’s) days are determined, the number of his months is known to thee, 
 and his limit thou hast appointed that he cannot pass ; 6. look away from 
 him, and forbear .. .’ etc. If this is original, the LX X represents a mere 
 misunderstanding. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 225 
 
 We may add to these considerations the question, Why should 
 baptism be given to infants (parvults) as is the use of the Church ? 
 seeing that af there were nothing in infants which required remission 
 and pardon, the grace of baptism would seem superfluous. 
 
 He re-inforces this hypothesis of a mysterious sinfulness 
 inherent in birth by the quaint argument that none of the 
 saints was ever known to keep his own birthday as a feast, 
 whereas Jeremiah and Job cursed the days of their entrance 
 into this world.2. Here the pollution of birth is thought of 
 quasi-juridically, as though it constituted guilt. But, a 
 little further on in the same treatise the emphasis seems to 
 shift, and the birth-stain seems to be treated as a predomi- 
 nantly physical quality, from which the pre-existent human 
 soul of Jesus alone was granted exemption at its incarnation, 
 according to the text Wisdom viil. 20—‘ being good, I came 
 into a body undefiled.’ Some years later, the stain derived 
 from the processes of conception and birth has become in 
 Origen’s mind purely physical; and, with considerable 
 daring, as he himself admits (‘ temerarie forsitan videor 
 dicere ’), he asserts that Jesus Himself was subject to it, 
 and stood in need of purification with His Mother. In the 
 Commentary on Romans, however, (after A.D. 244°) he 
 returns to the more refined, if less intelligible, idea of the 
 birth-stain as involving or amounting to sin, and appeals 
 
 1 in Lev. hom. viii. 3 (Lomm. ix. 318). 
 
 2 ibid. He also points out in this passage that the only persons 
 mentioned in Scripture as having kept their own birthdays are the tyrants 
 Pharaoh and Herod Antipas, both of whom polluted their celebrations 
 with bloodshed, the former by hanging the chief baker, and the latter by 
 beheading John the Baptist. 
 
 3 in Lev. hom. xii. 4 (Lomm. ix. 389 f.). 
 
 4 in Luc. hom. xiv. (Lomm. v. 134). This passage distinguishes 
 carefully between sovdes and peccatum, the former of which is said to be 
 transmitted by birth, the latter not. The paragraph significantly con- 
 cludes (Lomm. v. 135): ‘ parvuli baptizantur in remissionem peccatorum. 
 quorum peccatorum ? vel quo tempore peccaverunt ? aut quomodo potest 
 ulla lavacri in parvulis ratio subsistere, nisi iuxta illum sensum, de quo 
 paulo ante diximus ‘“‘ nullus mundus a sorde, nec si unius diei quidem 
 fuerit vita eius super terram’’? et quia per baptismi sacramentum nativi- 
 tatis sordes deponuntur, propterea baptizantur et parvuli, ‘“‘ nisi enim 
 quis renatus fuerit ex aqua et spiritu, non poterit intrare in regnum 
 coelorum.’’’ 
 
 5 Westcott, op. cit. 
 
226 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 once more to the ‘ Apostolic ’ a of infant baptism as 
 bearing this out.? 
 
 Doubtless this line of thought represents one more re- 
 emergence of that primitive subconscious tendency which 
 we have already observed at work in previous hamartio- 
 logical speculation, namely, the tendency to assume that all 
 sex-activity is intrinsically dangerous and wrong,” and that 
 the ground or origin of all actual sins is somehow to be found 
 in it. This tendency, characteristic, as we have seen, of 
 the ‘twice-born’ man, may be assigned to the Coptic, 
 as distinct from the Hellenic, side of Origen’s personality. 
 Two facts are in any case clear: (1) that the idea of the 
 birth-stain never assumes complete fixity of outline: like 
 the barbarous idea of ‘ bad mana,’ of which it is indeed 
 merely a form, it wavers between the meanings of physical, 
 ceremonial, and moral uncleanness; and (2) that in its 
 more developed statements, it approximates to a doctrine 
 both of ‘ original sin’ and of ‘ original guilt,’ such as is 
 entirely absent from the writings of his earlier period. 
 
 It is clear that this theory of a pollution of some kind 
 necessarily inherent in and transmitted by the processes of 
 generation and birth, if held apart from any view as to the 
 origin of such pollution, lands us in pure and simple dualism, 
 and involves the tacit surrender of the fundamental 
 Christian conception of God to Gnosticism. Origen was 
 therefore compelled to search for the ultimate fount of the 
 sinfulness of sexuality or of generation—a broad universal 
 fact (as he thought) which could hardly have been produced 
 by a number of pre-natal or transcendental acts of individual 
 souls—in some catastrophic happening upon the plane of 
 matter; in other words, he was forced back upon the 
 
 1 comm.in Rom. V. (Lomm. vi. 397) : ‘ pro hoc et ecclesia ab apostolis 
 traditionem suscepit, etiam parvulis baptismum dare; sciebant enim 
 illi, quibus mysteriorum secreta commissa sunt divinorum, quod essent 
 in omnibus genuinae sovdes peccati, quae per aquam et spiritum ablui 
 deberent.’ 
 
 2 Origen’s ultra-ascetic, almost Manichean, views with regard to this 
 matter are clearly shown both by his act of self-mutilation alluded to 
 above (p. 209) and also by two passages, 7v Gen. hom. v. 4 ad fin. (Lomm. 
 viii. 177), and 7m Num. hom. vi. 3 ad fin. (Lomm. x. 51), quoted by R. 
 Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmengesch. (1920), I. p. 538, n. 2. Tothese might 
 be added de ovat. 31, 4 (Koetschau, p. 398). 
 
 
 
 a ee ee ee 
 
 Fag Oe Ee ee ee 
 
 olga et On me 
 
 i 
 
THE PALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 227 
 
 conception of a single historic ‘ Fall’ in time and in this 
 world, and therewith upon a more or less literal interpre- 
 tation of the Adam-story. At first, if the language of the 
 Commentary on the Canticles is to be construed literally, he 
 took refuge in that form of the Fall-doctrine based on Gen. iii. 
 which may be called the theory of the :nquinamentum,} 
 that is, the theory that Eve was seduced by the serpent and 
 physically infected by him?; the same treatise contains 
 a vaguer and less repulsive expression of the idea of 
 ‘Original Sin’ in the statement that man’s free-will has 
 been ‘ inclined to ignominy or wantonness’ by occasion of 
 the ‘transgression’? (fvaevaricatio, which presumably 
 represents an original wapaBaous*). The close study of the 
 Epistle to the Romans, however, which was necessitated 
 by the preparation of his great Commentary ® on that book, 
 had the effect of diverting his mind into more characteristi- 
 cally Pauline channels ; and throughout Comm. in Rom. V., 
 which contains his exposition of the crucial passage Rom. 
 v. 13-21, he accepts, in a general sense, the more normal 
 Adamic theory as implied in the Apostle’s words. 
 | It is noticeable that in his exegesis of this passage the 
 word praevaricatio occurs frequently, and appears for all 
 practical purposes to have assumed its technical meaning of 
 ‘the Fall.’ The story of Gen. iil. seems to be taken quite 
 literally (though the sex-motzf reappears in one passing 
 allusion ®) ; and the propagation of sin from Adam to his 
 
 1 See above, Lecture II, p. 57; Lecture III, p. 122. 
 
 2 comm. in Cant. III. (Lomm. xv. 54 f.) : ‘ cervus quoque amicitiarum 
 quis alius videbitur nisi ille qui peremit serpentem qui seduxerat Evam, 
 et eloquii sui flatibus peccati venena in eam diffundens omnem posteritatis 
 sobolem contagio praevaricationis infecerat ?’ Westcott (op. cit.) dates 
 this treatise c. A.D. 240. Dr. Tennant’s description of it as ‘ one of 
 (Origen’s) earliest works’ (Sources, p. 303, n. 2) seems to be founded ona 
 confusion of it with an entirely different work, the much earlier Com- 
 mentary on Canticles of which a fragment is preserved in Philocalia, vii. 1 
 (€x Tod eis TO dopa puKpod Topov Ov ev TH vedryte eypayer). 
 
 8 comm. in Cant. IV. (Lomm. xv. 72): ‘ . ut ostenderet inesse 
 unicuique animae vim possibilitatis et arbitrii libertatem, qua possit agere 
 omne quod bonum est. Sed quia hoc naturae bonum praevaricationis 
 occasione decerptum, velad ignominiam vel lasciviam fueratinflexum. .. .’ 
 
 4 See below, p. 302. 5 Written after A.D. 244 (Westcott). 
 
 6 comm. in Rom. V. 9 (Lomm. vi. 397), where it is pointed out that 
 Adam did not beget children until after the Fall: “nec Adam scribitur 
 cognovisse Evam uxorem suam et genuisse Cain nisi post peccatum.’ 
 
228 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 descendants is explained in terms of ‘ seminal identity,’ 
 which we have already encountered in Irenaeus. Yet 
 Origen the Biblical exegete has not altogether overpowered 
 Origen the Platonist ; in his last-named character, he is 
 reluctant to surrender altogether the half-mythological, 
 half-metaphysical idea of an extra-mundane Paradise, and 
 of the individual ‘ falls’ of pre-existent spirits. Hence, in 
 commenting on Rom. v. 18 (‘ So then as through one trespass 
 the judgment came upon all men to condemnation’) he writes : 
 
 It is written that when Adam had sinned, the Lord God 
 drove him out of Paradise, and set him in this earth, over against 
 the Paradise of delights; and this was the condemnation of 
 his sin, a condemnation which without doubt has extended unto 
 all men. For all have been made to dwell in this place of humi- 
 liation and in the valley of weeping ; whether because all who 
 ave born from Adam were in his looms and were simultaneously 
 with him cast out of Paradise, or whether, in some other ineffable 
 way known to God only, each tndividual may be deemed to have 
 been thrust out of Paradise and so to have received condemnation.? 
 
 Here two alternative methods of conceiving a pre-natal 
 and transcendental Fall are indicated: the first being the 
 hypothesis of a collective pre-natal Fall of the whole race, 
 contained in Adam, from the heavenly place; the second 
 being the theory which has been already expounded in the 
 de principius, that of a never-ending series of individual 
 falls into this vale of tears, which is the world of matter. 
 
 In his last work (the Tveatise against Celsus) he appears, 
 though it is impossible to be quite sure of his meaning, to 
 revert to his earlier theory, that of an immense number of 
 
 1 See above, p. 197. The parallel of Levi’s pre-natal existence in 
 Abraham is used to support this theory (comm. in Rom. V. 1, Lomm. vi. 
 326): ‘si ergo Levi, qui generatione quarta post Abraham nascitur, in 
 lumbis Abrahami fuisse perhibetur, multo magis omnes homines qui in 
 hoc mundo nascuntur et nati sunt, in lumbis erant Adami, cum adhuc 
 esset in paradiso ; et omnes homines cum ipso vel in ipso expulsi sunt de 
 paradiso, cum ipse inde depulsus est.’ 
 
 2 comm. in Rom. V. 4 (Lomm. vi. 363 f.): . cum deliquisset 
 Adam, scriptum est quod eiecit eum Dominus Deus de Paradiso, et con- 
 stituit eum in terra hac contra Paradisum deliciarum: et haec fuit delicti 
 eius condemnatio, quae in omnes homines sine dubio pervenit. omnes 
 enim in loco hoc humiliationis et in convalle fletus effecti sunt: sive quod 
 in lumbis Adae fuerunt omnes qui ex eo nascuntur, et cum ipso pariter 
 eiecti sunt; sive alio quolibet inenarrabili modo et soli Deo cognito 
 unusquisque de Paradiso trusus videtur et excepisse condemnationem.’ 
 
 ‘ 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 229 
 
 individual pre-natal falls. This at any rate is a probable 
 inference from the allegorisation of ‘Adam’ (O78 == homo, 
 mankind in general) contained in the following passage : 
 
 Concerning Adam and his sin those who have knowledge of 
 _ these matters will philosophise to this effect, namely, that 
 “Adam ’ in the Greek language signifies &vOpwmoc, ‘man,’ and 
 that in what appears to be said about Adam < as an individual > 
 Moses is really laying down scientific principles concerning 
 human nature. For when the divine scripture tells us that 
 ‘in Adam all die,’ and that all were condemned in ‘ the likeness 
 of the transgression of Adam,’ it uses these expressions not so 
 much of a single individual as of the whole race. And in the 
 whole series of sayings which apparently apply to the individual 
 Adam, it will be found that the curse of Adam is really common 
 to all; and there is no woman who is not subject to the sentence 
 pronounced on the woman < Eve >. And the ‘man’ who 
 with the woman is cast out of Paradise, having been clothed in 
 the ‘ coats of skins,’ which God made on account of the trans- 
 gression (or ‘fall,’ mapé&aorg) of men for those that had sinned, 
 conveys a certain ineffable and mystic meaning, far transcending 
 Plato’s story of the descent of the soul which sheds her wings 
 and drifts down to this world, ‘until she find some solid footing.’ 
 
 This conception appears equally to underlie a later 
 passage of the same work, in which the idea of the birth- 
 stain described above, and here definitely stated to involve 
 guilt and to need expiation, is asserted to be part of the 
 revelation made to the prophets, and is connected, though 
 in vague language, with the expulsion of ‘ Adam, that is to 
 say Man’ from Paradise and his arrival in this terrestrial 
 place of affliction.2 It would, accordingly, seem that the 
 view in which Origen, towards the end of his life, finally came 
 to repose represents a combination of his Alexandrian ‘ pre- 
 natal fall’ theory with his Caesarean ‘ birth-stain’ theory. 
 We may regard him, like Wordsworth, as concluding that 
 
 the soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 And cometh from afar ?: 
 
 tc. Cels. IV. 40. (Koetschau, pp. 313 f.). The reference in the last 
 sentence to the myth of the Phaedrus is unmistakeable. For the history 
 of the allegorical interpretation of the ‘ coats of skins,’ see below, pp. 251, 
 275, 285, and J. H. Srawley, The Catechetical Oration of Gregory of Nyssa, 
 P- 42, note on l. 14. 
 
 era ces. .V1I.. 60, 3 Ode on Intimations of Immortality. 
 
230 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 but we must add that the sense of sin which was rooted in 
 the Egyptian side of his temperament compelled him to 
 think of the soul, not as‘ trailing clouds of glory,’ but rather 
 as falling to the earth like a meteor, glowing with the lurid 
 and disastrous fires of pre-natal and extra-temporal guilt. 
 
 It will have been seen that it is no more possible to educe 
 a single thought-out scheme of Fall-doctrine from the 
 writings of Origen than from those of his Greek-Christian 
 predecessors, the Apologists, Irenaeus, Clement. The main 
 interest, indeed, which his speculations bear for the purposes 
 of our enquiry resides in the fact that in them we find, 
 lying side by side and not yet articulated into coherent 
 systems, the disiecta membra of both the chief versions of 
 the Christian doctrine of man and sin, ‘ once-born’ or 
 minimising and ‘ twice-born’ or maximising, which hence- 
 forward were destined to compete for the allegiance of the 
 Church. To the former, or Hellenic-Christian, version of 
 the doctrine, belongs the tendency to allegorise the story of 
 Gen. ili., and in particular to place ‘ Paradise’ in an extra- 
 mundane ‘third heaven,’ which easily passes into the 
 Platonic tdézos vontés or world of Ideas; the lenient 
 description of ‘ Original Sin,’ if such it can be called, as a 
 levis contagio,: a ‘ slight infection,’ which does not seriously 
 impair the self-determining force of man’s free-will; the 
 large recognition of ‘social heredity’ as a factor equally 
 important with, or even more important than, physiological 
 heredity, in the transmission of sin from generation to 
 generation.2, To the latter or ‘ twice-born’ version, which 
 we may describe as specifically ‘African’ (not merely 
 because it reflects the native Egyptian elements in Origen’s 
 
 1 comm. in Rom. V. (Lomm. vi. 341): ‘ peccatum enim pertransiit 
 etiam in iustos, et levi quadam eos contagione perstrinxit.’ 
 
 2 ibid. (Lomm. vi. 342 f.): ‘. . . ut hoc sermone omnes qui ex Adam 
 praevaricatore nati sunt indicari videantur, et habere in semetipsis simili- 
 tudinem praevaricationis eius non solum ex semine sed ex institutione 
 susceptam. omnes enim qui in hoc mundo nascuntur non solum nutri- 
 untur a parentibus sed et imbuuntur ; et non solum sunt filii peccatorum 
 sed et discipuli. ibed. (Lomm. vi. 353): ‘ diximus quidem iam et in 
 superioribus quod parentes non solum generant filios, sed et imbuunt ; 
 et qui nascuntur, non solum filii parentibus, sed et discipulifiunt, et non 
 tam natura urgentur in mortem peccati quam disciplina.’ 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 231 
 
 personality, but because those who were, as we shall 
 presently see, its principal elaborators also dwelt on the 
 southern shores of the Mediterranean), are to be assigned 
 the tendency to assume the inherent sinfulness of sex, the 
 idea that the inbred evil in human nature is in some way to 
 be connected with physical generation, the belief that infants 
 are born not merely with a bias towards evil but actually 
 subject to some kind of pre-natal guilt, their own or Adam's, 
 which needs absolution through the waters of baptism. 
 
 It is true that some of the positions characteristic of the 
 “ African ’ doctrine had already been worked out by a some- 
 what earlier author, living nearer to the Pillars of Hercules, 
 the fiery Tertullian; but nevertheless, if it is permissible 
 to fix a definite point of time at which the bifurcation 
 between the ‘ once-born’ and the ‘ twice-born’ presenta- 
 tions of the Fall-doctrine tends to become clearly visible, 
 that point may well be placed in the year A.D. 231, the date 
 of Origen’s retirement from Alexandria to Caesarea, 
 
 TERTULLIAN AND ‘ TRADUCIANISM ’ 1 
 
 From the Palestine of A.D. 250 the thread of our research 
 now leads us some twelve hundred miles westwards, into 
 the Roman province of Proconsular Africa, and some forty 
 years backwards in respect of time, into the first decade of 
 the third century. Hitherto we have been concerned with 
 the earliest, predominantly ‘ once-born’ and ‘ minimising,’ 
 development of the Fall-doctrine in the Eastern countries 
 and the environment of Hellenic culture which together 
 may be said to constitute the primitive matrix of Catholic 
 Christianity ; but now our story touches for the first time 
 the Occidental division of the Christian world, in which a 
 sterner and gloomier presentation of the ideas of the Fall 
 and of Original Sin has played so momentous a part. Of 
 this great geographical and cultural unity within the Catholic 
 
 1 The brief account of Tertullian’s contribution to the growth of the 
 Western Fall-doctrine contained in this section may be supplemented 
 from P. Monceaux, Histoire littévaive del Afrique chrétienne, tom. i. (1901) ; 
 
 G. Esser, Die Seelenlehve Tervtullians (1893); A. d’Ales, La Théologie de 
 Lertullien (1905) ; J. Turmel, Tertullien (1905). 
 
232 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 unity, Western Christendom, of which Roman and Anglican 
 and Protestant still share in differing measures the spiritual 
 and doctrinal heritage, the ultimate intellectual metropolis 
 or parent-city is neither Rome nor Canterbury nor Geneva, 
 but Carthage ; where Latin theology was flourishing whilst 
 the local Roman Church was still almost purely Greek in 
 language and thought, and where the work of hammering 
 out the specifically Western conceptions of the Trinity, the 
 Church, and the ‘ Doctrine of Grace’ was first begun. 
 
 The earliest of the line of eminent teachers produced by 
 North African Christianity was Quintus Septimius Florens 
 Tertullianus, born c. A.D. 160, at Carthage, ‘the great 
 craftsman who was the first to give its peculiar aspect and 
 cachet to Latin theology.’1 As is well known, Tertullian 
 was before his conversion to Christianity a lawyer and jurist, 
 and it is possible that the Pandects of Justinian still preserve 
 an excerpt from his legal writings.2 The influence of his 
 juristic training upon the tone and character of his thought 
 is luminously summed up by the writer just quoted, in the 
 following words : 
 
 Tertullian was no philosopher; speculation was always 
 foreign to him, and he never thought of the Christian revelation 
 as a new light which comes to enlarge our intellectual horizon 
 or as a body of truth which invites our investigation. But he 
 possessed the juridical sense in the highest degree. He was a 
 lawyer who, before all things, saw in Christianity a Fact and a 
 Law. It was the business of Christians to prove and to compre- 
 hend the Fact—to interpret and, above all, to observe the Law. 
 Relatively to us, God is a master and a creditor: we are His 
 subjects and His debtors. The right method, therefore, of 
 determining our relations with Him is to apply the principles 
 of human legislative codes, and to carry into this application 
 the severity which governs the calculation of our debts and of 
 our civil rights—a method which can be employed with the 
 exactitude which characterises the operations of commerce.? 
 
 Despite the fact that only a comparatively short portion 
 of his Christian life was spent within the communion of the 
 
 1 J. Tixeront, Histoive des Dogmes (1909) i. p. 329. 
 
 2 quaestionum libri viii, de castvensi peculio, ascribed to a jurist 
 Tertullian, whom some identify with the African Father. See Dvgesta 
 Iustiniant Aug., recogn. Th. Mommsen (1870), ii. p. 897. 
 
 3 Tixeront, op. cit., p. 330 (slightly abridged). 
 
 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 233 
 
 ‘Great Church’ (he was baptised some time before A.D. 196, 
 adopted Montanist opinions c. 207, broke finally with the 
 Church in 213, and, according to Jerome,? lived to an 
 extreme old age), Tertullian may nevertheless be said to have 
 constructed the mould in which the classical ‘ twice-born ’ 
 or ‘ African’ presentation of the Fall-theory was destined 
 to be cast. This mould, which was indeed broken and 
 discarded when it had served its purpose,? but without 
 which the Augustinian Fall-doctrine, still imagined by 
 many to be the only Fall-doctrine known to traditional 
 Christianity, could never have assumed its completed and 
 logically rounded shape, was his ‘ traducianist ’ * psycho- 
 logy : which may now be briefly summarised. 
 
 Tertullian’s views with regard to the nature of the soul 
 are expounded at length in the treatise de anima, which 
 internal evidence shows to have been composed after his 
 definite adoption of the Montanist position, but which 
 none the less exercised a considerable influence within the 
 “Great Church.’ He asserts that his psychology is based 
 upon Holy Writ,® though claiming at the same time, in a 
 curiously modern spirit, to have given attention to medical 
 science in this connexion ®; and he expresses a vigorous 
 contempt for the psychologies of philosophers, especially 
 for the Platonic theories of metempsychosis and reminis- 
 cence.? Nevertheless, it is clear that he was indebted both 
 for his psychology and for his physiology to the Stoics, from 
 
 1 P. Monceaux, op. cit., p. 201 f. 
 
 2 de viris illustr. 53 (‘ fertur vixisse usque ad decrepitam aetatem ’). 
 
 3 c.f. below, Lecture VI, p. 413, n, I. 
 
 4 It is convenient to use this term as a description of Tertullian’s views 
 regarding the origin of the soul; though, strictly speaking, it is anachron- 
 istic, inasmuch as, according to Du Cange (Glossavium mediae et infimae 
 latinitatis, ed. Henschel, 1887, s.v. tvadux), the term traduciani belongs 
 rather to the controversies of the fifth century, being applied as a term of 
 reproach by the Pelagians to the Augusiinians; the earliest instance of 
 the term which he quotes is in Marius Mercator, lib. subnot. ix. 7, 14. 
 
 5 dean. 3. In giving quotations from this work I have used the text 
 of A. Reifferschied and G. Wissowa, published in the Vienna Corpus Script. 
 Eccles. Lat., vol. xx. 
 
 6 ibid. 2: ‘ sed et medicinam inspexi . . . sibi quoque hoc negotium 
 vindicantem, quippe ad quam magis animae ratio pertinere videatur per 
 corporis curam.’ He frequently cites the opinions of famous physicians, 
 especially Soranus (6, 8, 15, 25, 44) and Hippocrates (15, 25). 
 
 7 «bid. 4, 23-24, 31-33. 
 
234 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 whom he has borrowed his cardinal principle, that of the 
 corporeality of the soul. It is permissible to suggest that, 
 in Tertullian’s case, the legal mind, accustomed to deal 
 with ‘ real property ’ and other tangible objects, discovered 
 a special affinity with a philosophy which renders abstract 
 ideas easier to handle by hardening them into ‘ bodies’ 
 or quasi-material substances. Just as the Stoics had 
 affirmed the Logos spermatikos, or ‘seminal reason,’ per- 
 meating organic nature, to be, or to be immanent in, a 
 material or quasi-material thing, a ‘creative flame’? or 
 ‘fiery breath,’ ? that is, an exceedingly fine, rarefied, and 
 imponderable gas, so Tertullian applies this conception 
 to that which for him appears to take the place of 
 the Logos spermatikos, namely, the ‘breath’ (flatus) of 
 God, and develops it with narrow logic to a fantastic 
 conclusion. 
 
 In the beginning, we are told, God moulded man’s body 
 out of clay, and breathed the breath of life itself, materialis- 
 tically conceived, into his nostrils. The miraculous vapour 
 poured into every nook and cranny of Adam’s body, filling it 
 completely, and then congealing, as it were, into an ethereal 
 substance occupying the same space as the fleshly body and 
 fitting its lineaments and shape exactly, so as to bear its 
 precise impress. This substance is the soul, an astral body 
 somehow included within the skin of, and possessing the 
 same volume as, the body of flesh and blood: it possesses 
 a complete set of astral or ghostly limbs, whereby it really 
 performs in the dream-world, during sleep, deeds lawful and 
 unlawful, for which it will be held to strict account by God.* 
 Hence it is that in Hades Dives, though disembodied, has 
 
 1 sip TexviKdv. 
 
 2 mvedua mupoedes: for the use of these terms by the Stoics, see 
 the references given in A. Aall, Geschichte der Logosidee in der griech. 
 Philosophie (1896), p. 118, n. 4. 
 
 3 dean. 9g: ‘ recogita enim, cum deus flasset in faciem hominis flatum 
 vitae, et factus esset homo in animam vivam, totum utique per faciem 
 statim flatum illum in interiora transmissum et per universa corporis 
 spatia diffusum, simulque divina a spiratione densatum omni intus linea 
 expressum esse, quam densatus impleverat, et velut in forma gelasse.’ 
 
 4 ibid. 45. The opinion that the soul is morally responsible for dream- 
 actions is rejected by St. Augustine, de Gen. ad litt. xii. 15, and St. Thomas 
 Aq., Summa theol. i. q. xciv. a. 4, ii. iiae. q. cliv. a. 5. 
 
 ee ee eee 
 
 ee ee a ee ee eer eens 
 
 — s- 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 235 
 
 still a tongue, Lazarus a finger, and Abraham a bosom! ; 
 and it is by their ghostly features—the exact counterparts 
 of those that they wore in life—that the souls of the martyrs 
 are recognised beneath the heavenly altar by the Seer of 
 Patmos.2. Thesoul even has a colour; a Montanist sister 
 saw, during one of Tertullian’s sermons, a vision of a soul, 
 which was ‘ tenera et lucida et aerii coloris ’—‘ tender and 
 shining and of the colour of air’ % (apparently resembling 
 a great soap-bubble in human form)—a description which 
 reminds us of the wraiths and ‘ materialisations ’ of modern 
 spiritism. Nevertheless, though soul and body are two 
 substances distinct in thought, in fact they interpenetrate 
 and suffuse each other so subtly and intimately that man 
 is a single unity,* resoluble into its constituent elements 
 only by death. 
 
 It is on the basis of this materialistic theory of the soul 
 that Tertullian builds his explanation of the rationale of 
 procreation. This, according to him, is essentially a process 
 of fission, as well in regard to the psychological as to the 
 physiological domain ; the paternal germ is not merely a 
 portion of the progenitor’s body, but is (or is charged with) 
 a definite quantity of his soul-stuff, which through the act 
 of generation is diminished by so much.® When conception 
 takes place, this detached fragment of the father’s soul 
 shapes itself into a new soul, bearing all the hereditary 
 characters inherent in the parental stock. It seems that 
 the functions of the mother are regarded as being purely 
 passive and receptive ; and, though Tertullian himself does 
 not develop this consequence, the supposed biological law 
 (now finally exploded by the discoveries of Mendel), that 
 heredity only operates through the father,® will later be 
 used by incautious apologists to show that a miraculous 
 
 1 de an. 7,9. ‘The same curious idea appears in Irenaeus, adv. haer. 
 li. 55; see Grabe’s note, quoted by Harvey. 
 
 2 ibid. 8, 9. 8 ibid. 9. 
 
 4 ibid. 9: ‘ a primordio enim in Adam concreta et configurata corpori 
 anima, ut totius substantiae, ita et condicionis istius semen effecit’; cf. 
 also 36. 
 
 5 ibid. 27. 
 
 6 This ancient belief has been given a poetical expression by Aeschylus 
 
 in Eumen. 658-661, where Apollo explains to the Areopagus that the con- 
 nexion of son and father is very much more intimate and organic than that 
 
236 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 conception was necessary in the case of Christ, in order to 
 ensure the sinlessness of His human nature. Every human 
 being is, therefore, a ‘ chip of the old block’ in an almost 
 literal sense, with many, if not all, of his mental and moral 
 qualities hereditarily pre-determined,! though a place is still 
 left for free-will, which is here as elsewhere strongly asserted.? 
 
 The first instance of this alleged reproduction by way of 
 fission is to be found in the creation of Eve, who was made 
 not merely out of a rib of Adam but also out of a portion of 
 his soul-stuff.2 Though devoid of sexual accompaniments 
 and carried out in a purely supernatural manner, this event 
 was the type of all subsequent acts of generation, which 
 represent so many subdivisions of the initial quantum of 
 soul-stuff or condensed divine breath originally concentrated 
 in Adam alone. Each individual soul now existing is, 
 metaphorically speaking, a surculus or twig, cut from the 
 matrix or parent-stem of Adam, and then planted out to 
 
 of son and mother, in order to support his contention that Orestes was 
 justified in slaying his mother in order to avenge his father : 
 
 OUK €oTL LATHP  KEKAnUEevoU TEéKVOU 
 
 toxets, tpopos 5é€ KUpatos veoomdpov’ 
 
 tixte. 8 6 OpdoKxwv, 7 8 amep Edvw Lévy 
 
 €owoev Epvos, olor py BAdyn Oeds. 
 It is found in the ‘ Hippocratic’ treatise wept yovijs, which Dr. Singer 
 dates c. 380 B.c. (E. Littré, Hippocrates, tom. vii.), in Aristotle, de gen. 
 animal. i.21 (729a 21), though here it appears as the theory that the 
 male parent contributes the form or active principle and the female the 
 matter, and in Galen (d. A.D. 199) de facult. natural. i. 4, de sanit. tuend. i. 2 ; 
 Tertullian may have been influenced by the last-named. It was, however, 
 rejected by the Epicureans; cf. Lucretius, de verum nat. iv. 1229-31 
 
 semper enim partus duplici de semine constat, 
 atque utri similest magis id quodcumque creatur 
 eius habet plus parte aequa. 
 
 1 dean 20: ‘et hic itaque concludimus omnia naturalia animae ut 
 substantiva eius ipsi inesse et cum ipsa procedere atque proficere, ex quo 
 ipsa censetur. Sicut et Seneca saepe noster: ‘‘ insita sunt nobis omnium 
 artium et aetatum semina, magisterque ex occulto deus producit ingenia,”’ 
 ex seminibus scilicet insitis et occultis per infantiam, quae sunt et intellectus. 
 ex his enim producuntur ingenia.’ 
 
 2 ibid. 21, 22; cf. adv. Mayrcion. ii. 5, 6. 
 
 3 ibid. 36: ‘ ceterum et ipsam (sc. Evam) dei afflatus animasset, si 
 non ut carnis, ita et animae ex Adam tradux fuisset in femina.’ Here 
 ‘tradux’ must mean a‘ slip’ or ‘ off-shoot’ ; see below, p. 240, n. 2, fora 
 note on this word. 
 
 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH . 237 
 
 grow by itself into a separate tree.t Tertullian’s biology 
 here seems to approximate to the theory associated with the 
 name of Weissmann, which exhibits the whole life-process 
 of a species as a progressive sub-division of an original 
 immortal germ-plasm, and heredity as the unfolding of 
 characteristics which have not been acquired, but were 
 always implicit in the primitive plasm. It is clear that this 
 whole line of thought leads directly into the theory of 
 “seminal identity,’ already hinted at by Irenaeus and 
 Origen, according to which Adam was the sum of his own 
 posterity,? and conversely, the human race as it now exists 
 is an atomised or comminuted Adam: a position from which 
 the step to an interpretation of the conventional Fall- 
 tradition (as it may by this time be called) in terms of 
 ‘ Original Guilt ’ would appear easy and tempting, at any 
 rate to a thinker of ‘twice-born’ temperament. If all 
 human souls are detached portions of the original soul (of 
 Adam) which fell, they must bear with them, not merely 
 the psychological effects of, but the moral responsibility for, 
 the primordial Fall; they sinned ‘in Adam,’ and his trans- 
 gression is their transgression, for they were he. So at least 
 reason theologians, whose hypertrophied emotions have 
 hurried them into a fanatically pessimistic estimate of human 
 nature and human instincts. ‘ Traducianism, ‘seminal 
 identity ’ and ‘original guilt’ constitute an apparently 
 necessary sequence of ideas which is an effective ‘ rationali- 
 sation ’ of, or conceptual disguise for, the keen feelings of 
 shame and remorse with which the ‘ twice-born ’ Christian 
 contemplates the life which he lived before his conversion.? 
 - 1 ibid. 19: ‘<homo> cuius anima velut surculus quidam ex matrice 
 Adam in propaginem deducta et genitalibus feminae foveis commendata 
 cum omni sua paratura pullulavit tam intellectu quam et sensu.’ 
 
 2 A curious argument for this theory is found in the language of Gen. i. 
 26, which almost in the same breath refers to ‘ man ” both in the singular 
 
 and in the plural number: ‘ Let us make man in our image . . . and let 
 them have dominion over the fish of the sea, etc.’ ; tbid. 27: ‘igitur ex 
 uno homine tota haec animarum redundantia . . . nam et in ipsa prae- 
 
 fatione operis unius, “‘ faciamus hominem,” universa posteritas pluraliter 
 praedicata est—‘‘ et praesint piscibus maris.”’’ 
 
 8 It has been maintained (1) that ‘ traducianism’ is the necessary 
 basis of any doctrine of ‘ Original Sin,’ the opposite hypothesis, that of 
 ‘creationism’ (2.e. the view that each soul is, not the product of the 
 father’s soul or the parents’ souls, but an immediate and ad hoc creation of 
 
238 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Did Tertullian himself take this momentous step, that 
 of advancing from the idea of a hereditary bias towards 
 evil derived from Adam’s fall (‘ Original Sin’) to that of a 
 hereditary responsibility for Adam’s fall, which, as we shall 
 see in succeeding lectures, is the chief differentia of the 
 Augustinian version of the Fall-doctrine? Scholars are 
 divided in opinion on this point, and it is not easy to give a 
 decided reply. Itis certain that he held the idea of ‘ Original 
 Sin,’ though his demonology, which was even richer and more 
 luxuriant than that of his contemporaries, often tends to 
 cross and blur the lines of his exposition of the Fall-theory. 
 So, in the treatise which we have been considering, c. 39 
 tells us that the source of the evil with which pagans are 
 tainted from their mothers’ wombs is the idolatrous cere- 
 monial which surrounds childbirth, and conveys demonic 
 infection to the newly born babe. From this kind of 
 pollution the children of Christians are born free.1 Yet even 
 they in due time? need regeneration by water and the 
 Spirit ; for 
 
 every soul is enumerated as being ‘in Adam,’ until that moment 
 when it is re-enumerated as being ‘ in Christ’; and it is unclean, 
 
 
 
 God), destroying the moral continuity and solidarity of the race; cf. the 
 Jewish ‘ creationism ’ lying behind the doctrine of the yéger ha-va‘, Lecture 
 II, p. 69, n. 2; and (2) that ‘ the traducian theory is the only one which 
 modern biological knowledge supports’ (J. F. Bethune-Baker, Introduction 
 to the Early History of Christian Doctrine, 1903, p. 304). I would suggest 
 that both these contentions, in so far as they assume ‘ creationism’ and 
 ‘traducianism’ to be mutually exclusive alternatives, are antiquated by 
 the fact that our modern realisation of the immanence of God in all natural 
 processes, combined with the recognition of what is called ‘ emergent 
 evolution,’ has in principle abolished the cistinction between these two 
 views. When water is experimentally generated in a laboratory by the 
 combination of hydrogen and oxygen, we do not raise the question 
 whether ‘ this water’ as such is to be regarded as the direct product of 
 the combined gases, or whether we must suppose that mysterious proper- 
 ties of ‘ aqueosity’ and ‘ thisness’ have been catastrophically imposed 
 by God ab extva upon them; no more should we raise the disjunctive 
 question whether the soul is the product of the parents or of God. 
 ‘ Traducianism’ and ‘ creationism’ are no more than different ways of 
 looking at the same fact. 
 
 1 This, Tertullian thinks, is the real meaning of 1 Cor. vii. 14 discussed 
 above (p. 220, n. 2). 
 
 2 Tertullian deprecates Paedo-baptism; see below, p. 241. 
 
THE PALU-DOCTRINE, IN: THE CHURCH 2309 
 
 until it is so re-enumerated. But the soul is a sinner, because 
 it is < in itself > unclean, not because it derives its disgrace 
 from its alliance with the flesh. 
 
 A little later we read : 
 
 The evil, therefore, which exists in the soul, other than that 
 which is built upon it by the visitation of the wicked spirit, is 
 antecedent < to particular evil actions >, being derived from 
 the fault of our origin (ex origints vitio), and is in a certain manner 
 natural. For, as we have said, the corruption of nature is a 
 second nature.” 
 
 We are here very far away from the levis contagio of Origen’s 
 more Hellenic mood 3 ; an equally severe judgment is pro- 
 nounced upon fallen humanity in the treatise de spectacults : 
 
 . . . that dread might of the envious angel, the arch-corrupter 
 of the universe, has cast down man, the work and likeness of 
 God, the lord of the whole world, from his ancient integrity, and 
 changed into a state of rebellion against his Creator his whole 
 substance, which had together with him been fashioned for 
 PLORIAL Vests 
 
 Yet neither of these passages contains any clear trace 
 of the idea that we are justly culpable for having fallen ‘ in 
 Adam ’ or for being fallen creatures. An incidental reference 
 to the Fall, in the work de carnis resurrectione, is more 
 suggestive of this idea : 
 
 1 de an. 40: ‘ita omnis anima eo usque in Adam censetur, donec 
 in Christo recenseatur, tamdiu immunda, quamdiu (? non) recenseatur ; 
 peccatrix autem, quia immunda, nec recipiens ignominiam ex carnis 
 societate.’ The word ‘ nec’ at the beginning of the last clause has been 
 added by Wissowa: but it seems necessary in order to save Tertullian 
 from Manicheism: and as only one manuscript containing the text of 
 the de anima survives (cod. Agobardinus, saec. ix.), such a restoration 
 is not unjustifiable. Parity of reasoning suggests the insertion of ‘ non’ 
 after ‘ quamdiu.’ 
 
 2 ibid. 41: ‘ malum igitur animae, praeter quod ex obventu spiritus 
 nequam superstruitur, ex originis vitio antecedit, naturale quodammodo. 
 nam, ut diximus, naturae corruptio alia natura est.’ 
 
 3 vu. supra, Pp. 230. 
 
 4 de spect. 2: ‘cum ipsum hominem, opus et imaginem Dei, totius 
 universitatis possessorem, illa vis interpolatoris et aemulatoris angeli ab 
 initio de integritate deiecerit, universam substantiam eius pariter cum 
 ipso integritati institutam pariter cum ipso in perversitatem demutavit 
 adversus institutorem’ (Wissowa’s text; but the repetition of ‘ pariter 
 cum ipso’ must surely be a mere dittography). 
 
240 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 When the Lord says that He is come to save that which was 
 lost, what are we to understand by ‘that which was lost’ ? 
 Undoubtedly man. Is man ‘lost’ as a whole, or only in part ? 
 Surely as a whole, seeing that the transgression, which is the 
 cause of man’s ruin, was committed both by an impulse of the 
 soul, that is through concupiscence, and also by an action of the 
 flesh, that is through the tasting < of the forbidden fruit >, has 
 branded the whole man with the judicial record of his trans- 
 gression, and therefore has deservedly filled him with ruin.? 
 
 Here the ‘ elogium’ or ‘ judicial record’ of the sin of 
 Adam seems to be understood as binding his posterity also ; 
 and with this may be compared a passage of the de testumonio 
 ammae : 
 
 Finally, in every expression of annoyance, scorn, and ab- 
 horrence thou dost utter the name of Satan, whom we call the 
 angel of malice, the contriver of all error, the corrupter of the 
 whole age ; by whom man was deceived in the beginning, that 
 he should overstep the commandment of God; wherefore man 
 was given over to death, and has made his whole race, drawing 
 contamination from his seed, a stock or breed (¢vaducem) stained 
 with his own condemnation ?: 
 
 1 de carnis vesurvect. 34: ‘in primis cum ad hoc venisse se dicit, uti 
 quod periit salvum faciat, quid dicis perisse ? hominem sine dubio. 
 totumne an ex parte? utique totum, siquidem transgressio, quae perdi- 
 tionis humanae causa est, tam animae instinctu ex concupiscentia quam 
 et carnis actu ex degustatione commissa totum hominem elogio trans- 
 gressionis inscripsit atque exinde merito perditionis implevit ’ (Kroymann’s 
 text, in Vienna Corpus, vol. xxxvil.). cf. also adv. Marcion.i. 22: ‘ homo 
 damnatur in mortem ob unius arbusculae delibationem, et exinde proficiunt 
 delicta cum poenis, et pereunt iam omnes qui paradisi nullam cespitem 
 norunt’ (a sentence which, though it occurs in a context devoted to a 
 criticism of Marcion’s theology, nevertheless appears to express Tertullian’s 
 own point of view); and de resurrect. carnis 49: ‘ portavimus enim 
 imaginem choici per collegium transgressionis, per consortium mortis, per 
 exilium paradisi.’ 
 
 2 de test. animae, 3 (Wissowa): ‘ Satanan denique in omni vexatione 
 et aspernatione et detestatione pronuntias, quem nos dicimus malitiae 
 angelum, totius erroris artificem, totitts saeculi interpolatorem, per quem 
 homo a primordio circumventus, ut praeceptum dei excederet, et propterea 
 in mortem datus exinde totum de suo semine infectum suae etiam damna- 
 tionis traducem fecit.’ The word ‘ tradux,’ which plays an important part 
 in Latin speculation on this subject during the early patristic period, does 
 not seem to have been satisfactorily dealt with by English commentators 
 or translators, who take it as meaning, in a vague sense, either ‘ trans- 
 mitter’ or ‘transmission.’ According to Lewis and Short’s Latin 
 Dictionary (1922), its original meaning is a ‘ vine-layer’ or ‘ vine-branch’ 
 trained for propagation, for which they quote Varro, Columella, Pliny 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 2ar 
 
 in which the last phrase might easily be interpreted as 
 meaning that every member of the race is born subject to 
 the judicial sentence pronounced against Adam. 
 Nevertheless, it is a striking fact that Tertullian objects 
 to the custom of Infant Baptism, which, whether ultimately 
 justifiable on other grounds or not, is an obvious practical 
 inference from the doctrine of ‘ Original Guilt’; if infants 
 are born subject to ‘ God’s wrath and damnation,’ and if 
 baptism releases from this, it is clearly inhuman to delay the 
 administration of the Sacrament to them for a second longer 
 than is necessary. Tertullian, however, knows nothing of 
 this line of reasoning, and thinks rather of the terrible 
 danger of post-baptismal actual sin which haunts those who 
 receive the rite without long and searching preparation, 
 and mature purpose ; hence he vehemently urges the post- 
 ponement of baptism in the cases of children and of un- 
 married adults. ‘Why hurries the age of innocence to the 
 remission of sins?’ + The conclusion must be that, though 
 he may have been drifting in the direction of a conception 
 of ‘ Original Guilt,’ he had not consciously arrived at it. 
 It is probably safe to sum up this Father’s position in the 
 statements (1) that he taught no explicit doctrine of * Original 
 Guilt’; (2) that, however, he held a much more severe 
 doctrine of ‘ Original Sin’ than any which we have hitherto 
 come across, regarding the hereditary consequences of 
 Adam’s fall as a positive corruption, not a mere weakness, 
 a depravatio rather than a defrivatio ; and (3) that he shows 
 at least a strong tendency to view this corruption junidically 
 or forensically, as though it were a crime, rather than 
 medically, as would be natural if it were a mere infirmity. 
 
 and Tacitus. Du Cange (Glossarium, 1887 ed., s.v.) gives four meanings 
 as current in later Latin, viz. (1) stirps vel propago, (2) origo (3) peccatum 
 originale (4) propagatio. The first of these meanings seems to me most 
 appropriate in this context. There seems to be no authority for the sense 
 ‘transmitter.’ 
 
 1 de bapt. 18: ‘ itaque pro cuiusque personae condicione ac disposi- 
 tione, etiam aetate, cunctatio baptismi utilior est, praecipue tamen circa 
 parvulos . . . ait quidem dominus, “‘ nolite illos prohibere ad me venire.”’ 
 veniant ergo, dum adolescunt; veniant, dum discunt, dum quo veniant 
 docentur ; fiant Christiani, cum Christum nosse potuerint. quid festinat 
 innocens aetas ad remissionem peccatorum ?’ 
 
 R 
 
242 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 ) 
 
 It will be clear that this severe, ‘ twice-born ’ conception 
 of the inherited bias towards sin, and the tendency to 
 envisage it under specifically legal categories, when com- 
 bined with the theory of the ‘ seminal identity ’ of Adam’s 
 descendants with Adam himself, were bound eventually to 
 generate the formal idea of ° Original Guilt,’ even if they did 
 not generate it immediately upon their first juxtaposition. 
 
 The central and distinctive elements in Tertullian’s 
 Fall-doctrine have now, it may be hoped, been sketched 
 with a degree of detail sufficient for our purpose. It will, 
 however, be appropriate to add a few words regarding his 
 views on some of the more peripheral of the ‘ five issues ’ 
 enumerated at the beginning of this lecture as arising out of 
 the Pauline ideas of the Fall and of ‘ Original Sin.’ There 
 can be little doubt that he took the Genesis-story as a record 
 of plain historic fact. There is no trace in his writings of the 
 allegorical interpretation, which would have been peculiarly 
 uncongenial to his juristic habit of mind, or of the character- 
 istically Greek removal of ‘ Paradise’ into some extra- 
 mundane sphere ; all his allusions to the subject are marked 
 by the most naive literalism, and he seems to claim it as a 
 privilege of Christians (and presumably also of Jews) that 
 they alone are in possession of exact information about the 
 origin of man. As regards his conception of man’s unfallen 
 condition, it is noteworthy that, although holding a gloomy 
 view of the consequences of Adam’s sin, Tertullian betrays 
 no trace of the tendency, afterwards manifested by Augustine 
 and his successors, towards heightening the ‘ original right- 
 eousness ’ and ‘ perfection ’ of man to the greatest possible 
 degree of exaltation, in order thereby to increase the depth 
 and criminality of the ‘ Fall.’ His beliefs on this point do 
 not differ substantially from the Greek-Christian theory 
 of Adam's ‘ infantile condition’ or undeveloped innocence. 
 Before the first sin, he tells us, man was ‘ innocent, a close 
 friend of God, and the husbandman (colonus) of Paradise.’ 1 
 Adam's state is elsewhere described as one of ‘ integrity,’ 
 
 1 de patient. 5: the whole of this chaptér, which is too long to quote 
 here, is devoted to an exposition of the Fall and its consequences as spring- 
 ing from the fundamental sin of impatience. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 243 
 
 which does not seem to imply more than the absence of any 
 positive defect.1 It included, however, the gift of immor- 
 tality ; ‘ if he had never sinned, he would never have died.’ 2 
 
 Tertullian’s view of the present condition of human 
 nature, which is the object of Redemption, is more difficult 
 to define with precision. We have already quoted passages 
 in which he affirms that through the Fall man has perished 
 as a whole, or in respect of the whole of his substance, 
 that 1s, both in soul and body; and his ‘ traducianism ’ 
 might be construed as involving the consequence that the 
 seat or nidus of inherited evil extends over the whole 
 personality, from its highest spiritual faculties down to its 
 physiological instrument or basis—a position which seems 
 to discard, at any rate in words, the Pauline antithesis 
 between the disposition or ¢dpedvnua of ‘ the spirit,’ assumed to 
 be good, and that of ‘ the flesh,’ which is ex hyfothest bad. 
 Such a view might easily be pressed so as to become, in 
 effect, the doctrine of the ‘ total depravity ’ of fallen human 
 nature, as held by Calvin. Yet Tertullian himself never 
 draws this conclusion, and indeed expresses opinions clearly 
 inconsistent with it. Even after the Fall, he tells us, much 
 that is good still survives in human nature; the natural 
 goodness of the soul is overshadowed, not extinguished, by 
 the corruption of nature, and reappears in its former 
 beauty when the ‘ curtain of sin’ has been swept away by 
 baptism. There is some good in the worst of men and some 
 evil in the best.4 Moreover, free-will remains even in fallen 
 man, so that real repentance and real change of life are 
 possible under the impulsion of divine grace.® 
 
 Yet all men alike are subject to ‘ concupiscentia,’ a 
 term which is one of Tertullian’s most momentous legacies 
 
 1 de spect. 2, quoted above, p. 239, n. 4. 
 
 2 dean. 52: ‘ si non deliquisset, nequaquam obisset.’ 
 
 3 and ‘4 de an. 41: ‘ propterea nulla anima sine crimine, quia nulla 
 sine bonisemine. proinde, cum ad finem pervenit, reformata per secundam 
 nativitatem ex aqua et superna virtute detracto corruptionis pristinae 
 aulaeo totam lucem suam conspicit.’ 
 
 5 ibid. 21: ‘... genimina viperarum fructum paenitentiae facient, 
 si venena malignitatis expuerint. haec erit vis divinae gratiae, potentior 
 utique natura, habens in nobis subiacentem sibi liberam arbitrii potestatem, 
 quod adregovouov dicitur . . . inesse autem nobis 76 adrefovovoyv naturaliter 
 iam et Marcioni ostendimus et Hermogeni.’ 
 
244 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 to the Latin and Western theology of sin. ‘Concupiscentia’ 
 is the standing translation, both in the Old Latin versions 
 (as it would seem) and in the Vulgate, of émc@vpia, “ desire,’ as 
 used by St. Paul! : and, as we have already seen, the Apostle’s 
 conception of ‘ desire’ seems to be ultimately identical with 
 the old yéger-conception of the Rabbis. Yécer, émOuvpia, 
 “concupiscence,’ /ibido—these terms, representing a train of 
 human thought which stretches from Ben Sirach through 
 St. Paul and St. Augustine down to Freud, really denote the 
 same fundamental psychological fact, though they contain 
 varying implications of moral approval or disapproval of the 
 fact. The Rabbinical theology could not make up its mind 
 whether the yéger was in itself morally colourless, only 
 becoming sinful per accidens, or whether it was essentially 
 the yécer ha-ra‘, the ‘ evil impulse’: St. Paul was impelled 
 by his ascetic and ‘ twice-born’’ temperament to choose the 
 latter view, and in his writings ‘ desire’ (émOupia) almost 
 invariably 2? bears a bad sense. Yet Tertullian, for all his 
 African fanaticism, seems here to go behind St, Paul, and to 
 revive the view of the more liberal Rabbis, that appetite 
 in itself is ethically neutral. Those for whom the word 
 “concupiscence ’ is bound up with Augustinian and scholastic 
 associations will probably be surprised to find Tertullian 
 declaring that concupiscence existed in Christ as perfect 
 Man 8 ; and he asserts that there is a reasonable and laudable 
 concupiscence which any Christian may have, ingenuously 
 citing the Pauline dictum, in the Latin version familiar to him : 
 “si quis episcopatum concupiscit, bonum opus concupiscit.’ 4 
 
 1 The Old Latin MSS. d e translate our Lord’s words in Luke xxii. 15, 
 emOupia ercO¥pnoa, as “ concupiscentia concupivi’ ; but Vulg., apparently 
 disliking the ascription of ‘ concupiscence’ to Christ, prefers ‘ desiderio 
 desideravi.’ 
 
 2 The one instance of the use of the word in a good sense appears to be 
 Phil. i. 23: rv émOuptay Exywr els Td Gvadocat. 
 
 3 de an. 16: ‘ ecce enim tota haec trinitas et in Domino, et rationale, 
 quo docet, quo disserit, quo salutis vias sternit, et indignativum, quo 
 invehitur in scribas et Pharisaeos, et concupiscentivum, quo “‘ pascha cum 
 discipulis suis edere concupiscit’’’ (Luke xxii. 15; see n. 1, above). In | 
 de cult. fem. ii. 2, however, ‘ concupiscentia’ is used specifically of sexual 
 desire, in a bad sense. 
 
 4 y Tim. iii. 1: et tis €mucxomfs dpéyerar, Kadod Epyouv emOupet. Vulg., 
 disliking the term ‘ concupiscere’ in this connexion, has ‘ si quis episco- 
 patum desiderat, bonum opus desiderat.’ 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 245 
 
 After pointing out this liberal element in the thought of 
 one who is popularly reputed to be the most fanatical of 
 theologians (though indeed there are many parts of his 
 writings which are humble, gentle, persuasive, and beautiful) 
 it is disappointing to be compelled to add that Tertullian 
 frequently enunciates that somewhat morbid view of sex to 
 which, as we have shown, the ‘ twice-born’ temperament is 
 inclined in its most exaggerated form. It is well known that 
 (at least after his lapse into Montanism) he proclaimed sins 
 of impurity to be the worst ofallsins, beyond the reach of any 
 absolving power on earth,! and that his normal view of the 
 married state ranked it as far inferior to virginity, and as an 
 entanglement to be avoided by good Christians so far as was 
 possible 2—though, as M. Monceaux drily remarks, ‘ ce grand 
 ennemi du mariage était marié, naturellement.’? It would 
 seem that a legal training provides no absolute guarantee 
 for consistency either in theological theory or in practical 
 life. 
 
 It may be noted that Tertullian is the first writer to give 
 us a phrase for the hereditary moral handicap, which, though 
 it cannot be described as ‘ technical,’ yet has a technical 
 suggestion and flavour about it—namely, the phrase originis 
 vitium.* When we read these words, we seem to see the 
 shadow of the tremendous term feccaium onginale already 
 falling across the theological world; and we are no less 
 conscious that we are moving in an atmosphere very different 
 from that of primitive Greek-Christian theology, in which 
 the thought of the consequences of Adam’s sin, or of his or 
 ‘our’ expulsion from Paradise, is far too vague and indefinite 
 to have demanded a single technical or quasi-technical term 
 for its expression. 
 
 1 See especially de pudicitia. 
 
 2 In de exhort. cast. 9 he permits himself to write ‘ ergo, inquis, iam 
 et primas, id est, unas nuptias destruis. necimmerito, quoniam et ipsae 
 ex eo constant, quo et stuprum.’ 
 
 3 op. cit. p. 388. 
 
 4 de an. 41: ‘ malum igitur animae, praeter quod ex obventu spiritus 
 
 nequam superstruitur, ex orviginis vitio antecedit, naturale quodam 
 modo.’ 
 
240 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 HISTORY OF THE ‘ HELLENIC’ AND ‘ AFRICAN’ THEORIES 
 TO THE END OF THE FOURTH CENTURY 
 
 Our historical research has now reached the middle of 
 the third century of the Christian era, a point some two 
 hundred years distant from the dates of r Cor. and Rom., 
 which mark the first appearance of the Fall-doctrine in 
 Christian literature. And it is now possible to discern, 
 clearly differentiated from each other, the outlines of the 
 two classical-versions, ‘ once-born’ or Hellenic and ‘ twice- 
 born’ or African, of the somewhat indeterminate doctrines 
 propounded or reaffirmed by St. Paul. It will conduce to 
 lucidity if we pause for a moment in order to state and 
 contrast these two presentations of the ideas in question ; 
 . and the best method of doing this will be to summarise the 
 answers given by the ‘ once-born ’ and ‘ twice-born ’ theories 
 respectively to the ‘five crucial questions’ which were 
 pointed out at the beginning of this lecture as implicit in the 
 Pauline teaching. These questions, it will be remembered, 
 were those (1) of the literal or allegorical interpretation of 
 Gen. il., (2) of the original state of man before the Fall, 
 (3) of the exact nature of the disastrous consequences flowing 
 from the first man’s sin, (4) of the manner in which these 
 consequences are perpetuated, whether by physiological or 
 ‘social’ heredity, (5) of the present ‘condition of human 
 nature, whether suffering from a grave depravatio or from 
 a comparatively slight deprivatio. 
 
 The ‘ Hellenic’ doctrine shows a strong tendency to 
 allegorise the Paradise-story, or, at least, some of its 
 details. It is inclined to construe ‘Adam’ etymologically, 
 as merely the universal of ‘man,’ to remove ‘ Paradise’ 
 into some extra-cosmic sphere which easily transforms itself 
 into a purely metaphysical world of ideas or of noumena, 
 and to interpret the eating of the forbidden fruit as a sym- 
 bolic parable of sensual, sometimes of sexual, indulgence. 
 At the same time, man’s Paradisal condition is not invested 
 with fantastically exalted attributes of intellectual and moral 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 247 
 
 perfection! : he is conceived as a childish and imperfect 
 creature, and his inexperience is sometimes taken as extenua- 
 ting his Fall, which indeed is said to have had beneficial 
 results in so far as it increased his knowledge of himself and 
 of the world. The evil consequences of the Fall are con- 
 ceived as expulsion from Paradise, subjection to the hard- 
 ships of this world, and a certain moral weakness, due to 
 loss of the assistance of the Logos or the Spirit, and some- 
 times described as the loss of the ‘ likeness’ of God; the 
 idea of ‘ Original Guilt ’ is, on the whole, conspicuous by its 
 absence. These evil consequences are transmitted partly 
 by ‘social heredity,’ children being influenced by the 
 examples and instruction of their parents and by the fact 
 of being born outside ‘ Paradise,’ partly, it would seem, by 
 physiological heredity, in so far as the human race is vaguely 
 thought of as organically united with Adam, its head and 
 progenitor. It follows from this mild and minimising con- 
 ception of the Fall-idea that the hereditary moral handicap 
 of human nature is not depicted in very gloomy colours ; it is 
 much more a deprivatio, a negation or absence of strength, 
 than a positive depravatio, and even so far as it is conceived 
 as a positive miasma, it does not amount to more than a 
 levis contagio.2 The main source of sin lies in man’s free, 
 self-determining will, and the main hindrance to a life of 
 virtue consists in the invisible assaults of the demons, 
 who, much more than any abstract ‘ Original Sin,’ are 
 invoked as the explanation of evil desires, thoughts, and 
 suggestions. 
 
 The ‘ African’ doctrine, on the other hand, starts from 
 a prosaically literal acceptance of the Paradise-story. 
 On the question of man’s original state, it does not differ 
 materially from the other version: the ‘ integrity,’ that is, 
 ‘wholeness’ or ‘ completeness,’ which Tertullian predicates 
 of Adam’s nature, is clearly not incompatible with the 
 “childishness’ ascribed to the first man by Irenaeus. But, 
 as we have seen, it shows a decided tendency to treat the 
 
 1 Except, perhaps, in Origen’s theory of pre-natal falls; but this, as 
 we have pointed out, is rather a substitute for the Adam-theory than a 
 version of it. 
 
 2 Origen’s phrase ; see above, p. 230. 
 
248 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 inherited bias towards sin as a substantive and very grave 
 disease or corruption, and to superadd to this, as part of 
 the dreary legacy of the Fall, the idea of ‘ Original Guilt ’ or 
 hereditary legal responsibility for the first transgression. 
 These conceptions are closely bound up with the idea of the 
 ‘seminal identity’ of the race with its first father as the 
 true explanation of heredity. And they naturally lead toa 
 severe and gloomy view of man’s fallen state, which, though 
 not as yet accused of ‘ total depravity’ in the Calvinistic 
 sense, is nevertheless regarded as involving the contamina- 
 tion of both body and soul with the poison of congenital 
 sinfulness. This scheme of ideas does not, indeed, amount 
 to the full Augustinian position, for the beliefs in man’s 
 ‘Original Righteousness’ or ‘ Perfection’ and in the prac- 
 tical destruction of free-will by the Fall are still lacking ; 
 but it will have become clear that the earliest thought 
 of Christian Africa, as represented by Tertullian and by 
 Origen (when writing as a Copt rather than as a Greek), 
 contains the unmistakeable presage of what was to come. 
 
 The remainder of this lecture will be devoted to a sketch 
 of the development of these two types of Fall-doctrine 
 during the rest of the pre-Augustinian period, that is, down 
 to the end of the fourth century of our era—or rather to a 
 sketch of the development of the ‘ African ’ theory, and to 
 a record of the unprogressive oscillations of the ‘ Hellenic ’ 
 theory. For, as we shall see, it is only in reference to the 
 vigorous and prosaic West, with its predominantly ethical 
 and practical interests, that we can speak of a ‘ develop- 
 ment’ of the doctrines of human nature and of sin in the 
 sense of an expansion of content and an ever-growing 
 precision of form; the contemplative and metaphysically 
 minded East tended rather to fix its gaze upon the eternal 
 verities of the Being of God, upon the idea of the unchanging, 
 impassible Logos and the mysteries of His relation to God 
 and of His assumption of flesh, and it devoted little energy 
 to the elucidation of the Fall-doctrine, contenting itself for 
 the most part with repeating the unsystematised state- 
 ments of the early Greek-Christian writers whom we have 
 already noticed. Nevertheless, we must not expect to find 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 249 
 
 the doctrines generally characteristic of East and West 
 divided by a rigid geographical frontier. In a supra-racial 
 body like the Great Church of Catholic antiquity the currents 
 of living thought are bound to intermingle ; the colours of 
 the theological map, though their main masses are distinct, 
 tend to overlap and run into each other like those of a badly 
 executed aquatint. Hence we shall have occasion to note 
 the presence of ‘ twice-born,’ almost Augustinian, traits in 
 the teaching of some fourth-century Greek Fathers, and 
 of a “ once-born ’ element in the thought of one or two Latin 
 writers : though these overlappings will not prove sufficiently 
 extensive to invalidate the application of the adjectives 
 ‘Hellenic’ and ‘ African’ to the ‘ once-born’ and ‘ twice- 
 born’ theories respectively. It will be natural in the first 
 place to complete our survey of Greek-Christian thought 
 with regard to the origin of sin down to the close of what 
 may be called the primitive and formative period of Fall- 
 speculation, and then to retrace our steps in order to carry 
 the story of the more vital and clear-cut Western theory 
 down to the same point ; concluding this lecture with an 
 attempt to indicate the bearing of the results so far attained 
 upon the fundamental question ‘ What statements regarding 
 the origin and ground of sin may reasonably claim to have 
 been held in the Christian Church ubique, semper, et ab 
 omnibus 2’ 
 
 a 
 THE ‘ HELLENIC’ THEORY DOWN TO THE END OF 
 THE PRE-AUGUSTINIAN PERIOD 
 
 (rt) Methodius of Olympus. The history of Eastern 
 thought with regard to the questions of the primal sin and 
 its consequences, as with regard to other and even pro- 
 founder questions, between the middle of the third and the 
 end of the fourth century, is in great measure the history 
 of alternating reactions against and regressions toward the 
 characteristic positions of Origen. Both of these tendencies 
 manifest themselves in the writings of Methodius, bishop 
 of Olympus in Lycia (or according to some authorities, 
 
250 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of Patarat), who is said to have suffered martyrdom 
 Cc. A.D. 3II, in the persecution of Maximinus Daza. Despite 
 this author’s relative obscurity, a study of his Fall-doctrine 
 forms the necessary introduction to the Greek-Christian 
 anthropology and hamartiology of this period, not only 
 because his life roughly covers the interval between the 
 generation of Origen and that of Athanasius, but also 
 because his relation to later Eastern orthodoxy is not unlike 
 that of Tertullian to the thought of Ambrose and Augustine 
 in Western Christendom ; for, in both cases, the main ideas 
 afterwards set forth by the great classical writers of the 
 fourth and fifth centuries—the golden age of creative 
 theological thought—already appear, in germinal and 
 confused form, amidst the less mature speculations of their 
 third-century predecessor. 
 
 The principal tenet of the Origenistic system to which 
 Methodius objects most strongly is its conception of the 
 relations of souland body: this is attacked inan intolerably 
 diffuse dialogue, laboriously imitating the Platonic model, 
 though without any tincture of the Attic master’s wit and 
 charm—the dialogue de vesurrectione. In the course of this 
 work he takes occasion to denounce the allegorical interpre- 
 tation of Gen. ili., the idea of a supra-mundane Paradise, 
 the hypothesis of a number of pre-natal falls, and the 
 contention that evilin the human soul is due to its immersion 
 in the world of matter 2—that is, the whole ‘ Transcendental 
 Fall-theory ’ which we have seen to be characteristic of 
 Origen’s Alexandrine period. He asserts emphatically that 
 Paradise is a definite area of this world’s surface, ingeniously 
 pointing out that if it had been located above the firmament 
 
 1 See Bardenhewer, Patrology, pp. 175 ff., and the articles ‘ Methodius’ 
 in DCB (Salmon) and PRE (Bonwetsch). The standard editions of this 
 Father’s works are (a) G. N. Bonwetsch, Methodius von Olympus (1891), i. 
 Schrifien ; [this does not appear ever to have been completed, and has 
 now been largely superseded by] (b) Methodius (1917), edited by the same 
 scholar, in Die griech. christl. Schriftsteller der erst. drei Jahrhund. For 
 the purposes of this section I have used the text as given in the latter 
 work, which is cited as ‘ Bonwetsch (b).’ A brief but excellent summary 
 of his general doctrinal position will be found in F. Loofs, Leitfaden zum 
 Studium der Dogmengesch. (1906), pp. 224 ff. 
 
 2 de vesury.i. passim. For the sources from which the text of this work 
 has been reconstructed, see Bonwetsch (b), Einleitung, pp. xxxiv-xxxvii. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH a25rz 
 
 the four sacred rivers, which according to Gen. ii. ro ff. take 
 their rise in it, must necessarily have poured down from the 
 skies in a single mighty cataract, which would have washed 
 the earth away altogether.t The earlier Greek exegesis 2 
 of 2 Cor. xi. 2-4 (‘I know a man in Christ . . . sucha one 
 caught up even to the third heaven. And I know such 
 aman... how that he was caught up into Paradise,’ etc.) 
 is repudiated, and the passage is explained as referring to 
 two separate raptures, which translated the Apostle in spirit 
 to two distinct places, the ‘third heaven’ above this 
 sublunary world, and ‘ Paradise’ within it.2 And he de- 
 votes interminable pages to confuting Origen’s allegorical 
 interpretation of the ‘coats of skins,’ wherewith God 
 clothed Adam and Eve after the Fall, as fleshly bodies— 
 an interpretation which for some reason he seems to find 
 peculiarly exasperating. So far as the first of the ‘five 
 cardinal issues’ implicit in the Fall-doctrine is concerned, 
 Methodius, though an Eastern of Easterns, stands for the 
 characteristically ‘African’ view, and affords a good 
 example of that theological overlapping of East and West 
 which the reader has already been warned to expect. 
 
 With regard, however, to three of the other issues (the 
 primal condition of man, the rationale of the process whereby 
 the consequences of the first sin are transmitted, the resul- 
 tant state of human nature) the opinions of Methodius are 
 specifically ‘ Hellenic’ and in line with the teaching of the 
 early Apologists and of Irenaeus. He tells us that Adam 
 was overcome by evil whilst still imperfect, and expresses 
 this idea by the fanciful assertion that, whilst the protoplast 
 was still a clay image, moist and soft from the Creator’s 
 hands, the streams of sin overflowed and dissolved 
 
 1 de vesurr. i. 55 [Bonwetsch (b), p. 313]: mpa@rov yap 6 mapddetoos, 
 dbev kat €£eBAnOnpev ev TH mpwroTAdoTH, ex TavTNs €oTl THs ys TpodjAws Téz70s 
 e€alperos . . . <ws> SiAov amo Tod Kal Tov Tiypw Kat tov Eddparnv Kai tovs 
 Aourods TroTapovs Tovs éxetOev mpoxeopevous evtadba daiveadar Tv pevpdtwr Tas 
 duexBodas eis tiv Kal? Huds yareipov emuxkdvlovras. ov yap amd THv odtpavav 
 dvwbev Katapdoocovrar xedpevor’ mel 00d UreaTH av 4 YH OyKoVv TodobTOV GIpdws 
 e€ dyous katadepdpevov UrodeEacbat Udatos. 
 
 Su supra, p..192, 1. 2% 
 
 3 ibid. [Bonwetsch (b), p. 313 f.] 
 
 4 These ‘ coats of skins’ seem to have exercised a curious fascination 
 over early Christian writers ; see above, p. 229, n. 1, and below, p. 275, 0. 4. 
 
252 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 him.! It would be rash to extract any minutely detailed 
 meaning from this highly imaginative metaphor: but it 
 at least suggests that the conception of unfallen man as 
 a ‘babe’ (vjmos) which we have seen to be characteristic 
 of the earliest Greek-Christian thought on this subject still 
 dominates his mind, and that the belief in the ‘ Original 
 Perfection ’’ and ‘ Righteousness’ of man is still below the 
 intellectual horizon of Eastern Christianity. 
 
 This conclusion may appear at first sight to be somewhat 
 discounted by the fact that Methodius revives the ‘ recapitu- 
 lation’ theory of Irenaeus in a form so extreme that it 
 asserts the Logos to have been personally united with the 
 first Adam as with the second, thus hardening the Pauline 
 parallelism of Adam and Christ into an all but absolute 
 identity 7; and in one passage at least he affirms that man 
 was originally immortal, and not merely capable of im- 
 mortality, physical death being introduced in order that 
 man might not live for ever in a state of sin. We notice 
 also what appears to be the first instance, in any Christian 
 writing which can be regarded as a systematic discussion 
 of the subject,* of the application of the significant term 
 
 1 symposium ili. 5 [Bonwetsch (b), p. 31]: €re yap mnAovpyovpevor Tov 
 "Addu, ws EoTw eimetv, Kat TyKTOV GvTa Kal Vdapy, Kal pHndérw POdcavTa 
 diknv dotpdxov Th adOapoia Kpatawiivac Kal drometpwOfvar, Vdwp wamep 
 KataderBopern Kal Kataordlovoa Si€Avcev adrov 1) dpapria. 
 
 2 symposium iii. 4 [Bonwetsch (b), p. 30 f.]: dépe yap qyets emroxepmpeda, 
 m@s opbodd—ws avyyaye <IIatios> tov ’Adday es tov Xpiorov, od pdvov avdrov 
 TUTOV HyovpeEvos elvat Kal elkdva, GAAG Kal adTo TobTo Xpiorov Kai adrov yeyovevat 
 dud, TO TOV mpd aidvwy els adTov eyKatackHya Aoyov. According to Victorinus 
 Afer, on Gal. i. 19 (PL VIII. 1155 B), this idea was held in an even cruder 
 form by certain Judaising Christians, ‘quiad dominum nostrum Iesum 
 Christum adiungunt iudaismi observantiam: quamquam etiam Jesum 
 Christum fatentur: dicunt enim eum ipsum Adam esse, et esse animam 
 generalem, et alia huiusmodi blasphema.’ 
 
 5 ibid. ix. 2 [Bonwetsch (b), p. 116]: qv yap judy Kal mpdocbev drrwtos 
 HaKnvy adda dia tiv mapaBaow ecarevOn Kat €xAOn, Tod Oeod TO dudprnua 
 Avoavtos Oavarw, iva wn aavdtws dpaptwrds 6 dvOpwmos wv, Sdons ev adT@ 
 THs apaptias, aiwriws Kataxpitos yev7x0n. For the development of this idea 
 by Gregory of Nyssa, see below, p. 280. 
 
 4 It is true that the word casus is used to describe Adam’s transgression 
 in the Latin version of 4 Esdras (Bensly, vii. 118, ‘ non est factum solius 
 tuus casus sed et nostrum,’ quoted above, in an English translation, 
 Lecture II, p. 80) ; and that in Hilgenfeld’s conjectural restoration of the 
 lost Greek text from which the Latin version was made (Messias Iudaéorum, 
 Leipzig, 1869, p. 67) this word is represented by mr@ya. If this restora- 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 253 
 
 ‘Fall’ (zr@pa) to the sin of Adam.! This term is entirely 
 non-scriptural in this connexion, the word used by St. Paul 
 being wapafPaots, a ‘ stepping aside’ from the path marked 
 out for man by God; and it was destined later to have 
 momentous consequences in the way of fostering a belief 
 in ‘ original righteousness,’ inasmuch as the conception of 
 a ‘ Fall’ implies an exalted condition previously enjoyed by 
 the being who ‘ fell,’ an implication from which the Biblical 
 and early Patristic word zapdBaois is entirely free.? It is 
 fair, however, to observe that the term has not yet assumed 
 the technical sense of ‘ the Fall,’ but is employed rather in 
 the general sense of a ‘calamity’ or ‘ disaster.’ We may 
 accurately sum up the ideas of Methodius with regard to 
 man’s original state by saying that he adheres in the main 
 to the position of Irenaeus, though there are not wanting 
 in his works faint premonitions of the coming invasion of 
 Christian thought by the Rabbinical figment of Adam’s 
 supernatural perfection. 
 
 tion were certain, we should have to conclude that the use of mr@pa in 
 this connexion runs back at least into the second century A.p. (The Greek 
 version of 4 Esdras must be prior to Clement of Alexandria, as it is quoted 
 by him, Strom. iii. 16; see G. H. Box, The Ezra-A pocalypse, p. xi.) But 
 there is no proof that casus is a translation of mrdpa, ‘ fall’; it may 
 equally well have been used to translate a vaguer term like oupdopa, 
 ‘disaster.’ Violet and Gressmann (Die Apok. des Esra und des Baruch, 
 Gniech. Chrisil. Schriftst. XXXII. p. 99, note im Joc.) think that casus must 
 represent mr@ya, and that a7dpya must have represented an original 
 
 NgBN ; but, even so, this latter word need mean no more than ‘ ruin’ 
 in a general sense (see Brown, Driver, and Briggs, Hebrew and English 
 
 Lexicon of the O.T.., s.v. Sp», p- 658). 
 
 Note that Wisdom x. 3 has wapdmrwua for Adam’s sin; but this 
 word cannot be pressed to mean much more than mapdBaos. In the New 
 Testament arpa invariably means ‘ corpse’; see Moulton and Geden, 
 Concordance, s.v. It is, however, curious that Hippolytus, de antichristo 
 64 (Griech. Christl. Schriftst.,;ed. H. Achelis, p. 44), after quoting 
 Matt. xxiv. 28, ‘ wheresoever the 77@ya is, there will the eagles be gathered 
 together,’ observes mrdpa S€é yeyevnrar ev mapadeiow’ exet yap *Addap 
 anatndels mémtwKxev: a use of the word which at least points the way 
 towards its later technical use. 
 
 1 symposium iii. 6 [Bonwetsch (b), p. 32]: . . . cuvvéBn <tov avOpwmov> 
 mapeAnArvbdra tiv évrodnvy dA€Opiov mrdpa Kat Sewdv meceiv, eis Odvarov 
 dvacrouyewwbévra. 
 
 * For observations on the use and significance of the parallel Latin 
 words, praevaricatio (= mapdBaos) and lapsus (= mt@pa), see below, 
 Pp. 302. 
 
254 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 The question of the exact nature of the sinister legacy 
 of the Fall, which had hardly been faced by Eastern theology 
 up to this point, receives for the first time, in the treatise 
 known as the Banquet of the Ten Virgins,1 what is in effect 
 a philosophical answer, albeit expressed in a somewhat 
 confused form—an answer which was destined to be further 
 elaborated by the great Greek Fathers of the fourth century. 
 This answer describes the evil principle introduced into 
 human nature by the Fall as dopa, a word which was 
 doubtless suggested in the first instance by its use in 
 Rom. viii. 21 to describe the effects of Adam’s transgression 
 upon sub-human nature. This word is usually translated 
 ‘corruption’; but in the writings of Methodius and his 
 successors, saturated as they were with the influence of 
 Greek philosophy, a better rendering would be ‘ disinte- 
 
 ration’ ?; for ‘ corruption’ conveys an inevitable sug- 
 
 °. Es Sb 
 
 gestion of a change which is offensive to the senses or 
 (metaphorically) to the conscience, whereas ¢@opa used in 
 philosophical context is an aesthetically colourless term, a 
 connoting, at least in Aristotle, no more than the modern 
 term ‘ katabolism,’ that is, the break-down of a highly 
 organised structure into its components or into simpler 
 combinations of them. No doubt as used by Plato the 
 term possesses associations of a severer kind, which may 
 well have been in the mind of this Father (Methodius 
 platomzans *): for, in Platonic thought, yeveoits and 
 @Oopa, ‘coming-to-be’ and ‘ passing-away, are charac- 
 teristic of the world of matter, which is erroneous, mani- 
 fold,’ self-contradictory, and evil.® But, whether the term 
 
 1 symposium iii. 7 [Bonwetsch (b), pp. 33 ff]. 
 
 * This rendering is confirmed by the fact that the inbred infirmity of 
 man’s nature is also described as advappooria ‘ disharmony’ (symp. il. 7), 
 and (by implication) as 70 dvacro.yewwOFvac—‘ being resolved into its 
 component elements,’ zbid. iii. 6 [Bonwetsch (b), p. 32]. 
 
 3 It is true that St. Basil once alludes to dvawdia as arising from ¢Oopa 
 (hom. Quod Deus non est auctor malorum, 5) ; but the highly metaphorical 
 context makes it clear that ¢@opa is not used in its philosophical sense. 
 
 * Loofs, Lettfaden, p. 225. (Professor Loofs has been good enough to 
 inform me that this phrase was suggested to him by the title of A. Jahn’s 
 work, S. Method1 opera et S. Methodius platonizans, Halle, 1865.) 
 
 5 For ¢0opa in Aristotle, see the treatise mepi yevécews kal dOopas, 
 
 3149-338» (edited by H. H. Joachim, under the title ‘ On Coming-to-be 
 and Passing-away,’ 1922). It is clear that for Aristotle the term ¢@opa 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 255 
 
 is employed with the Platonic or the Aristotelian nuance, 
 it does not suggest, as the word ‘ corruption ’ does, a quality 
 or a process which naturally awakens horror or disgust in 
 the mind of the beholder: and it is therefore reasonable to 
 assume that the state of ¢fopa produced in man by the 
 Fall would have been deemed by Methodius to be regret- 
 table indeed both in itself and in its effects, but not per se 
 morally censurable or involving those who suffer from it 
 in personal guilt, any more than hereditary phthisis or colour- 
 blindness can be imputed to those who suffer from them as 
 morally censurable offences. It is, in other words, probable 
 that he would have been very far from agreeing with the 
 Augustinian position that the mere possession of ‘ con- 
 cupiscence ’ is in itself a sin.t 
 
 Though Methodius himself does not give any clear 
 explanation as to what he means by the ‘ disintegration ’ 
 to which man has been subjected by the Fall, it has seemed 
 worth while to reconstruct its probable significance at this 
 point: for, as stated above, this author is the herald of the 
 fourth-century Greek Fathers, some of whom employ the 
 conception as the basis of that presentation of Christ’s 
 redeeming work which unsympathetic critics have labelled 
 “ethico-physical’ or “ physical-materialistic ’—that, namely, 
 which concentrates the believer’s attention on the idea of 
 the union of the ‘ disintegrated ’ soul with the Logos, Who 
 through the sacraments—especially that of the Eucharist— 
 floods it with His own essence, which is true Being, thereby 
 arresting its tendency to relapse into non-being and restoring 
 it to full and concrete existence. Formally, this conception 
 is Platonic rather than Aristotelian, in so far as it assumes 
 that evil is non-ens; but we may surmise that what 
 
 covers what may be roughly called clean kinds of disintegration, such 
 as the melting of ice. And, even in Plato, yéveots and d0opa are corre- 
 lative and equally necessary characteristics of the material world, the 
 latter not being more essentially evil than the former. In later Greek- 
 Christian usage, the original, purely physical meaning of ¢@opa and its 
 secondary, ethical meaning became hopelessly confused; this confusion 
 is specially evident in the ‘ Aphthartodocetic’ controversy at the beginning 
 of the sixth century (see R. Draguet, Julien d@ Halicarnasse et sa controverse 
 ,avec Sévérve d Antioch, Louvain, 1924, pp. 100 ff.). 
 
 1 For this, see below, Lecture V, p. 373, 0. 2. 
 
256 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Methodius and his greater successors were really trying to 
 express by the term ¢0opa is ‘ weakness of will-power,’ the 
 defect which the modern psychologist describes by the 
 bastard neologisms ‘ aboulia ’ and ‘ psychasthenia.’ In any 
 case, however, our author is a convinced adherent of the 
 continuous ‘ Hellenic’ tradition that the inherited infirmity 
 does not seriously prejudice the essential freedom of the 
 will, which in the treatise de autexusio is said to be possessed 
 by all members of the human race in the same measure as 
 by Adam at his creation }—a dictum which, if it had been 
 uttered a century later, might have been described as 
 explicitly Pelagian. 
 
 The foregoing exposition of Methodius’ Fall- apergiae 
 will, it may be hoped, have placed in the reader’s hand the 
 main guiding threads which run through the hamartio- 
 logical teaching of his great fourth-century successors— 
 Athanasius, and the Cappadocian triad, Basil the Great, 
 his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory 
 of Nazianzus. Their writings deserve a specially careful 
 examination, inasmuch as in them the primitive ‘ once- 
 born’ version of the Fall-doctrine attained as much fixity of 
 outline and definiteness of articulation as it was destined to 
 attain before Augustinianism descended on the Western 
 Church like a flood, and Eastern thought had been drawn off 
 into the sterile intricacies of the Monophysite, Monothelite, 
 and Iconoclastic controversies. Though these illustrious 
 doctors were by no means unconscious of the pervasive 
 influences of Manicheism (the third great wave of Oriental 
 dualism which was now beginning to assail the faith of Israel), 
 the focus of their attention was occupied by the great 
 Trinitarian and Christological problem, and they were not © 
 able to spare more than a place in the penumbra of their 
 thoughts for the question of the origin of sin. Much of our 
 
 1 de autexus. xvi. [Bonwetsch (b), p. 186]: adreEovauov 5€ tov mpdtov 
 avOpwrov yeyovevar A€yw, TouTéaTiv EdeVOepov, ad’ od Kal of duddoxor Tod yevous 
 THv Opolay é€Aevbepiay exAnpwoavro. It may be noted that this treatise is 
 penetrated by the master-motive which, as we have seen, lies at the root 
 of all Fall-speculation, viz. the desire to safeguard the infinite goodness 
 and power of God both against monism and against dualism ; but, in this 
 work at least, Methodius seems to forget the Fall-doctrine altogether, 
 and to seek the way of escape between the Scylla of the Indian and the 
 Charybdis of the Persian doctrine in unlimited indeterminism. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 257 
 
 reconstruction, therefore, in the following section will have, 
 as before, to be pieced together out of incidental allusions 
 and obiter dicta ; we shall not expect to find perfect precision 
 of language or coherence of thought; and we shall be 
 prepared for the occasional emergence of an idea or an 
 expression which seems more akin to the ‘ African’ or 
 ‘twice-born ’ mode of feeling than to the sunny genius of 
 Christian Hellenism. It is doubtless unnecessary to repeat 
 the warning that the ‘ African’ and the ‘ Hellenic’ versions 
 of the Fall-doctrine, as systematically set out above, though 
 generally representative of the two main tendencies of 
 hamartiological thought in the pre-Augustinian Church, 
 are yet in the nature of composite photographs, which arrive 
 at the expression of an ideal type by the elimination of 
 individual and irrelevant detail. 
 
 gol ae A daestuseii Ds (ALD. §20%, 7102°,373)..., Chough 
 St. Athanasius does not deal with the question directly, it 
 would seem probable that he held a partially allegorising 
 interpretation of Gen. ii.; for his writings contain few 
 allusions to the details of the story, and one well-known 
 passage describes the Fall of man as consisting, not so 
 much in the physical manducation of a particular fruit as 
 in the aversion of his mind, through slothfulness, from that 
 beatific contemplation of divine things for which he had been 
 created.t This idea is presumably inherited from Origen, 
 but with a difference ; for it does not appear to have been 
 coupled by Athanasius with the idea of pre-natal existence 
 or of a purely metaphysical or ‘intelligible’ Paradise. 
 He once, indeed, asserts that ‘ Paradise’ was ‘ tropically,’ 
 or metaphorically, so called by Moses; but in the same 
 breath he alludes to it as a ‘ place’?; and, as Adam is 
 
 1 ¢. gentes 3: ovTw pev ody 6 Snwovpyos, Wamep EtpnTat, TO THY avOpwimwv 
 yévos KaTeoKevace, Kai pévew HOEAncev’ of Sé avOpwro. KaToALywpHaavrTes TOV 
 KpeiTTOvwv, Kal OKVHCaYTEs TEpl THY TovTwWY KaTdAnp, TA eyyuTépw pwaAAoV 
 éauTdv elyrynoav. éyytrepa dé tovTos Av Td GHpa Kal at to’Tov aicOyoets* 
 d0ev tHv pev vontdv anéotynoav éavT@v Tov vobv, éavtods dé Katavoety np£arto. 
 eis €auTdv émibupiay erecav, Ta idta mpoTiunoavtes THS mpds TA Beta Bewpias : 
 see also the preceding chapter. (For the text of St. Athanasius I have 
 used the Benedictine edition, Patavii, 1777.) 
 
 2 ibid. 2, ad fin.: . . . ouvdsaitaa8ar trois dyious €v TH THY vonrdv Oewpia, 
 qv elyev ev éxeivw 7O tomm, Ov Kat 6 ayios Mwiofs tpomiKds tapddevcov 
 Wvomacer. 
 
 Ss 
 
258 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 conceived as being endowed with a body,! even in his 
 paradisal state, it is natural to conclude that the ‘ place’ 
 is conceived as located somewhere within this concrete 
 universe, whether above the earth, as Irenaeus thought, 
 or upon it, as Methodius maintained. It is probably safe 
 to assume that, like the former of the authors just mentioned, 
 he accepted the idea of a first man and woman quite literally, 
 but would have been prepared to rationalise some of the 
 more naive features of the story. 
 
 Unlike Irenaeus, however, he holds that the protoplast 
 was anything but a ‘ babe,’ inasmuch as Adam is credited 
 with intellectual, moral, and spiritual powers of the highest 
 order. His purity of heart endowed him with the vision of 
 God, a vision so far-reaching that he could contemplate the 
 eternity of God’s essence and the cosmic operations of His 
 Word.? His mental sight was turned away from ‘ bodies,’ 
 and directed upwards. Harnack has collected the expres- 
 sions ‘imagination concerning God,’ ‘ knowledge,’ “ percep- 
 tion,’ ‘comprehension,’ ‘contemplation’ of ‘divine things’ 
 or of ‘the intelligible world,’ ‘contemplation concerning 
 God,’ an ‘inward grasp of knowledge as to the Father,’ 3 
 which are used by Athanasius to describe the eagle-like, un- 
 wavering intensity of the first man’s gaze upon the splendour 
 of God. Besides all this, he was endued with immortality 
 and safeguarded from disintegration into his native nothing- 
 ness by his intimate union with the Logos *—an idea which 
 we have already encountered in the writings of Methodius, 
 though Athanasius does not follow his predecessor in the 
 strange fancy of making the first Adam apparently as much 
 an incarnation of the Divine Word as the second. The 
 anthropology of this great Father thus marks a definite 
 breach with the primitive Hellenic tradition which conceived 
 the protoplast as frail, unformed, and innocent or morally 
 neutral, ‘capable of both’ good and evil,® and the definite 
 
 1 ¢. gentes 3, quoted above. 2 «bid. 2. 
 
 5 davracia mepl Oeot, yrdats, Katavdnois, KardAniyis, Oewpia trav Oelwv, 
 Gewpia t&v vontadv, Bewpia rept tod Oeod, Ewora ris eis marépa yricews 
 (History of Dogma, E. tr., 1897, ili. p. 273). 
 
 4 d ¥ ‘ : bf 5 8 4 A 4 / , A / 
 
 é wnucayn. 4, 5; Cj. especially 5: ova yap Tov ovvovta TovTois Lloyov 
 Kal 7 Kata dvow Pbopa rovTwr ovK Hyytle. 
 
 5 uv. supra, pp. 175, 176, 193. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 259 
 
 beginning of that naturalisation of the ideas of Adam’s 
 ‘ original righteousness’ and ‘ perfection ’ within the sphere 
 of Christian thought, both Eastern and Western, which was 
 the outstanding event in the history of the Fall-doctrine 
 during the fourth century of our era. 
 
 It is in the highest degree noteworthy that Athanasius, 
 in exalting the primitive state of man, draws in effect that 
 very distinction between (a) the qualities belonging to the 
 first man merely in virtue of his human nature as such, and 
 (b) the resplendent supernatural qualities bestowed on him 
 by a special act of Divine grace, which was destined to play 
 a great part in the later development of the ‘ African’ 
 Fall-doctrine, and to be expressed by the mediaeval School- 
 men as the distinction between Adam’s pura naturalia and 
 the donum superadditum of ‘ original righteousness.’4_ Man, 
 like all other members of the created universe, was made 
 out of nothing: hence human nature can never continue 
 in one stay, always tending to slip back into nothing. To 
 counteract this inherent instability of man’s being, God 
 bestowed upon him ‘a further gift’? (a phrase which is 
 roughly equivalent to donum superadditum), namely His 
 own ‘image, which is none other than the indwelling of 
 the Logos, the ‘image of the invisible God,’ * and a special 
 ‘grace’ ® (another word which calls up Augustinian associa- 
 tions in the mind of the modern reader). It is carefully 
 explained that this supernatural grace was bestowed on man 
 from without, catastrophically, and was by no means bound 
 up with or involved in his physical constitution as man.® 
 
 ® 
 
 1 See Lecture V, p. 363; Lecture VI, p. 4or1. 
 
 2 de incarn. 4: €oTt pev yap Kata dvow avOpwaos Ovntos, are 8H €€ ovK 
 OvTow yeyovws. 
 
 3 ibid. 3: mAéov te yapilopuevos adrots. 
 
 4 Col.i.15. The idea that the ‘image of God’ in man 7s the indwelling 
 Logos is clearly expressed in the following passage: epi 5€ adrod (sc. Tod 
 Xpictobd) <eipynrau> oti pdvos eikav aGArAnOwi} Kat dvoet Tod Tarpds Eat. et yap 
 Kal kat eixova vyeyovapev Kal eik@v Kal boa beob expnwarioaper, GAN’ od ou” 
 EavTovs maw, aAda dia Thy evoukjoagay ev jpty eikova Kal aAnOA Sd€av Tod Geod, 
 qTis €oTW 6 Adyos avrod, 6 81° yas vorepov yevduevos oap£, tavryv 7H 
 KAjoews € EXO ev THv xapu (oY. ill. c. Avian. 10 ad fin.). 
 
 5 deincarn. 3: mpoAaBav jadadicato vou Kai Témm THY Sobcicay adtots xdpwv. 
 
 6 ov. il. c. Avianos, 68: 6 pévtot dvOpwros Tovotros eyiveto olos Av Kal 6 
 "Addap apo ris mapapdacews, e£whev AaBwv tHv xdpw Kal pw} cvvnppoopEernv Exwv 
 avThY TO owpate. 
 
260 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 According to Harnack,? this bodily and sensuous con- 
 stitution of man is all that Athanasius means by mere 
 human nature; our higher faculties, intellectual and 
 spiritual, belong to the donum superadditum, which is the 
 ‘image of God.’ Hence the first sin was a Fall, not from a 
 natural to an unnatural state, but rather from a state which 
 was supernatural to one which was merely natural—another 
 conception which we shall meet again in the thought of 
 some Western Schoolmen.? 
 
 It may thus be said that Athanasius, despite the touches 
 of anticipated Augustinianism which we have noted, regards 
 the direct consequences of the Fall as being in the nature 
 of a deprivatio rather than of a depravatio. The ‘ depriva- 
 tion’ however involves a ‘ depravation,’ in so far as the loss 
 of the ‘image of God’ (that is, of the indwelling of the Logos) 
 releases the connatural tendency of man’s being to lapse 
 into non-entity, in other words, renders him liable to 
 ‘disintegration’ or ¢0opa.2 This word, at least in the 
 fourth-century Greek Fathers, includes the ideas of physical 
 mortality and of that obscuration of man’s intellectual 
 powers which rendered him an easy prey to idolatry and 
 the worship of daemons 4; but its primary meaning seems 
 to be metaphysical. Round the conception of ‘ disintegra- 
 tion ’ coheres the whole scheme of ideas, the emergence of 
 which was predicted in our discussion of Methodius, and 
 which needs no further explanation at this point—the idea 
 of evil as non-being (by which, verbally at least, God is 
 saved from the charge of originating evil, as He cannot have 
 originated the non-existent: this device was subsequently 
 employed in the theodicies of Gregory of Nyssa,° Augustine, ® 
 
 1 op. cit. ill. p. 272. 
 
 eemee Lecture Vi, peor: 
 
 8 For the ideas expressed in this and the preceding sentences, compare 
 de incayn. 4: % yap mapaBaats Tis evroAjs eis TO KaTa dvaw adtods eméaTpe dev, 
 iva WoTep OvK OvTES yeydvactY OUTWS Kal THY Els TO p17) Elvar POopaV dropetvwor 
 T@ Xpovw elKdTws. 
 
 4 It would seem that the idea of a progressive intellectual decadence 
 in man resulting in idolatry was derived by Athanasius and his successors 
 from Rom. i. 18-end. Wecannot, however, go at length into the interest- 
 ing question of the influence exercised by this passage on later thought, as 
 exigencies of space compel us to limit the scope of our survey very strictly 
 
 to the history of the Adam-theory. 
 5 uv. infra, p. 278. & Lecture: Vi) p.371* 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 261 
 
 and Thomas Aquinas !)—and the idea of redemption as 
 consisting chiefly in the reunion of the perishing soul with 
 the Logos, Who infuses into it the streams of His own 
 strong and stainless being, thereby arresting the process of 
 ‘ disintegration,’ and eventually exalting the soul to what 
 is daringly described as actual ‘ deification.’2 This latter 
 conception is summed up in the famous paradox ‘ He (the 
 Logos) became Man in order that we might be made God’ 3 ; 
 a sentence which points backwards to the words ascribed to 
 St. Peter ‘ that through these (the promises) ye may become 
 partakers of the Divine nature, having escaped from the 
 “ disintegration ’’ which is in the world through sinful 
 appetite ’ *—and forwards to the glowing lines of Newman : 
 
 And that a higher gift than grace 
 Should flesh and blood refine, 
 God’s presence and His very Self 
 
 And essence all-divine.® 
 
 In all three cases, though the Eucharist is not expressly 
 mentioned, it is permissible to surmise that the sacramental 
 idea is in the background of the writer’s mind. ® 
 
 There does not appear to be any trace of the idea 
 of ‘original guilt’ in the thought of Athanasius. His 
 occasional statements that ‘we’ sinned, or perished, in 
 contexts bearing on the Fall of man, might seem prima facie 
 to imply a belief in some kind of participation by Adam’s 
 posterity in the responsibility for his sin ; but it is, I think, 
 
 1 Lecture VI, p. 405. 
 
 2 Complete ‘ deification’ will, apparently, not be accomplished until 
 the resurrection : see the passage oy”. ili. c. Avian. 33, quoted below (p. 262, 
 12). 
 
 3 de incayn. 54: avros yap evnvOpmmnoev, iva juets OeomornPSpev. Com- 
 pare or. ii. c. Avian. 70: ov adv 8€é madw €BeoroinOn Kticpat. avvadbels 6 
 avOpwros, et un Oeds Av GAnOwos 6 vids; or”. iii. c. Avian. 25: domep viol Kal 
 Geot 51a tov ev yuiv Adyov: and many other passages. See A. Robertson, 
 St. Athanasius On the Incarnation (E. tr.), p. 93, D. 2. 
 
 euzeteter tA. 
 
 5 Dream of Gerontius. 
 
 6 The Eucharistic setting in which the idea of ‘ deification’ was held 
 by the mind of Athanasius is clearly shown in the following sentence : 
 otk avOpmmov Té Twos peTéxovTes owpatos adAAA atrob Trot Adyou capa 
 AapBavovres Peoto.otpeda (ad Maximum philosophum epistola, 2 ad fin.). 
 Cf. St. Ignatius’ conception of the Eucharist as the ¢dppyaxov abavacias, 
 Eph. 20. 
 
262 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 more natural to interpret such expressions merely as 
 desultory symptoms of the subconscious influence of the 
 ‘ Recapitulation ’-theory in its vaguest and least rigorous 
 form. No explicit statement is made as to the manner in 
 which the consequences of the Fall are transmitted from 
 generation to generation: but the emphatically realistic 
 idea of ‘ disintegration ’ which Athanasius holds in common 
 with Methodius must surely presuppose physiological, and 
 not merely ‘ social,’ heredity as the means of its propagation. 
 
 The opinions of Athanasius with regard to the last of 
 the ‘ five cardinal issues,’ the present condition of ‘ fallen ’ 
 man, though severe, are yet, on the whole, of the ‘ Hellenic ’ 
 and ‘once-born’ type. We are told that the débdcle of 
 human nature, that is, its collapse into nothingness, which 
 was brought about by the Fall and the withdrawal of the 
 sustaining power of the Logos, was a gradual and long- 
 drawn-out process, which is not even yet complete ; for it 
 is implied that man still retains the ‘ image of God’ (that is, 
 the indwelling of the Logos) in so far as he still possesses 
 faculties of knowing and reasoning, and free-will It is 
 even asserted that sinlessness is both theoretically and 
 actually possible, some of the saints, such as Jeremiah and 
 John the Baptist, having been pure from every kind of sin.” 
 
 1 Cf. de incayn. 12, in which it is contended that even before the Incar- 
 nation men might have improved their state by receiving instruction from 
 the law, the prophets, and other holy men. ‘The vivid simile at the begin- 
 ning of c. 14, in the same treatise, of the picture overlaid by dirt, implies 
 that the ‘image of God’ still existed in human nature, only overlaid by 
 sin to such a degree that it had been ‘ made invisible’ (zapadavicbeica). 
 
 2 The passage in which this statement occurs is worth quoting at length, 
 as it contains Athanasius’ leading ideas relative to the Fall, Sin, and 
 Redemption assembled together. 
 
 > ‘ ‘ lol 6 , lo A / ” \ 8 A a 2 cpa d > 
 ei yap Ta THS YedtyTos TOG Adyou Epya pH Sia Tod adpartos eyiveto, ovK 
 b] ¢ 4 , > A ~ 
 av €JeomornOn 6 avOpwros. Kal madwy, et Ta idia THs CapKds OdK edEyeTO TOD 
 A , ? n DY Q 60 > cat > \ v4 ec om” é > > Laer g ‘ 
 oyouv, ovK av NAevdepwbn mavTeAds azo TovTwy 6 avOpwmos’ GAA’ ei dpa mpdos 
 > e lal / »” = 
 dAlyov wev averraveTo, Ws mpoet mov, maALw Sé Evevev 7) duwaptia ev adT@ kal 4 0 opa, 
 4 > 
 
 \ an »” > v2 / A aA 
 Worep emt THv Eumrpoober avOparwv yéyove, Kab TOTO SeixvuTa. moAAol yodv 
 4 7 A \ ‘A ¢€ 
 dytou yeyovaci kat Kkabapoi rmaons duaprias’ "lepeutas §é xaléx KotAlas 
 € , rf) * \ ai / ” i. > , b] > , 924 aA aA 
 nyiacbn’ Kal Iwdvvns Ete kvopopovpevos eoKipTycev ev ayadXudoe emt TH Pwvh 
 a , / . ‘ y s+ 2 , 
 THs QYeordkov Mapias’ Kai ouws ‘€Bacirevoev 6 Odvatos amd "Addu péxpe 
 : , oo 4 ‘ Nace , 2 Ps = 
 Mwocéws, kal emt Tovs py apaprnoavtas emi TH Sporwpate THs mapaBdoews 
 >AS , ’ \ ¢ Mv 7) \ Chae. fa) \ \ A ‘ 
 du.’ Kal odrws Euevov oddev HrTOov of dvOpwrror Ovynrol Kal POaprol, SexTLKol 
 A ? / A , cal ~ A 
 tT&v (Siwy ris dv¥cews Tabdv. viv dé rot Adyou yerouévov avOpamou, 
 > / A ~ A / ~ ~ 
 Kal LOvomoLovpevovu Ta THS GapKos, OVKETL TabTa Tod GwmaTos anTETAL, Sid TOV 
 > > ~ f A ié ‘ LAN e > ? ~ \ > , 4 4 Ce 
 €v avT@ yevopevov Adyov’ a um avTov pev aviAwrat, AouTov Sé of avOpwror 
 
 2 
 
 
 

 
 THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 263 
 
 It is natural to append to our account of Athanasius’ 
 Fall-doctrine some words with regard to his younger 
 contemporary, (3) Cyril of Jerusalem (A.D. 315-386). This 
 Father’s writings contain exceedingly few allusions to the 
 ideas of a primitive catastrophe and of an inherited taint. 
 He tells us, in one place, that Adam’s sin was the cause of 
 physical death1; he is prepared to use the idiom which 
 makes the first person plural the subject of verbs referring to 
 the Fall,? and he admits that our nature is ‘ wounded,’ ® that 
 is, affected by a hereditary bias towards sin. But he is no 
 less emphatic in asserting that we are personally sinless at 
 birth,* and that man possesses the fullest possible freedom of 
 choice, which is not really hampered by the suggestions of 
 the devil or the storms of appetite ®; and his references to 
 the ‘remission of sins’ imparted in baptism make it clear 
 that he is thinking only of actual personal sins and of adult 
 baptism, and that the idea of ‘ original guilt ’ is completely 
 absent from his mind.® As in the case of so many other 
 Greek-Christian writers, it is evident both that the Fall- 
 tradition is for him too much of an authoritative reality 
 
 ovKeTL KaTa Ta dia maOn pevovow aywapTwdAol Kal vexpol, aAAa KATA THY TOO 
 — Adyou Sdvapw avaordyres, GOdvaroe Kal ddOaprou del Srapevovow (or. iii. 
 c. Arian. 33). Together with this should be considered a passage in o7. il. 
 c. Avian. 61, which is of interest (a) because it affirms the universality of 
 the destruction involved by Adam’s sin, thus appearing to contradict 
 the statement just cited as to the sinlessness of many of the saints, (bd) 
 because it contains an emphatic assertion of the idea of redemption by 
 way of quasi-physical (7.e., presumably, sacramental) incorporation with 
 the human nature of the incarnate Logos: éed2) mdvtwv tdv avOpadmav 
 amoAAvpevwv Kata THY TapdBaow Tod °’Addau, mpwHTn Tdv dAdwy éodOy Kal 
 HArcvbepadOn % exeivov cap, ws adtob tot Adyov odua yevopuérn, Kal doumov 
 Hpmets Ws cdvcowpot TUYXdVOVTES KaT’ exetvo owlopeda. 
 
 er Cab. XM1, 2. 
 
 2 ibid. ii. 5: doAdAapev dmarnbevtes . . . TemTwHKapev . . . ETUPADONwev 
 ait iiAs 
 
 8 ibid. xii. 7: péyrotov Fv TO Tpatua THs avOpwmrdrnTos, ad Toda Ews 
 Kegadrys odk tv ev avT@ OXroKAnpia. 
 
 4 ibid. iv. 19: mplv wapayévynrat els TévdSe TOV Kdopov 7 uy}, OddSey NuapTer 
 (probably a repudiation of Origen’s view)’ dAQ’ €Advres dvapaptynrot, viv 
 ek Mpoaipécews apapTavoper. 
 
 5 ibid. iv. 21: adregovards éorw % pvyn’ Kal 6 dudBodAos 7d pev droBddAXeuw 
 dvvaTa, TO Oé Kal dvayKdoat Tapa Tpoatpeow ovk Exes THY eEovaiav. wmoypader 
 oot mopvetas Aoyrouov' av OéAns, edéEw* eav p1) O€Ans, ovdK d€Fw. 
 
 Ve PAtpid. iil. 12, 15, xVii.)37. 
 
264. THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 to be completely discarded, and also that it has never been 
 assimilated into the texture of his thought, which remains 
 strongly indeterministic throughout. 
 
 (4) St. Basil of Caesarea (b. A.D. 330, d. 379). The 
 writings of the greatest of the Cappadocian Fathers 
 contain some clear and unmistakable affirmations of, or 
 allusions to, the Adamic Fall-doctrine in its most general 
 sense,! side by side with assertions of human free-will so 
 vehement and unqualified as to seem logically incompatible 
 with that doctrine. His position with regard to the question 
 of the origins and ground of sin is thus typically ‘ Hellenic,’ 
 both in its inconsistency and in its libertarianism ; and, but 
 for the testimony which it bears to the rapid growth of 
 the idea of ‘ original perfection,’ might have been described 
 as entirely free from any traits of the kind which we 
 have designated as ‘ African’ or ‘ twice-born.’ The most 
 extended discussion of the subject which St. Basil has 
 
 1 The following are the passages alluded to (all quotations are taken 
 from the Benedictine text, S.P.N. Basilit Caesar. Capp. archiep. opera 
 omnia, ed. D. Julianus Garnier, Parisiis, 1722—hereinafter cited as 
 ‘Garnier’ or ‘G’): (a) hom. in ps. xxix. 5 (G.i. 129 A): Kadds pev yap 
 nenv Kata tHv dvow: (notice that Basil does not, apparently, accept 
 Athanasius’ distinction between human nature as such and the donum 
 supevadditum) aobevis dé dia 7d €€ EmtBovdAfs Tod dodews vexpwOHvar TH 
 TapanTwHpate : 
 
 (b) hom. in ps. cxiv. 3 (G. i. 202 A): quets Fuey more Evdokor emi THs TOb 
 mapadeicov dtaywy fs, eyevopeba 5é ddo€ou Kal TaTewwol dia THY ExTTWOW : 
 
 (c) hom. in fam. et sicc. 7 (G. ii. 70 D): as yap ’"Adap xaxds dayav tiv 
 dpaptiav mapémepisev (presumably by physical heredity) ; 
 
 (zd) hom. de humilit. (G. ii. 156 D, E)—a strong assertion of man’s 
 original glory and perfection, from which he was cast down by the devil 
 by the hope of a feigned glory ; 
 
 (ec) hom. de venunt. saec. 6, 7 (G. 1. 207 D, 208 C)—these passages, 
 however, are allusions to the story of Gen. iii. rather than affirmations of 
 the Fall-doctrine ; 
 
 (f) de spir. sancto, 15 (G. iii. 28 C): 9 Tod Oeod Kai owripos Rudy sreEpi 
 Tov avOpwrov oikovopia avdKAnats €oTw ano THs EKTTMOEWS. 
 
 (g) ep. 261 (ad Sozopolitanos) (G. iii. 402 A, B)—a general but quite 
 definite assertion of the doctrine of the Fall in order to vindicate the 
 reality of the Incarnation against those who attributed a ‘ celestial body ’ 
 toour Lord. ‘Thereis an interesting touch of ‘ anticipated Augustinianism’ 
 in the use of the word ¢upapa, ‘lump,’ to describe mankind considered 
 as included in Adam (v. infra, p. 310, n. 2, p. 328, n. 2): tls dé xpeia THs 
 ayias mapbévov, et pt ex Tod dupdwartos Tod "Addy euedrAev 7 Oeopdpos cap§ 
 mpocdauBavecbat ; 
 
 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 265 
 
 bequeathed to posterity—though, as we shall see, even 
 this does not amount to very much—is to be found in the 
 Homily quod Deus non est auctor malorum,’ a title which 
 bears witness to the fact, often emphasised in these Lectures, 
 that the Fall-doctrine is fundamentally an exercise in 
 theodicy-making. A brief summary of this discussion will 
 sufficiently indicate the general tenor of his thought upon 
 a matter to which he has evidently devoted but little 
 sustained attention. 
 
 After some introductory remarks upon the evils which 
 God permits to afflict mankind, and the difficulties which 
 these raise against the belief in the divine governance of the 
 world and of human history, the preacher begins his treat- 
 ment of the subject by distinguishing sharply, much as a 
 modern philosopher might, between physical evil (that is, in 
 the last resort, pain) and moral evilor sin. Weare not here 
 concerned, nor does space permit us, to examine his vindi- 
 cation of the justice of God in regard to the terrible chastise- 
 ments, such as storms, floods and earthquakes, with which 
 from time to time He visits offending communities or sections 
 of the human race. These things, according to St. Basil, 
 are relatively evil; sin alone is absolutely evil; and the 
 root of sin is emphatically asserted to be free-will,” ‘ seeing 
 that it is in our power either to abstain from evil or to be 
 wicked.’ If this unqualified autonomy can really be 
 attributed to the human will, one half and that the most 
 important half of a complete theodicy has already been 
 constructed, and nothing more remains to be said on the 
 moral side of the problem of evil. But Basil appears to be 
 uneasily conscious that the facts of human nature are not 
 quite so simple as unlimited indeterminism supposes them 
 to be; at any rate, he adds two arguments which, on the 
 extreme libertarian hypothesis, are logically superfluous, 
 
 1 Garnier, ii. 72-83. 
 
 2 op. cit. 3 (Garnier, li. p. 74 A): dpx} yap Kat pila ris dpaprias rod 
 ed? nuiv Kal 7d adre€ovaror. 
 
 3 ibid. 5 (p. 76 E). 
 
 4 Later on in this Homily (7, Garnier, p. 79 D, E) Basil gives the 
 correct reply to those who impugn the righteousness of God on the ground 
 that He might have made us moral automata and did not—the reply, 
 
 namely, that the possibility of moral action involves freedom of choice 
 and therefore freedom to go wrong. 
 
266 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 namely, (rt) the contention already adduced by Athanasius, 
 that evil is a privatio, supervening upon ‘ mutilations of the 
 soul,’ 1 and therefore a negation or non-entity—and that the 
 Creator cannot be supposed to have created that which 
 does not exist ; (2) that a good Creator cannot in any case 
 be the author of anything save that which is good, 
 a contention which is confirmed by the Scriptural record. 
 ‘And God saw all that He had made, and, behold, it 
 was very good.’ Nevertheless, he is forced to admit that 
 evil does exist empirically, even though it may be ‘ non- 
 existent’ metaphysically?; and he poses once more the 
 question—already answered, if extreme indeterminism 
 be allowed—‘If God is not the first cause of evil, who or 
 what is ?’ 
 
 The reply is again ‘ Human free-will,’ but this time with 
 a difference. For the freedom which is now in question 
 seems to be, not the freedom which we possess or think 
 ourselves to possess at the present moment, but rather the 
 complete capacity for self-determination with which the 
 soul in its unfallen condition was once endowed.* There 
 follows an exceedingly vague and elusive statement of what 
 appears to be in essence Origen’s first or ‘ Alexandrine ’ 
 Fall-theory, that which postulates a great number of pre- 
 natal falls. We are told that ‘the soul’—by which is 
 apparently meant each individual soul—was created for the 
 contemplation of God and of eternal beauty ; that it allowed 
 itself to be overcome by satiety ° and a kind of drowsiness, 
 
 1 ob. cit. 5 (p. 78 A): orépnots yap ayafod earl 76 Kaxdv: ibid, (p. 78 B): 
 ovTw Kal TO Kakov ovK ev tdia wmdpge e€otlv, GAAA Tots THS uxAs 
 TmnpwWmacuv emcrylveTat. 
 
 As was suggested above, in our discussion of Methodius (p. 255), the 
 idea of the anhypostatic character of evil naturally leads to an interpreta- 
 tion of ‘inherited sinfulness ’ as weakness, or a defect of will-power, issuing 
 in failure to control the natural impulses in accordance with the dictates 
 of reason, rather than as a positive propension towards wrong-doing as 
 such ; and this conception of ‘ weakness’ as the result of the Fall is actually 
 expressed by St. Basil in quotation (a), supra, p. 264, 0. I. 
 
 2 Gen. i, 31. 
 
 3 op. cit. 5 (p. 78 C): dAda pny eote 76 Kakodv, Kal 4 evépyera Selxvvat 
 moAv Kata tod Biov mavtds Kexvuevov. mdbev odv adT@ TO elval, et pHTE 
 dvapxov €ort, dno, unre mEeTolnTaAL ; 
 
 4 op. ett. 6 (p. 78: E). 
 
 5 xédpos (ibid. 6, p. 79 A): the word is used by Origen (v. supra, p. 213). 
 
 ee ye inet 2 ee 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 267 
 
 so conceiving the desire of carnal pleasures, which caused it 
 to slide down from the heavenly sphere and to be mingled 
 with flesh. 
 
 Hardly, however, has St. Basil formulated this position 
 before he seems to be attacked by misgivings with regard to 
 the wisdom or justifiability of identifying himself so explicitly 
 with the teaching of one so suspect by many members of 
 the Church, albeit so beloved by himself,? as Origen: and 
 he consequently decides to redress the balance of his 
 discourse by subjoining a statement of what had by this 
 time almost become the ‘ orthodox ’ theory, in the following 
 words : 
 
 There was a time when Adam lived on high, not locally, but 
 in respect of the direction of his will [this is evidently meant to 
 repudiate both a supra-mundane, but yet concrete, Paradise, 
 and also the idea of human pre-existence on the plane of the 
 intelligible world] when, only just endowed with life, he raised 
 his eyes to heaven; and, rejoicing exceedingly in those things 
 which he saw, he was filled to overflowing with love for his 
 Benefactor, who had freely given him the enjoyment of eternal 
 life, had made him to repose amidst the delights of Paradise, 
 had granted him a princedom like unto that of the angels and 
 a share in the food of archangels, and had made him a listener 
 to the Divine Voice. And besides all this, he was shielded by 
 God<from evil> and enjoyed all His good things. Never- 
 theless, being soon sated with all these things, and being as it 
 were impelled to insolence by his satiety, he preferred that 
 which appeared pleasant to the eyes of flesh above the intelligible 
 beauty, and counted the satisfying of his belly more precious 
 than the spiritual joys. So then, being forthwith outside Para- 
 dise, and outside that blessed manner of life, he became evil, 
 not through necessity, but as the result of folly.® 
 
 1 For Origen’s own statement of this theory, v. supra, pp. 212 ff. 
 
 2 It will be remembered that we owe the Philocalia to the collaboration 
 of Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus. 
 
 3 op. cit. 7 (Garnier, p. 79 B, C): fv more 6 Addy dvw, 0d romm GAAG 
 TH mpoapece, ote dptu puxwhels Kal avaPrAas mpds odpavoer, weprxapyns Tots 
 Spwpevois yevopevos, brepayanayv tov evepyéTrny Cais pev aiwviov amdAavow 
 xaproduevov, Tpudais Sé mapadeicov evavarravoarra, apyny dé SdvTa Kata Thy THY 
 ayyédwv, Kat dpyayyéAots adrov tovjoavra Opodiarov, kal duvAs Oelas dxpoaTHy’ 
 éml maou tovtos brepacmilduevos Tapa eob, Kai dmoAatwv Tav adrod ayabdar, 
 Taxyd mdvtwy avaTAndels Kal ofov €£vBpicas 7 Kdpw, 76 Tots capKivors 6POadpois 
 davév tepmvov Tob vonTos mpoetiunce KdAXovs, Kal Thy TAnspoVvIY THS yaoTpos 
 Tov mvevpaticav amodatvoeww Tiyswrépav ebero. eéw pev ed0ds qv Tod 
 mapadetoov, £w Sé ris paxaplas éxelvns Staywyfs’ odK e& dvdyKys Kaxds 
 GAN’ €€ dBovdAlas yevdpevos. 
 
268 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 This passage clearly asserts a high view of ‘ original 
 righteousness’ and ‘ perfection, 1 and it is consequently 
 not surprising to find elsewhere ? in the writings of St. Basil 
 instances of the use of the word ‘ Fall’ (ékardats, m7 Gpa) 
 in this connexion. We naturally expect, after such an 
 exordium, some explanation of the consequences flowing 
 from the ‘ folly’ of the first man. But the Adam-theory, 
 as here set forth, remains a torso, running down into vague- 
 ness ; the only statements suggestive of a connexion between 
 the acquired sinfulness of the protoplast and the sinfulness 
 of his descendants are to be found in the employment from 
 time to time of an idiom which we have already noted in 
 Greek writers on this subject, namely, the use of the first 
 personal pronoun plural in expressions referring to the Fall. 
 ‘We’ are said to have drawn death upon ourselves as the 
 result of an evil disposition?; the Tree of the Knowledge of 
 Good and Evil was fair to look upon in order that ‘ our’ 
 obedience might be tested ®; the devil has become our 
 adversary on account of the Fall (z7@pa) which happened 
 to ‘us’ of old as the result of our insult (to God).® Such 
 expressions may naturally be construed, both in Athanasius 
 and in Basil, as symptomatic of the subconscious influence 
 of the Kecapitulation-theory. But it is clear that the 
 conviction which our author really holds with his whole 
 heart and which springs out of the depths of his own vital 
 experience is the virile ethical belief in the fullness of man’s 
 free-will. The Fall-doctrine comes to him from without, 
 on the authority of Scripture and ecclesiastical tradition, 
 and it is accepted by him in a minimising form, we need not 
 doubt sincerely, but yet superficially ; it has not gripped 
 his emotions or even the whole of his intellect, and he has 
 made little effort to harmonise the uncompromising liber- 
 tarianism natural to his own Hellenic temperament with 
 the measure of determinism which even a minimal statement 
 of the Fall-doctrine must logically involve. 
 
 It may be noted that this Father adds a curious 
 
 1 Cf. quotations (a), (0) and (da), supra, p. 264, n. I. 
 
 2 e.g. de spir. sancto 15; hom. in ps. cxiv. 3. 
 
 3 uv. supra, pp. 196, 261. 
 
 4 hom, quod Deus non est auct. mal. 7 (Garnier, p. 79 C). 
 5 ibid. g (Garnier, p. 81 A). 6 ibid. 9 (Garnier, p. 81 D). 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 269 
 
 hypothetical decoration to the idea of Adam’s ‘ original 
 perfection,’ when he tells us that, although unfallen man had 
 no need of clothing, nevertheless, if he had persevered in 
 virtue, a lucid aureole would have formed itself about him, 
 more beauteous than the daedal hues of the flowers and 
 more brilliant than the light of the stars, which would have 
 been an angelic garment bestowed on him as the reward of 
 his perseverance by the hand of the Creator himself.4 
 
 From the writings of St. Basil we pass by a natural 
 transition to those of (5) his younger brother, St. Gregory 
 of Nyssa (b. c. A.D. 335, d. c. 395).2. Though it cannot be 
 said that this acute psychologist and brilliant rhetorician 
 did much to fix the changeful and elusive lineaments of the 
 “ Hellenic ’ Fall-doctrine, he nevertheless deserves the credit 
 of having devoted much more attention and interest to the 
 subject than any of the Greek-Christian writers whom we 
 have reviewed so far, with the exceptions of Irenaeus and 
 Origen ; and his works contain a wealth of material for the 
 reconstruction of the opinions and speculations regarding 
 the origin of sin which were current in Eastern Christendom 
 during the age immediately prior to that of St. Augustine. 
 It will conduce to clearness if in summarising the ideas held 
 by this Father we employ once more the five-fold scheme 
 of ‘cardinal issues’ defined at the beginning of this Lecture 
 as arising directly out of the Pauline doctrine of the Fall 
 and of its consequences for man. (1) It is clear that, 
 following his master Origen, Gregory was a partisan of the 
 allegorical, as opposed to the prosaically literal, interpretation 
 of Gen. iii. We need only refer to the phrases used by him 
 in the oratio catechetica— ‘... all the matters whereof 
 Moses treats in more or less historical form, placing before us 
 
 1 hom. quod Deus non est auct. mal. 9 (Garnier, p. 81 D). 
 
 2 For more extended discussions of St. Gregory’s doctrines of Man and 
 of Sin, see the following: Gregorit Nyss. doctrinam de hominis natura et 
 tllustravit et cum Origeniana comparavit E. W. Moller, Halle, 1854; A. 
 Krampf, Der Urzustand des Menschen nach der Lehre des hl. Gregor von 
 Nyssa, 1889; Fr. Hilt, Des hl. Gregors von Nyssa Lehre vom Menschen, 
 1890; J. Riviere, Le dogme de la rédemption, 1905, Ppp. 151-159, 384-386, 
 420, 422. Quotations from the ovatio catechetica are given in accordance 
 with Dr. J. H. Srawley’s text (The Catechetical Oration of Gregory of Nyssa, 
 Cambr. Patristic Texts, 1903) ; for quotations from other works, I have 
 used Migne (PG XLIV-XLVI). 
 
270 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 doctrines in the guise of a narrative’... ‘nowit is sucha 
 doctrine which Moses sets forth unto you in more or less 
 historical form and by means of riddles; yet the teaching 
 which these riddles contain is plain and manifest.’ * Thorough- 
 going allegorism is for him, as for Origen, a means of escape 
 from servitude to the letter of the Paradise-story into the 
 free atmosphere of philosophical speculation, in which the 
 Fall-theory can be developed in accordance with what we 
 have seen to be its true nature, as a hypothesis framed by 
 reason to account for the actual existence of evil whilst 
 safeguarding the infinite power and goodness of God. 
 
 (2) The question, what was Gregory’s view of the original 
 state of man, is much more obscure and complicated. It 
 can, however, be considerably simplified if we abandon the 
 attempt to harmonise all his allusions to the subject, and 
 recognise that two somewhat different theories of ‘ original 
 perfection,’ involving correspondingly diverse theories of the 
 nature and effects of the Fall, appear in his writings. The 
 earliest of these attempts to articulate the Fall-theory is 
 to be found in the treatise de hominis opificro (‘ on the making 
 of man’) which may be dated c. A.D. 380; the later is 
 contained in the oratio catechetica, written c. A.D. 385. 
 A brief survey and comparison of these two views will both 
 help to complete our picture of the various tendencies which 
 the ‘ Hellenic’ Fall-speculation of this period was elastic 
 enough to include, and also suggest ideas which may prove 
 to be of use in our final evaluation and re-formulation of the 
 basic Christian doctrines of human nature and of sin. 
 
 (a) ‘ Original perfection’ and the Fall in the treatise 
 ‘On the making of man.’ 
 
 The first of these trains of thought finds its nominal 
 starting-point in the words of Gen. i. 26, 27. (26) ‘ And 
 God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: 
 and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea. . . ,’ 
 
 ‘or. cat. 5: Oca rept todtwy taropikdtepov 6 Mwogs diebepyerau, ev 
 Sinyjnoews elder Sdypara Hutv mapatibépevos. 
 
 2 ibid. 8: 1d dé ToLvotrov Sdypa iotopixwTepov pev Kal 8c’ aiveypdrwv 6 
 
 Mwofs byiv éxriberar, aAnv ExdndAov Kat 7a aiviypara ri SiSacKadAlay Eyer. 
 
 3 de hom. opif. 16-18. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 271 
 
 etc. (27) ‘And God created man in his own image, in the 
 image of God created he him ; male and female created he 
 them.’ This text is made, by a somewhat forced exegesis, 
 to yield the theory of a double creation of man, or (in other 
 words) of the creation of the human race as involving two 
 distinct and separate Divine acts. The first of these acts 
 brought into existence ‘man’ as such, that is, the idea or 
 universal concept of humanity. This archetypal or ideal 
 ‘man’ was made ‘in the image of God,’ and was con- 
 sequently endowed with all possible moral and intellectual 
 excellences, including the completest freedom of self- 
 determination ; and, though at the beginning numerically 
 one, and contained in one body,? he included in himself the 
 potentiality of all subsequent individual men. His nature 
 was entirely free from irrational passions and appetites, 
 more particularly from the sexual appetite ; and if he had 
 never fallen, he would have propagated himself in the same 
 manner as the angels, presumably (though Gregory does 
 not say this, and disclaims exact knowledge of the angelic 
 mode of procreation) by some kind of fission. 
 Nevertheless, though made in the image of God, he was 
 distinguished from God by his creaturely status, which 
 involved instability and mutability; for God alone is 
 uncreate and immutable. This mutability inherent in man 
 carried with it the possibility of sin: and, though God did 
 not predestine man to sin, He foresaw that in point of fact 
 he would sin,? and would consequently forfeit the power of 
 
 1 de hom. opif. 16 (PG XLIV. 185 C): ovrws ofuat Kabdrep ev evi 
 cwpatt GAov TO THS avOpwrdTHTOS TANpwUGA .. . TEeproxeDFvat. 
 
 2 The view set out in this paragraph must be carefully distinguished 
 from Origen’s theory of the pre-natal existence of individual human spirits, 
 which is emphatically repudiated by Gregory of Nyssa. (de an. et resurr. 
 [PG XLVI, 112 C].) This passage does not mention the name of Origen, 
 doubtless owing to Gregory’s pietas towards him, and appears to be 
 nominally directed against the idea of a pre-natal fall as expounded in 
 the myth contained in Plato’s Phaedrus (v. supra, p. 214); but to con- 
 demn the theory of the Phaedrus myth is to condemn the theory of 
 Origen’s Alexandrine period. Another repudiation of this view occurs in 
 de hom. opif. 28 (PG XLIV. 229 B). 
 
 8 Cf. Milton, Paradise Lost, iii. 116: ‘ They themselves decreed 
 
 Their own revolt, not I. If I foreknew, 
 Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, 
 Which had no less proved certain, unforeknown.’ 
 
272 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 reproducing himself after the manner of the angels. In 
 view, therefore, of the foreseen, though not fore-ordained, 
 catastrophe of the Fall, and to preserve the possibility of 
 the numerical increase of mankind, God subdivided the 
 one archetypal man into ‘male’ and ‘female’: that is, 
 He added to man’s original intellectual nature those sexual 
 organs and appetites which are the instruments of genera- 
 tion in the sub-human brutes. ‘Hence also’ (he adds) 
 ‘the great David, pitying the misery of man, mourns over 
 his nature with such words as these, that ‘‘man being in 
 honour knew it not’’ (meaning by “ honour ”’ the equality 
 of the angels) ; therefore, he says, “‘ he is compared to the 
 beasts that have no understanding, and made like unto 
 them.’ ! For he truly was made like the beasts, who received 
 in his nature the present mode of transient generation, 
 on account of his inclination to material things.’? This 
 partial degradation of man, through his subdivision and 
 ‘sexualization’ (if this coinage may be pardoned) in view 
 of a foreseen Fall, is the second act of creation, described in 
 Gen. 1. 27 ‘ male and female created he them.’ 
 
 The assumption of an animal nature and of sexual 
 feelings by man necessarily carried with it (according to 
 this author) the assumption of other appetites and passions, 
 such as pride, ferocity, greed, and timidity. All these evil 
 impulses came into human nature concomitantly with sex 
 and because of sex, so that man became a Janus-like creature, 
 with two faces, one bearing the ‘image of God,’ the other 
 the image of the brutes. Nevertheless, free-will can bridle 
 these passions and harness them to good ends, thus trans- 
 forming the dispositions from which they arise into heroic 
 virtues ; this had actually been done by Moses and other 
 saints of the elder Covenant.2 On the other hand, free- 
 will may accept and endorse the animal passions, and set 
 the intellect to work at the excogitation of lawless and 
 fantastic means of satisfying them, so that monstrous 
 crimes, unknown to the brute creation, result. Yet Gregory 
 seems to recognise, in a startlingly modern spirit, that all 
 
 1s ex lit 3) (1xX )i 
 
 2 de hom. opif. 17, 5 (PG XLIV. 189 D). 
 3 ibid. 18, 8 (PG XLIV. 193 D). 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 273 
 
 so-called ‘evil passions’ in man are exaggerations, or 
 perversions, of instincts which in themselves are necessary 
 for the continuance of animal life upon the earth; anger, 
 for instance, is the perversion of the self-assertive instinct, 
 timidity of the self-preserving instinct, and so on. The 
 affinities of this conception with the Rabbinical idea of the 
 yecer ha-ra‘, and with the doctrines of more recent psycho- 
 logy of the psycho-analytic school, do not need to be 
 emphasised. 
 
 Gregory’s earliest version of the Fall-doctrine, yee does 
 not regard the connatural disorder of the human soul as 
 a direct consequence of the Fall: it is, rather, a direct 
 consequence of man’s endowment by God with a bodily, 
 and more particularly with a sexual, nature, in view of his 
 divinely foreseen Fall. This position represents an exceed- 
 ingly subtle and original revision of the traditional doctrine, 
 and cannot now be considered on its merits: it must suffice 
 to note its key-conceptions, some of which, as we shall see, 
 were discarded by our author in his later presentation of the 
 doctrine, that which appears in the oratio catechetica. These 
 key-conceptions are: 
 
 (i) The attribution of ‘ original perfection,’ not to the 
 first sexually differentiated pair of human beings, but to 
 the archetypal Man, the universal of humanity; this idea 
 may well be derived from the hypothesis of a single pre- 
 existent Adam tentatively Re in Origen’s Commentary 
 on the Epistle to the Romans! : 
 
 (ii) The conviction that sex is an intrinsically evil, or at 
 least undesirable and regrettable, phenomenon—an instance 
 of the appearance of a specifically “‘ twice-born ’ or “ African ’ 
 trait in an otherwise thoroughly ‘ Hellenic’ scheme of 
 thought. The emergence of this familiar piece of morbidity 
 will cause no surprise to anyone who remembers the ascetic 
 tendencies common to the three Cappadocians, or who 
 has read the terrible indictment of marriage contained in 
 Gregory’s treatise de virginitate.? 
 
 1 vy. supra, p. 228. 
 2c. li. (PG XLVI. 325 ff.). Like Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa was a 
 married disparager of marriage : his wife was named Theosebia (see S. Greg. 
 Naz. ep. cxcvii, ed. Paris. ii. p. 162, written to console Gregory of Nyssa on 
 T 
 
274 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 (iii) The ultra-‘ Hellenic,’ almost Pelagian, belief that 
 free-will is capable—apparently by itself—of taming the 
 passions, and that sinlessness was actually achieved by a 
 few men even before the coming of Christ.} 
 
 (b) ‘ Original perfection’ in the Catechetical Oration. 
 
 The chief prima facie objection to the scheme of ideas 
 just described is that, in so far as it regards sin as a natural 
 consequence of our animal constitution, and attributes 
 our animal constitution to a specific creative act of God, 
 it appears to make God the ultimate first cause of sin— 
 the very conclusion which the Fall-doctrine was originally 
 designed to destroy, but into which it tends, when care- 
 lessly handled, to convert itself. Five years later, how- 
 ever, Gregory had been driven by the silent but persistent 
 pressure of Manichean dualism to realise the true issues at 
 stake. ‘All through the oratio catechetica’ (says Dr. Srawley) 
 “Gregory has the Manicheans in view.’? What we have 
 called the theodicy-making motive dominates his later pre- 
 sentation of the Fall-doctrine. ‘Seeing that man is the 
 work of God, who out of His goodness brought this living 
 creature into existence, no one can rationally suppose that 
 he, whose constitution has its source in goodness, was created 
 by his Maker in a state of evil.’ 3 
 
 In the light of this principle, the whole theory of a 
 double creation and of a distinction between the one arche- 
 typal man and the two sexually differentiated beings, 
 Adam and Eve, is tacitly dropped, and there is substituted 
 for it what was now becoming, in both East and West, the 
 normal view—that, namely, of a single glorious protoplast, 
 belonging both to the intelligible and to the sensible world, 
 
 her death ; Nicephorus, H.E. xi. 19, ed. Fronto Ducaeus, 1630, li. p. 1373 
 Tillemont, Mémoires, ix. p. 252, thinks that she was a deaconess, as well as 
 a priest’s wife). 
 
 1 Cf. the opinions of St. Athanasius on this point, supra, p. 262. 
 
 4 op. ctl. Pp. 27, 1.5. 
 
 3 or. cat. 5 (Sr. p. 25, 15): €zrevd%) yap Beod Epyov 6 dvOpwmos, Tod 8° 
 ayabérnra to Cdov roito mapayaydvtos eis yéveow, ovK dv Tis evrAdyws, 
 od 4 airla THs cvotdcews ayabdrns €otl, TodTov év Kakots yeyevfolaL Tapa Top 
 METOLNKOTOS KADUTOTTEVCELEDV. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH) 275 
 
 the meeting-point of spirit and matter, the ruler of the earth, 
 immortal and impassible, ‘ revelling in the manifestation of 
 Deity even face to face.’? Inflamed with envy by man’s 
 splendid prerogatives, the archangel who governs the earth 
 and its surrounding sphere resolved to bring him to naught? ; 
 and, being unable to work man’s ruin by force, he persuaded 
 him by guile to renounce his communion with God, and so 
 to infect his whole being with a fatal weakness. Gregory 
 illustrates this conception by a quaint yet significant simile, 
 comparing the malevolent Spirit to one who, not having 
 sufficient strength of lung to blow a lamp out, mixes water 
 with the oil and so reduces the flame to a feeble flicker 3 ; 
 a simile which implies that the image of God in man is 
 obscured but by no means destroyed. [From the error of 
 the protoplast flow all human ills, including physical mor- 
 tality (the ‘ coats of skins’ of Gen. ili. 21 are explained as 
 symbolising the sensuous and irrational nature with which 
 mortality is necessarily bound up, but not bodies as such *) ; 
 and the God of Christianity is thus vindicated against the 
 indictment of the Manicheans. We may note that in 
 Gregory, as in other fourth-century writers, an exalted con- 
 ception of man’s primal state finds its logical consequence 
 in an occasional use of the word ‘ Fall’ to denote the first 
 transgression. ® 
 
 1 or. cat. 6 (Sr. p. 36, 8): adris Kata mpdowmov tis Oeias eudavelas 
 KaTaTpupav. 
 
 2 Note that in the Catechetical Oration the real and ultimate ‘ Fall’ 
 is that of the angel of the earth, who became the devil. 
 
 8 ibid. 6 (Sr. p. 36, 15). 
 
 4 ibid. 8 (Sr. p. 43, 2 ff.), where Gregory draws attention, in an 
 eminently critical spirit, to the difficulty of supposing that animals were 
 literally killed and flayed for the purpose of providing these garments. 
 The explanation which he gives seems to represent, like so much else of 
 greater importance in fourth-century Eastern thought, the resultant of 
 the forces of attraction towards and revolt against Origen (v. supra, p. 249). 
 Cf. de an. et resurry. (PG XLVI. 148 D), where the ‘ skin’ is expounded as 
 typifying ‘ the form of the irrational nature, wherewith we were clothed, 
 when we had been made familiar with passion,’ and de virg. 12, where it 
 is identified with the ‘ mind of the flesh’ (¢pdvnua tis capxds). For earlier 
 discussions of this point, v. supra, pp. 229, 251, 275. 
 
 5 Cf. or. cat. 8 (St. p. 51, 22): } rod mem@TwKOTOS Gvdpbwas: ibid. 15 
 (Sr. p. 63, 11): 6 &y 7H wrwparte avOpwmos; de vita Moysis (PG XLIV, 
 337 D): Adyos ris eotw ex matpixfs mapaddcews TO MuoTOV Exwv, 6s dat, 
 Teaovons huav eis Gpwapriavy THs dvcews, 7 Tapideiv Tov Oedv THY TTAGLY 
 
276 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 (3) What, in Gregory’s view, was the exact nature of the 
 disastrous legacy of the primal catastrophe ? According to 
 the treatise On the making of man, it was nothing other than 
 our irrational, sensuous, appetitive, and emotional nature 
 itself. But, as we have already pointed out, to brand 
 appetite, instinct, and emotion as evil, as things which had 
 better not have been, is to leave the door ajar for the 
 entrance of Manicheism. We may suppose that it was 
 the realisation of this fact which impelled Gregory in the 
 Catechetical Oration to affirm emphatically that the seat of 
 evil lies in the power of choice though even in this work 
 there are not wanting traces of his earlier view.2, To modern 
 readers it may seem that it would not have been very difficult 
 to clear up the confusion which enwrapped the question of 
 the precise nature of the flaw or disharmony in man’s psychic 
 structure by saying boldly: ‘ appetite is in itself good, or 
 at least neutral; but appetite permitted to indulge itself 
 without limit or government becomes fer accidens bad ; it is 
 the business of the will to keep appetite in order ; but, owing 
 to the Fall, the will is weak, so that it is not always capable 
 of opposing a firm inhibition to the clamorous demands of 
 the appetites for satisfaction, with the result that they 
 often break out into action contrary to the dictates of reason 
 and conscience. Hence, the radical flaw of human nature 
 may be defined as “‘ weakness of will’’.’ He comes near to 
 this position, when he tells us that ‘human nature is weak 
 relatively to the doing of good, in that it was once for all 
 
 
 
 amapavontov. or. cat., however, also employs the words zapartpomm, 
 ‘turning aside’ (8, Sr. p. 49, 16), and wapoAcAdvew, ‘ to slip aside’ (8, Sr. 
 Pp. 5I, 10), which seem to express the older idea of the first sin as a 
 mapaBaois, a divergence from the line of progress which God had meant 
 man to pursue. 
 
 1 op. cit. 7 (Sr. p. 40, 4): Kakov yap oddev é€w mpoaipécews ef” EavTod 
 xetrat (in other words, moral evil is alone xaxov) ; cf. also c. Eunom. ii. 13 
 (PG XLV. 545 B): yap mapaxot mpoaipécews 03 awpatos auaptia éaotiv’ 
 tdvov yap puxfs  mpoaipecis, ad’ Fs maoa tis pPicews avudopa thy apyxiy 
 éoxev (‘for disobedience is a sin of will, not of body; for will is a 
 property of soul, from which all the disaster of our nature had its 
 beginning’). For this line of thought, see St. Basil, hom. quod Deus non 
 est auctor malorum (discussed supra, p. 265). 
 
 2 ibid. 8 (Sr. p. 45, 7): T@ atoOnriKd péper, TH kata 76 o@pd dnc, THs 
 Kaxias Kataptxbeions (‘ wickedness being intermingled with the sensuous part 
 cof our nature>, that part I mean which is connected with the body ’). 
 
 a, 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 2977 
 
 hamstrung by wickedness.’} But he never succeeds in 
 reaching a clear distinction between appetite and the illicit 
 indulgence of appetite ; he sticks fast at precisely the same 
 point at which the Rabbinical artificers of the yé¢er-doctrine 
 had stuck. Doubtless in both cases the failure to advance 
 may be attributed to defective terminology, inasmuch as 
 neither the Hebrew nor the Greek language contains a word 
 which exactly expresses the idea of Will as the power, not 
 merely to choose, but to enforce the choice in the teeth of 
 rebellious inclinations by the exertion of effort. 
 
 In view of this imperfection of his psychological termi- 
 nology, it might have been expected that Gregory would fall 
 back upon the metaphysical or quasi-metaphysical concep- 
 tion of ‘ disintegration,’ which we have already noted in 
 Methodius and Athanasius. This, however, he leaves on 
 one side. Two fragments, indeed, of the scheme of ideas 
 
 1 de ovat. domin. 4 (PG XLIV. 1164 C): adodevas % dvOpwrivn dvats 
 mpos 76 ayabdv eorw, amak bia Kakias exvevpiobeica. (The context consists 
 of a series of eloquent variations on.this theme.) Cf. also or. cat. 15 
 (Sr. p. 63, 10): édet7o yap Tod latpevovtos 4 dvois nudv aobevyoaca; 
 ibid. 16 (Sr. p. 69, 9), where the ‘impulse towards wickedness’ is called 
 an dppwotnpua or ‘ ailment’ of our nature. 
 
 2 v. supra, Lecture IIT, p. 609. 
 
 3 Biblical Hebrew does not contain a word for ‘ Will,’ in the sense 
 defined above: py seems to mean rather ‘ goodwill,’ ‘ favour,’ 
 ‘desire,’ or ‘ pleasure’ (see Brown, Driver, and Briggs, Hebrew and 
 English Lexicon of the O.T., s.v., p. 953). And Dr. A. Biichler, than whom 
 no one can speak with more authority, informs me that the equivalent of 
 ‘ will’ in this sense is not to be found, so far as he knows, in Rabbinical 
 Hebrew. He suggests, indeed, (in a letter to me) that the term yéger 
 hattobh (‘ the good impulse,’ which in later Rabbinical literature is said to 
 contend with the yéger ha-va‘ within the soul of man) comes to very much 
 the same thing ; but the‘ goodimpulse,’ or‘ disposition,’ being ex hypothest 
 directed towards good ends, cannot be taken as simply identical with the 
 bare power of exerting effort to overcome inclination, for this latter power 
 may be exerted to overcome conscientious scruples or good inclinations, 
 as in the case of Shakespere’s Hubert (King John, Act IV, Scene 1) : 
 
 ‘If I talk to him, with his innocent prate 
 
 He will awake my mercy which lies dead : 
 
 Therefore I will be sudden, and dispatch.’ 
 The Greek language is no better off in this regard. mpoaipeos is 
 defined by Aristotle as Bovdeutixn dpeéis THv ef’ Hutv (Eth. Nic. ili. 3, 19)— 
 a definition which implies that in mpoaipeous ‘ appetite’ and ‘ deliberation ’ 
 are harmoniously united ; and @éAnyua is defined by St. John of Damascus 
 (orth. fid. ii. 22, quoted by Suicer, Thesaurus, s.v.), in substantially identical 
 terms, as dpefis Aoyixy Te Kai Cwriki wdvev HpTnuErn TOV hvaiKkdv. 
 
 P| 
 
278 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 which coheres round this term appear in the Catechetical 
 Ovation. He several times takes occasion to point out that 
 evil is a ‘ privation,’ absence, or negation of good, not a 
 thing-in-itself existing in its own right ; and bases on this 
 the conventional anti-Manichean contention that God is 
 not the author of evil, as it would be absurd to describe Him 
 as the author of that which does not exist.1_ And the idea 
 of the ‘ deification’ of human nature through sacramental 
 incorporation into the Incarnate Logos is expressed with 
 almost startling realism and definiteness, in a chapter? 
 which sets forth a doctrine of Eucharistic ‘ transelementa- 
 tion ’® which is hardly, if at all, distinguishable from the 
 later ‘ transubstantiation.’ But the disease which is to 
 be healed by this ‘ deification’ is here described, not as a 
 mere negative tendency to relapse into nothingness, but as 
 a substantive ‘ poison’ * which can only find its antidote in 
 the reception of the Body of Christ. We seem, in short, to 
 be here confronted with a momentary emergence of the 
 characteristically ‘ African ’ tendency to conceive the results 
 of the Fall as involving a positive defravatio, and not a 
 mere deprivatio. The only comment that can usefully be 
 made upon this will be a repetition of the familiar reminder 
 that too much consistency must not be expected from the 
 pioneers of scientific theology. 
 
 It is of great importance to note that Gregory, in harmony 
 with the strongly marked tendency of the ‘ once-born’ and 
 ‘Hellenic’ line of thought, repudiates the idea of ‘ Original 
 Guilt.’ Ample proof of this statement is supplied by the 
 whole tenor of the treatise On the untimely deaths of infants ° ; 
 in which the question of the future destiny of babes who die 
 
 1 Op. Cit. 7. SLCC B 
 
 3 ibid. 37 (Sr. p. 152, 6): tabra dé didwor 7H THs edAoyias Suvdyer mpos 
 Exeivo pEeTAaTOLxELWoas THY paivopevar tiv dvaw. See Srawley’s note 2x loc., 
 and D. Stone, History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, i. pp. 71 ff., 103 f. 
 
 4 OnAnTHpcov (Sr. p. 142, 4). 
 
 5 de tnfantibus qui praemature abripiuntur (PG XLVI. 161-192). That 
 the infants contemplated in this treatise are unbaptised infants is not 
 indeed expressly stated, but follows (1) from the presumption that no 
 doubt could have arisen in the mind of any primitive Christian about the 
 salvation of baptised infants, and (2) from the fact that Gregory seems to 
 be almost unconscious of the existence of the custom of infant baptism ; 
 v. infra, Pp. 279. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 279 
 
 without baptism is handled with the completest apparent 
 unconsciousness of any idea that a newly born babe is as 
 such subject to God’s wrath or stained with any kind of 
 ‘sin.’ + Gregory's humane and reasonable suggestion of 
 some state analogous to what was later called the limbus 
 puerorum, as the solution of this problem,? stands in the 
 most vivid contrast to the heartless fanaticism with which 
 Augustine condemns unbaptised little ones to eternal fire, 
 and is the surest warrant that he was completely out of 
 sympathy with the theory which impelled the Doctor of 
 Hippo to this gruesome conclusion. It is, indeed, remark- 
 able that (for all his devotion to Origen) Gregory seems to 
 ignore the custom of infant baptism with the theories which 
 had grown out of it, and to maintain the primitive point of 
 view according to which the normal recipients of baptism 
 are adults, and the sins which are forgiven through the 
 sacrament are the actual sins committed by the neophytes 
 in their past lives. The only work dealing at any length 
 with the theology of baptism which Gregory has bequeathed 
 to us declares that the new-made Christian ascending from 
 the baptismal font is as free from accusations and penalites 
 as the new-born babe >—a statement which is a formal 
 
 1 Note the first appearance of a sixth ‘ crucial issue,’ which will in our 
 subsequent discussions have to be considered together with the five defined 
 at the beginning of Lecture 1V—namely, the eschatological issue, ‘ What is 
 the future fate of those who die subject to the consequences of the Fall, 
 without having in this life consciously obtained redemption through 
 Christ and in His Church ?’ 
 
 2 This view is developed in a rhetorical and elusive passage too long 
 to quote (op. cit., PG XLVI. 177 A-180 D), the gist of which is that the 
 soul of an infant who has died before attaining the age of reason will enjoy 
 a beatitude proportionate to its capacities, very much less than that to 
 which the adult saint may look forward, but nevertheless true beatitude ; 
 it is suggested that such child-spirits may progressively grow in the know- 
 ledge of God until they eventually attain to full mental and spiritual 
 maturity. 
 
 * For references v. infra, Lecture V, p. 377, n. 1. 
 
 4 Gregory does not condemn even hardened adult sinners (much less 
 innocent babes) to never-ending hell ; for his usual teaching makes ‘ hell’ 
 merely a temporary purgatory, which will end in the universal droxatdoraas 
 or restoration in which he had learned from Origen to believe ; see Barden- 
 hewer, Patrology, p. 303 f. 
 
 5 in baptism. Christi (PG XLVI. 579 D): os yap ro evOdToKov madiov 
 eAcvbepov eotw éyKAnudtav Kal TyLwpidv, oUTwWS Kal 6 THS avayervicews mais 
 ovK Exet mepi Tivos amoAoynHaerat, Bacwixh Swped Tadv evdvrav aPpeleis. 
 
280 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 contradiction of the doctrine of ‘ Original Guilt,’ and 
 may even be thought to undermine the necessity of infant 
 baptism itself. 
 
 (4) Although Gregory nowhere attempts an explicit 
 definition of the manner in which the ‘ weakness’ or ‘ ail- 
 ment’ of human nature is transmitted from generation to 
 generation, we may conclude with reasonable certainty that 
 Gregory regarded the transmission as taking place by way 
 of biological, and not merely of ‘social,’ heredity. This 
 conclusion would seem to be an inevitable inference from 
 the use of the first person plural in verbs referring to the 
 Fall (an idiom which, as in previous writers, betrays the 
 subconscious influence of the idea of ‘ recapitulation ’), from 
 Gregory’s ‘traducianist’ conception of the origin of the soul, } 
 and from the phrases which declare sin, or the impulse to 
 sin, to be knit up with man’s constitution, especially with 
 his bodily constitution.? It is indirectly confirmed by the 
 statement, apparently based upon a suggestion of Methodius, 
 that man was made subject to physical death in order that 
 his spiritual nature might be freed from inherent sinfulness 
 and become capable of receiving the resurrection body, just 
 as an earthenware vessel into which some malicious person 
 has poured molten lead must be broken up before the alien 
 matter can be removed and the fragments recompounded 
 into a new vessel. We may glance in passing at the curious 
 fancy that the multiplicity of mankind is itself an evil, and 
 that it would have been better if the archetypal man had 
 continued to subsist in his pure intellectual unity and 
 uniqueness °; this, however, is an irrelevant piece of un- 
 
 1 de hom. opif. 29 (PG XLIV. 233 D ff.). 
 
 2 e.g. ov. cat. 35 (Sr. p. 134, 15): dv adv éxdveral mws 6 avOpwmos THs 
 m™pos TO Kakov ovupdvias: de vita Moysis (PG XLIV. 336): <zov 
 KUpLov> Tov THY GuapTHTLKHY Hudv dvow TeptBadAdpevov: ibid. (756): 6 Kowwvdv 
 THs pvoews TOb Adap, kowwvadv b€ kal THs exmtTdaews: in ps. (PG XLIV. 
 609) : 7) Gwapria 7 cuvarroTiKTopern TH dvoer. For the connexion of con- 
 genital wickedness with the body, v. supra, p. 276, n. 2. 
 
 C) USSUPTA, Di 252 Tas. 
 
 $vorviicaine (Sricp. 44919): 
 
 5 Such is the apparent implication of a sentence in de an. et vesurr. 
 (PG XLVI. 157 A): 6 yap mp&ros ordxvs 6 mpatos avOpwros Fv "Addy 
 (Gregory is fancifully embroidering upon St. Paul’s comparison of the 
 
 resurrection of the body to the growth of corn from the seed, in 1 Cor. xv). 
 GAN everd) TH TAS Kakias claddm eis TARIOS H Pdats KaTepeplao4y 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 281 
 
 digested neo-Platonism, which bears no organic relation to 
 Gregory’s other speculations upon evil in man. 
 
 (5) The resulting state of human nature, infected as it 
 is by ‘ weakness’ and the ‘impulse to sin,’ is one of dis- 
 integration and destruction. Yet, though the objective 
 and ex opere operato aspects of Redemption, and, by impli- 
 cation, the presupposed need and helplessness of man, are 
 brought into strong relief by the vividly realistic conception 
 of ‘ deification’’ through the Eucharist, in which Gregory’s 
 soteriology culminates, no diminution is admitted in the 
 fullness of man’s endowment of free-will. Whatever the 
 strength of our innate propension towards evil, it is not so 
 strong that we cannot overcome it if we choose ; whatever 
 the power of sacramental grace, it does not dispense us from 
 the necessity of spiritual effort in order to its fruitful 
 appropriation. 
 
 We may conclude this review of Gregory’s speculations 
 about human nature and congenital sinfulness by drawing 
 attention to the tentative and provisional character which 
 he expressly attributes to them. ‘Some such explanation 
 as the following have we received from the Fathers ’ 1—“‘ we, 
 imagining the truth as far as we can by means of conjectures 
 and similitudes, do not set forth that which occurs to our 
 mind authoritatively, but will place it in the form of a 
 theoretical exercise before our kindly hearers’ *?—‘ here, 
 again, the true answer, whatever it may be, can be clear 
 to those only who, like Paul, have been initiated into the 
 mysteries of Paradise; but ourv answer is as follows’? 
 
 
 
 x. tT. A. The idea that multiplicity as such is evil appears in Plotinus, 
 Enn. vi.6,1: Gp’ €ore 70 7AHV0s andaracts Tob Evds, Kal 4 ameElpia amdoTaAcLS 
 mavtTeAns TH 7TARVos avdpiOpov elvar, Kal dua TobTO KaKov 7 amretpia Kal ypeis 
 Kaxol, orav mANOos ; 
 
 1 ov. cat. 6 (Sr. p. 28, 15): Tovotrdv twa Adyov mapa tTav maTrépwr 
 dvedeEdueOa: this formula reminds us of the phrase with which Plato’s 
 Critias introduces the Myth of Atlantis—éeyw dpdow madadv axnxows Adyov 
 ov véov avopds (Timaeus, 21 A). 
 
 2 de hom. opif. 16 (PG XLIV. 185 A): pets Sé, nabds é€ore Suvaror, 
 dua oToxaopav Tivwv Kal eikovwv davtacbevtes THY aAnOevav, TO Emi vobv €ADov 
 ovuK amodavTikas exTiOépeba, GAN’ ws ev yupvacias etder Tots edyvmpoor TaY 
 aKkpowpevwy mpoobjcoper. 
 
 8 ibid. 17 (PG XLIV. 188 B): aAd ev rovtos wddw 6 pH adndijs Adyos, 
 cotis moTe My TUyXavEL, Lovous GV Ein SHAos Tots Kata IIabAov Ta TOb mapadeicov 
 
 47 >e 
 
 punOetow amoppnta’ 6 dé yyeTEpos TOLObTEs €oTLY. 
 
282 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 —these are the formulae with which he introduces the subtle 
 though unsystematised ideas which have been summarised 
 above. The Adam-tradition exists, and he admits its 
 general claim upon his allegiance; but the philosopher’s 
 stone of allegorism enables him to transmute its pictorial 
 details into metaphysical or psychological concepts, and 
 he uses this power with great freedom. It is clear that 
 there is as yet no question of a stereotyped ecclesiastical 
 dogma. 
 
 (6) St. Gregory of Nazianzus (b. A.D. 329, d. c. 390). 
 Before we finally leave the field of unsystematised and 
 incoherent speculations presented by the writings of the 
 Greek Fathers, and turn to the swift, consistent, and logical 
 development of the ‘ African’ or Western version of the 
 Fall-doctrine, the third remaining doctor of the Cappadocian 
 group claims our attention—Gregory of Nazianzus, ‘ the 
 Theologian’ far excellence as Eastern Christendom has 
 loved to style him, and the intimate friend of the brothers 
 Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, whose thoughts with regard 
 to the origin and ground of sin have just been reviewed. 
 Like his predecessors, this Father has bequeathed to us 
 no single treatise dealing with the subject of our enquiry, 
 and his ideas about the Fall and its consequences have 
 to be gathered from incidental allusions scattered through 
 works dealing with other doctrinal questions. It cannot 
 be claimed that his doctrine exhibits any advance upon 
 that of his two friends, in respect either of definition or 
 of synthesisation; its interest lies partly in the testi- 
 mony which it bears to the existence and solidity of a 
 ‘“once-born’ and non-Western type of Fall-theory, or 
 Fall-speculation, during the last pre-Augustinian century, 
 and partly in its employment as a spear-head, not so 
 much against theological dualism (its traditional foe) as, 
 in the more restricted area of Christology, against the 
 Apollinarian tenet of the imperfection or incompleteness 
 of the Lord’s human nature. This peculiar Christological 
 bearing imposed by Gregory upon the Fall-doctrine will 
 be explained in the course of our survey of his allusions 
 to the doctrine—a survey which may follow the familiar 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 283 
 
 land-marks of the ‘ five crucial issues,’ or such of them as 
 emerge in his writings.? 
 
 A convenient starting-point for our study of this Father’s 
 opinions on the subject of our enquiry is provided by a 
 passage occurring in the last of his sermons, preached, after 
 his retirement from the see of Constantinople, at the village 
 of Arianzus, one Easter Day not long before his death.? 
 The purpose of this discourse is to glorify the Resurrection 
 of Christ by exhibiting it in its context, as a supreme 
 moment in the whole process of God’s dealings with His 
 universe and with man. The first portion of it, therefore, 
 is devoted to the topics of Creation and the Fall. The 
 preacher distinguishes sharply between the creation of the 
 ‘intelligible world,’ the world, that is, of Platonic Ideas or 
 eternal values, and that of the ‘sensible’ or phenomenal 
 world. He continues : 
 
 Mind, then, and sense, thus distinguished from each other, 
 had remained within their own boundaries, and bore in them- 
 selves the magnificence of the Creator-Word, silent praisers and 
 thrilling heralds of His mighty work. Not yet was there any 
 mingling of both, nor any mixture of these opposites, tokens of a 
 greater wisdom and generosity in the creation of natures; nor 
 as yet were the whole riches of goodness made known. Now the 
 Creator-Word, determining to exhibit this, and to produce a 
 single living being out of both (the invisible and visible natures, 
 I mean), fashions Man; and taking the body from already 
 existing matter, and placing in it a Breath taken from Himself 
 (which the Word knew to be an intelligent soul, and the image 
 of God), He placed him on the earth as a sort of second world, 
 a microcosm,? a new Angel, a mingled worshipper, fully initiated 
 into the mysteries of the visible creation, but only partially 
 into those of the intelligible creation *—king of all upon earth, 
 but subject to the King above ; earthly and heavenly ; temporal 
 and yet immortal ; visible and yet intelligible ; midway between 
 greatness and lowliness; in one person combining spirit and 
 
 1 Quotations are taken from the Paris edition of 1840, ‘ post operam 
 et studium monachorum O.S.B. e congreg. 5S. Mauri’ ; references to the 
 volume and page of this are given in brackets. 
 
 2 ov. xlv. (i. 845) in sanctum Pascha. ‘The Benedictine editor dates 
 this Oration c. A.D. 385. 
 
 8 ofdv twa Kdopmov ETepov, ev puxp@ peyav. The idea may have been 
 suggested by the account of the creation of man in Plato’s Timaeus. 
 
 4 endntyy THs Oparis Kticews, wvoTnv THs voouperys. 
 
284 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 flesh, spirit because of God’s favour, flesh because of his exalta- 
 tion . . . a living creature, governed by God’s providence here, 
 but in process of translation to another sphere, and—to crown 
 the mystery—in process of being deified through its natural 
 inclination towards God! ... 
 
 Him [that is, Man] God placed in Paradise—whatever that 
 Paradise may have been 2—having honoured him with the gift 
 of free-will, in order that good might belong to him as the result 
 of his choice, no less than to Him Who had provided the seeds 
 thereof, as a husbandman of immortal plants, that is, perhaps, of 
 Divine concepts, both the simpler and the more perfect —naked in 
 his simplicity and in his inartificial way of life, and devoid of any 
 covering or defence ; for such it was fitting that the original 
 man should be... Now the Tree [of Knowledge] was Con- 
 templation * (as I see the matter), which can be safely climbed 
 only by those who are of a more perfect and settled character ; 
 but it is not good for those who are simple-minded and of a 
 somewhat greedy appetite, just as perfect (7.e. solid) nourishment 
 is not profitable for those who are yet tender and stand in need 
 of milk. But when by the envy of the devil and the caprice 
 of the woman (that caprice which she both suffered, as being 
 the more tender, and inspired<into the man>, as being the 
 more persuasive)—alas for my weakness! for that of my first 
 father 1s mine °>—he forgot the commandment which had been 
 given to him, and was worsted by the baneful taste; and for 
 his wickedness was banished at once from the Tree of Life, from 
 Paradise, and from God, and was clothed with the coats of skins, 
 
 1 lHov evrabba oixovopovpevov, Kat dAdaxod peOordpevov, Kal, wépas Tob 
 pvotnplov, TH mpos Gedv vevoer Geovpevov. 
 
 2 Garis mote hv 6 Tapadevaos odTOs. 
 
 3 dutdv abavdtwv yewpyov, Jeiwy évvordy tows, THv Te GTAOVOTEpwY Kal THY 
 TEAEWTEPwY, 
 
 The comparison between ideas and growing plants is one which seems 
 naturally to suggest itself to the mystical genius; cf. Keats, Ode to 
 Psyche : 
 
 ‘ Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane 
 In some untrodden region of my mind, 
 Where branchéd thoughts, new-grown with pleasant pain, 
 Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind’ ; 
 and Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven: 
 
 “ And now my heart is as a broken fount, 
 Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever 
 From the dank thoughts that shiver 
 Upon the sighful branches of my mind.’ 
 4 Oewpia yap hv TO putov. 
 
 5 ded ris euts aobeveias’ eu yap 7 Tod mpomaropos (a phrase which 
 contains a suggestion of ‘ Original Guilt’; v. infra, p. 289, n. 2). 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH) 285 
 
 that 1s, perhaps, the coarser kind of flesh, which is both mortal 
 and impatient of control.” 
 
 A cursory survey of this passage will show that in it our 
 author raises the first of the ‘ cardinal issues,’ that of the 
 allegorical as opposed to the literal interpretation of the 
 Scriptural narrative. Closer investigation, however, reveals 
 the fact that this first issue is not presented to the reader 
 in clear-cut isolation, but is intertwined with the second— 
 namely, the question of the original state of man. At first 
 sight, a single consistent scheme of ideas, based upon an 
 allegorical exegesis, and displaying clearly marked affinities 
 with Origen’s later or ‘ Caesarean’ presentation of the Fall- 
 doctrine, seems to run through the passage. The expression 
 “whatever that Paradise may have been’ suggests that the 
 ‘garden ’ is not to be interpreted as a literal plot of ground, 
 but as an exalted state? ; and, in view of the sublimation 
 of the flowers of Eden into ‘ Divine concepts,’ this state can 
 hardly be other than a transcendental state of existence on 
 the plane of the intelligible world. With such an interpre- 
 tation of the Paradise-story coheres the ascription of super- 
 human and angelic prerogatives to the primal man, and 
 the allegorisation of the Tree of Knowledge as ‘ contempla- 
 tion’; though it is to be noticed that Gregory seems here 
 to have introduced an ingenious variant into the Origenian 
 scheme (doubtless in order to make type and antitype 
 correspond more exactly), representing the first sin as 
 consisting, not in man’s turning away through ‘ satiety ’ 
 from privileges of contemplation which he already possessed, 
 but in his premature grasping at privileges which he did not 
 possess and for which he was, even in his primitive glory, 
 not sufficiently prepared. The explanation of the ‘ coats 
 of skins’ given here is in a general sense cognate with the 
 
 1 rods Seppativous audievvuTa yitavas, laws TY TmaxvTépav odpKa: Cf. 
 carmen de anima 115 (il. p. 248) : 
 
 Sepparivous dé xiTa&vas Edéacaro odpxa Bapetay 
 vexpodopos. 
 
 2 op. cit. 7, 8 (slightly abbreviated). The translation given above is 
 largely based on that of C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow (Select Library 
 of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1894). I have italicised phrases of 
 special doctrinal interest. 
 
 3 Cf. carmen de anima, 105 (ii. p. 246): 
 
 fw 5” odpavin wéAerar mapddevoos Eporye. 
 
286 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 explanations given by Origen and Gregory of Nyssa ; though 
 the Nazianzene’s statement that these garments may sym- 
 bolise ‘ a coarser flesh ’ implies that unfallen man possessed 
 flesh of some kind, presumably of a more subtle, tenuous, 
 or ethereal consistency. 
 
 Nevertheless, the three notable allegorisations to which 
 we have drawn attention (of the plants of Paradise, the 
 Tree of Knowledge, and the ‘ coats of skins ’) are introduced 
 with expressions of hesitancy (‘ perhaps’ and ‘as I see the 
 matter’); and there are other statements which seem to 
 presuppose a more literal view of the Scriptural narrative. 
 We are told that man was placed ‘on the earth,’ though 
 ‘in process of translation to another sphere’; that he was 
 only ‘ partially initiated’ into the mysteries of the ideal 
 world ; that he was naked of covering and defence, and led 
 a simple and artless life. Mention is, moreover, made of 
 the detail of his temptation by the woman. All this is 
 strongly reminiscent of the earliest Greek presentation of 
 the Fall-theory, as we found it in Tatian, Theophilus, and 
 Irenaeus, according to which man as originally created was 
 a ‘ babe,’ ‘ capable of either good or evil,’ but possessed of 
 a ‘starting-point for progress.’ The conclusion to which 
 we seem to be driven is that Gregory’s thoughts on this 
 subject represent a purely mechanical and inconsistent 
 juxtaposition of the earlier pre-Origenian, and of the later 
 or post-Origenian tendencies of Hellenic Fall-speculation— 
 of the primitive theory which views the first sin as the failure 
 of an infantile being to pursue the upward course of develop- 
 ment which God had marked out for him, and of the later 
 conception, which vaguely emerges during the fourth 
 century, of an archetypal man or collective race-spirit who 
 falls from an exalted, possibly a metaphysical, Paradise. 
 It should be noted, however, that Gregory Nazianzen, like 
 all the great Greek Fathers of the fourth and succeeding 
 centuries, unequivocally condemns Origen’s first or 
 ‘ Alexandrine ’ view, that of the pre-natal life and sin of the 
 individual soul? ; and few candid students will fail to be 
 
 1 Cf. p. 271 ff. (Gregory of Nyssa). 
 2 Or, XXXVii. 15 (i. p. 655). The name of Origen is not mentioned, but 
 the theory is condemned as Aiav Gromop Kal obK ExxAnavaoTiKdr. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH = 287 
 
 impressed by the instinctive repulsion with which the under- 
 lying mind of the Christian society rejected a theory which 
 was felt to be an infiltration from alien sources, despite the 
 extreme fluidity and indeterminateness of its own Adamic 
 tradition. 
 
 Gregory's language with regard to the third issue, that 
 of the precise nature of the sorrowful legacy of the Fall, 
 is tantalisingly vague. We are told that as the result of 
 Adam’s transgression mankind has become subject to a 
 ‘newly sown curse,’ ! to death, to sin, to a “ heavy yoke ’ of 
 toil and trouble 2 ; but, for the most part, no effort is made 
 to define the undesirable thing, quality, or status, of which 
 trouble, death, and sin are the symptoms. There seems to 
 be only one passage which gives us even a momentary 
 glimpse into his real mind with regard to this point; it 
 occurs in the poem entitled A sorrowful song on the calamities 
 of hits own soul, and forms the conclusion of a lamentation 
 over the internal conflict between reason and appetite which 
 torments the author—a lamentation which may be described 
 as the substance of Rom. vii. 7-24 hammered out into 
 somewhat pedestrian elegiac couplets. We will venture 
 upon the following metrical rendering : 
 
 Often our earth owns the sway of the Mind: yet, captive 
 unwilling, 
 Often the Mind in its turn follows the might of the Flesh. 
 Yea, though it yearn for the good, it accomplisheth that which 
 it hateth, 
 Mourning its direful fate, held in calamitous thrall, 
 Mourning our ancient father’s offence, and the sin of our mother, 
 Word that she spake in guile, mother of frenzy distraught : 
 Mourning the impious lie of the crooked bloodthirsty serpent, 
 Who in the crimes of men taketh his fiendish delight ; 
 Mourning the fatal Tree, and the fruit bringing ruin to mortals, 
 Taste whereof setteth man e’en fore the gates of the grave, 
 
 1 carmina, i. (poemata theologica), sect. i. 8 (de anima), line 128 f. 
 (ii. p. 248) : 
 toin mpwroydvoto vedamopos HAvOev arn 
 devAotow pepdmecow, d0ev ordyus €BAdatyoe. 
 2 ibid. ii. (poemata historica), sect. ii. 1 (ad Hellenium), line 345 f. 
 (ii. p. 1014) : 
 ovx dArts, orte Bporotor Bapdv Cuydv Ayaye mparn 
 apxeyovov Kaxin, Kal dutov avdpoddvor ; 
 
288 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Nakedness shameful of limbs, and banishment dreary from 
 Eden, 
 Far from the Tree of Life, heaping dishonour on loss.} 
 
 It is clear that our author here conceives the Fall to be 
 the historical cause of the moral struggle within himself ; 
 in other words, that the legacy of the Fall is to be identified 
 with inordinate or hypertrophied appetite, as indeed St. Paul 
 had already taught by implication in the chapter which is 
 the basis of these lines. But the term ‘ hypertrophied,’ as 
 applied to appetite, must necessarily be relative to some 
 norm or standard, and the ‘normal’ amount of appetite 
 must, presumably, be that which is capable of being con- 
 trolled by the will. ‘Hypertrophy of appetite’ is thus 
 merely a synonym for ‘atrophy of will’; the phrases 
 represent different aspects of the same psychic fact, as 
 ‘convex ’ and ‘ concave’ represent different aspects of the 
 same geometric fact. We may therefore claim that the 
 underlying conception revealed in these lines is that of the 
 inherent infirmity of human nature as consisting in “ con- 
 genital weakness of will’—the same conception which 
 Methodius and Athanasius had endeavoured to express 
 under the figure of metaphysical ‘ disintegration.’ 
 
 Did Gregory hold the theory of ‘ Original Guilt’? 
 Certain phrases occurring in his works seem at first sight to 
 imply that he did. These phrases include some very definite 
 and forcible assertions of our unity and solidarity with the 
 Adam who fell: typical of them is the following : 
 
 1 carmina, li. (poemata historica), sect. i. 45, lines 95-107 (il. p. 922) : 
 GdAXoTte pev Te vow xods Sduvarar' adAdote 8 adte 
 oapKl voos KpaTteph EomreTar ovK €Oédwy. 
 GAAa 7d prev mobeer, Td ye BéATEpov' 46 atvyéer Sé 
 Epdwv, SovAoov’ynv pvpeTrar apyadenv, 
 maTpos T apxeydvoto mAdvynv, Kal untpos adAtTpHy 
 mappacw, NMETEpNS NTEpa papyoovns, 
 Kal oxoAoto SpaKxovtos atdabaXov aipoBdporo 
 weddos, 6s avOpmrwv Tépmerar autAakias, 
 Kal Evrov, 76€ dutotio Bpotav SynAjpova Kapmov 
 yedoiy 7 odrAopevnv, Kai POavdro.o mvAas, 
 yUpvwow perewv te mavaicyea, Kal mapadeicou 
 75€ putot Cwis pibw dripotarny. 
 It may perhaps be claimed for the versions of Gregory’s lines given in the 
 text that they are not more prosaic than the originals. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 289 
 
 <Through the sufferings of Christ> we were re-created, not 
 an individual here and there, but all of us who partook of the same 
 Adam, who were deceived by the serpent, were slain by sin, were 
 saved once more by the heavenly Adam, and by the Tree of 
 shame were brought back to the Tree of Life, from whence we 
 have fallen.? 
 
 Together with this may be grouped many other instances of 
 the use of the first person plural (‘ we’) and even of the first 
 person singular (‘ I’) 2—in verbs expressing the idea of the 
 primal sin. The impression created by these turns of 
 phraseology, that Gregory was at least inclined to play 
 with the idea of ‘ Original Guilt,’ is to a certain extent 
 reinforced by passages which speak of the human race as 
 ‘condemned’ for Adam’s fault. But against these 
 references we must set his treatment of infant baptism, any 
 consideration of which must always force the question of the 
 reality of ‘ Original Guilt’ to the front: the crucial passage 
 is, again, to be found in one of his poetical compositions. 
 He tells us that God has provided many helps for our fickle 
 and wayward nature : 
 
 Whereof the Laver is one, fount of grace ; for, e’enas the Hebrew 
 
 Children escaped the destroyer, by virtue of blood’s dread 
 anointing 
 
 Cleansing the posts of the doors, what time all the first-born of 
 Egypt 
 
 Fell in the self-same night of alarm, so also meseemeth 
 
 1 OY. XXXili. 9 (i. p. 609): adta ra ypiorod 7aOn, du” Ov aveTrAdoOnpev, odx 
 6 pev, 6 8 ov, mavtes Sێ of Tod adrod "Adam petacydvtes, Kal bm Tot 6dews 
 mapadoy.obevtes, Kal TH apaptia Oavatwhévtes, Kat dia TOD emovpaviov "Adayu 
 avaowévres, Kal mpos To EvAov THs Cwhs éemavaybevtes, 81a Tod EvVAov THs 
 atupias, ev dmomeTTwKapev. 
 
 2 e.g. OY. X1X. 14 (i. p. 372),a paragraph in which every sentence contains 
 thisidiom ; ov. xxii. 13 (i. p. 422): éeyphv yap, émerd7 Oedrns Wvwrat, Svatpetobas 
 THY avOpwrdTnTa, Kal mept TOV vody avonTtaivew Tods TaAAa addous, Kal 7 6Aov 
 pe aodlecfa, dAov mtaicavta Kal Kataxpibévra ex THS TOO mpwromAdoTov 
 mapakons (a piece of anti-Apollinarian sarcasm; v. infra, p.291 f); ov. xlv. 8 
 (i. p. 851) : ded THs eufis aobevelas’ eur yap 4 Too mpomdropos (quoted above, 
 p. 284, n. 5); ib7d.9 (i. p. 852): petéAaBov ris efkdvos (sc. Tob Geob) Kat ovK 
 epvAata: ibid. 12 (i. p. 854) : meadvras Huds ex THs auaptias TO am apy%s. 
 
 3 e.g. OY. XXXvii. 4 (i. p. 665): Kal ef  yeBous KaTEKpLVE, TOOW UGAXov 
 TO xptorov mabeiy edixaiwoev: and or. Xxxix. 13 (i. p. 685) : <lva> ovrws 6 véos 
 "Add tov madav avacdonta, Kat AvOG TO KaTaKpLLA THS oapKos. 
 Notice also the word xaraxpiOévra in or. xxii. 13 (quoted above). 
 
 U 
 
290 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Here is the Seal of God our defender, for innocent infants 
 Only a Seal, but for grown men a Seal and a Remedy 
 potent.+ 
 
 The significance of the last two lines will be translucently 
 clear, and doubtless, to those who have been accustomed 
 to assume that Augustinianism is Catholicism, somewhat 
 startling: for the poet draws a sharp distinction between 
 the effects of Adult and those of Infant Baptism, affirming 
 the former to include both dedication to God and remission 
 of sin, but the latter to consist in dedication only—which is 
 precisely the position maintained by the Pelagians in the 
 next century.2_ Evidently our author knows nothing of the 
 idea that newly born babes are, simply in virtue of their 
 human nature, born guilty of the sin of Adam. This con- 
 clusion is reinforced by the fact that, like his friend and 
 namesake of Nyssa,? he decides the ‘ eschatological issue ’ 
 (which, as we have seen, was now beginning to emerge) by 
 means of the hypothesis of Limbo *—another idea which was 
 advocated by the Pelagians, and as strenuously denounced 
 by the Africans.® It will therefore be safest to assume 
 (as in the case of Athanasius, Basil, and Gregory of Nyssa) 
 that the phrases mentioned above, which identify ‘ us’ 
 
 1 caymina, i. (poemata theologica), sect. i. 9 (de testamentis et adventu 
 
 Christt), lines 87-92 (ii. p. 252) : 
 
 av é&v Kal Noetpoto Bpotots ydpis* ws yap dA€eOpov 
 
 ‘EBpaiwy moré maides bréxpuyov aipate ypioTa, 
 
 TO Aids exdOnpev, 67 dArETO Tpwroyéeve Aros 
 
 Aiyvmrov yeven vuKtl pif, Os Kal Emouye 
 
 adpnyis ade~txdxoro Beod 7d8€, vnmiadyots pev 
 
 od¢pnyis, de€opévorce 8’ adkos Kai odpnyis apioryn. 
 (I do not understand the lengthening of the last syllable of vuxri in 
 line 90, but give the line as it stands in the Paris edition.) 
 
 2 v. infra, Lecture V, p. 345. 
 
 3 vu. supra, p. 279. 
 
 4 or. xl. 23 (i. p. 708): rods dé (that is, those who have not been able 
 to receive baptism 61a vymidrnra—this implies that there were still 
 some parts of the Church where paedobaptism was unknown—or through 
 some other involuntary cause) pyre dofacOjcecbar pjnre KoAacbjcecbar mapa 
 Tod duxaiov KpiTod, ws doppaylorous ev atovipous Sé, dAAa wabdvras paAdov 
 thy Cnpiav (1.e. the lack of baptism) 7 dpdcavras. 08d yap darts od KoAdcews 
 agévos, 45n Kal Tynfs’ Womep obd€ Gots od Timfs, 7Sn Kal KoAdcews. I use 
 the term Limbo in the text as a convenient anachronism for expressing the 
 idea of a future state which is one neither of punishment nor of glory. 
 
 5 vw. infra; Lecture, V} p.348,2D. 2. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 2o1 
 
 with Adam, are no more than highly rhetorical assertions 
 of the theory of ‘ Recapitulation.’ It will have become clear 
 in the course of our review that the idea of ‘ Original 
 Guilt "—if considered in abstraction from its psychological 
 grounds in the self-condemnation of the ‘ twice-born’ saint 
 or converted rake—may be said to have two main logical 
 antecedents, namely, the conception of ‘ Recapitulation ’ 
 (which, if pressed, easily converts itself into ‘ seminal 
 identity ’), and the belief that baptism is always ‘ for the 
 remission of sins,’ even when administered to unconscious 
 infants. But we have seen that Gregory did not hold the 
 latter view: and, if allowance be made for the vivid modes 
 of expression natural to an Asian orator, there will be no 
 reason for supposing that he had in his own mind pressed 
 the former to its logical conclusion. 
 
 Gregory, then, though not a believer in ‘ Original Guilt,’ 
 is an enthusiastic ‘ recapitulationist.’ In the light of this 
 fact his opinions with regard to the fourth and fifth of 
 the cardinal issues become easily intelligible. The means 
 whereby ‘ weakness of will’ is transmitted cannot, for a 
 believer in ‘ Recapitulation,’ be anything other than physio- 
 logical heredity.1. And his characteristic opinion with 
 regard to the present state of human nature is this—that 
 man’s intellect (vots), as well as his will, emotions, and 
 physical constitution, has suffered deterioration through the 
 Fall. It is here that he brings the Fall-doctrine to bear 
 upon the Apollinarian controversy. Adam sinned with his 
 mind first of all, in that he mentally denied the supreme 
 claim of God’s command upon his loyalty and obedience. 
 Hence, in virtue of Adam’s ‘ recapitulation’ of humanity 
 within himself, the human mind as such became in some 
 undefined manner subject to the consequences of the Fall. 
 Gregory never faces the question, What precisely are the 
 consequences of the Fall in the purely mental sphere? 
 but we may suppose that he means in a general sense error 
 and delusion. In order, therefore, that man as a whole 
 might be redeemed, it was necessary that the Saviour should 
 assume human intellectual faculties together with the rest 
 
 LOY euLOos 
 
292 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of man’s nature! ; ‘ for that which was not assumed could 
 not have been healed.’ 2 
 
 We need only point out, without commenting upon, the 
 fact that the conception of redemption here pre-supposed 
 appears, as in the writings of Athanasius and Gregory of 
 Nyssa, to be that of union with the Incarnate Logos, and 
 ultimate ‘ deification,’ through sacramental reception of 
 Him in the Eucharist. This is not, indeed, expressly stated : 
 but it is difficult, if not impossible, to see how the assumption 
 by the Logos of a human vois could have the effect of 
 Redeeming the vots of mankind in general, unless the final 
 ‘recapitulation’ of our race in Christ is conceived as con- 
 summated through the sacramental incorporation of its 
 wayward and sinful individuals into Him. It may, indeed, 
 be said that healing and sanctification through sacraments 
 constitute the goal to which the medical way of conceiving 
 ‘innate sinfulness’ favoured by Greek thought naturally 
 leads, just as juridical absolution and ‘ justification ’ are the 
 end which the forensic conception more congenial to the 
 Latin mind presupposes. 
 
 iL HEP DEVI STARIGHTS : 
 
 If Gregory of Nazianzus died in A.D. 390, as seems most 
 probable, the end of his life may be regarded as roughly 
 synchronising with the beginning of Augustine’s Christian 
 career ° ; so that the consideration of his writings forms the 
 natural terminus ad quem for the present section of our 
 enquiry. We may appropriately pause at this point, before 
 taking up the thread of the ‘African’ or ‘ twice-born’ 
 development of the Fall-tradition, to explain our deliberate 
 
 1 The classical passages for this anti-Apollinarian use of the Fall- 
 doctrine are to be found in the two Epistles to Cledonius, epp. ci., cil. 
 (ii. p. 83 ff) ; cf. also ov. xxii. 13 (i. p. 422), a partof which is quoted above 
 (p. 289, n. 2), and carmen de se ipso, line 167 ff. (ii. p. 874) : réuvovar 8’, ws 
 fedv ov, Kat Beot péyay Bporov (i.e. ‘ exalted humanity’) dvow tibévtes, 
 ws dvov "Adam memtwkoros. 
 
 2 ep. ci. (ii. p. 87): 76 yap ampdcdrnmrov, abepdmevtov’ 6 Sé Hrwra TO 
 6G, rodro Kai owerar: a celebrated epigram which Tixeront (op. cit. ii. 
 p. 115) justly describes as a ‘ sentence lapidaire.’ 
 
 3 Augustine was baptised in A.D. 387. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 203 
 
 omission of any mention of a theory which may well appear 
 at first sight to form an integral part of the subject-matter 
 of our research, and which exercised a powerful influence 
 over Christian soteriology for a thousand years—the theory, 
 namely, that by virtue of Adam’s sin the Devil acquired 
 legal or quasi-legal rights of property over mankind, rights 
 which the justice of God forbade Him to disregard and which 
 consequently had to be bought out in some way or other. 
 On this was founded the popular view of the Atonement, 
 which saw in the death of Christ the payment of His life as 
 a “ransom’ to the Devil, designed to induce the latter to 
 surrender his commercially conceived interest in the posses- 
 sion of human souls. The soteriological scheme so consti- 
 tuted can claim the support of many illustrious teachers, 
 belonging both to Eastern and to Western Christendom, 
 amongst whom may be enumerated Irenaeus (its apparent 
 originator *), Origen (though he may not have regarded it as 
 much more than an elaborate metaphor), Basil, Gregory of 
 Nyssa, Tertullian, Augustine; though sturdy protests were 
 raised against it by the otherwise unknown author Adei- 
 mantius, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John of Damascus.? 
 We have left this once popular theory on one side—not 
 so much because of its bizarre and mythological nature, or 
 of the childishly immoral idea to which it gave birth, that 
 of a trick played by God upon the Devil in offering him 
 Christ’s Humanity as his prey without telling him that it 
 veiled the Godhead—nor yet because of the fact that 
 
 1 Detailed histories of the growth of this theory may be found in H. 
 Rashdall, The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology (1919), pp. 243 ff., 
 259, 303 ff., 311, 313, 332; J. Riviére, Le dogme de la rédemption, I. (Essat 
 d étude historique) (1905), cc. xxi-xxiv. See also A. Ritschl, Rechifertigung 
 und Verséhnung (1882),i. pp. 16-19, and A. Sabatier, La doctrine del expiation 
 et son Evolution historique (1903), p. 47 ff. 
 
 2 Rashdall (op. cit. p. 245) suggests that this theory may have been 
 derived by Irenaeus from the doctrine of Marcion. According to the latter 
 “it was because, by bringing about the death of Jesus, the God of the Jews 
 —the generally just but not benevolent Demiurge—had violated his own 
 laws, that it became just for the true and benevolent God to set man free 
 from the Demiurge.’ Rashdall adds ‘ Irenaeus simply substituted the 
 devil for the Demiurge.’ The dualistic affinities of the conception are in 
 any case obvious. 
 
 3 So Rashdall (p. 259, n. 1). 
 
 4 For references, see the works of Rashdall and Riviere, mentioned 
 above. 
 
294 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Anselm’s Cur Deus homo eventually drove it from the field 
 of Christian thought, so that, whether or not it was ever 
 believed ubique, it cannot even assert a claim to fulfil the 
 test of semper ; but rather because it is completely unknown 
 to the New Testament. Though our Lord speaks of men 
 as subject to the domination of evil spirits,| He gives no 
 countenance to the monstrous notion of the Devil’s ‘ rights’ ; 
 the power of Satan is always regarded by Him as a lawless 
 usurpation. Nor does He anywhere connect the beginnings 
 of such usurpation with the sin of Adam; if the simile of 
 the “house swept and garnished’ may be pressed, He 
 affirms them rather to be due to the folly or weakness of 
 the individual. The theory is merely a mistaken inference 
 from the use of the word ‘ ransom’ in Mark x. 45, and forms 
 an apt illustration of the dangers involved in riding a 
 metaphor to death. It is a parasite on, and not an organic 
 branch of, the genuine and Pauline Fall-tradition, only 
 deserving of notice in so far as its tenacious vigour is an 
 index of the vitality inherent in the trunk to which it clings ; 
 and we need not, therefore, complicate our history by taking 
 further account of it. | 
 
 (0) THE ‘ AFRICAN’ THEORY DOWN TO THE END OF 
 THE PRE-AUGUSTINIAN PERIOD 
 
 In accordance with the plan outlined above, our story 
 now returns to the West and to the third century A.D., 
 with the object of tracing the development of the more 
 severe or ‘ twice-born’ version of the Fall-doctrine, from 
 the ‘ point of bifurcation’ between the two presentations 
 of this doctrine marked by the writings of Tertullian and 
 Origen, down to the end of the pre-Augustinian period. 
 The writers whose opinions will claim attention in this 
 section of our narrative are Cyprian, Lactantius, Hilary of 
 Poitiers, Ambrose, and the anonymous commentator on the 
 Pauline Epistles known by the sobriquet of “ Ambrosiaster.’ 
 The evidence provided by the first three of these writers 
 may be summed up in a few sentences, whilst the last two 
 will require a somewhat more detailed treatment, in view 
 
 1 vy. supra, Lecture III, p. 110 f. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH = 295 
 
 of their position in time as the immediate precursors of 
 Augustine, and of the peculiar influence which they (in par- 
 ticular Ambrose, as the bishop who instructed and baptised 
 Augustine) appear to have exercised upon his thought. 
 
 (x) St. Cyprian (beheaded A.D. 258). The extant 
 writings of this illustrious prelate and martyr, the third + 
 great African lawyer to embrace Christianity, contain half 
 a dozen or so of references to Adam’s sin and its melancholy 
 consequences, which, whilst generally in accord with the 
 views of Tertullian, Cyprian’s ‘master,’ 2 add no fresh 
 developments to them. There is, however, one passage of 
 great significance, which represents the first explicit emer- 
 gence of the idea of ‘ Original Gwilt’ as the theoretical 
 justification of infant baptism. We have spoken above of 
 the stimulating influence exerted by this custom on the 
 growth of a doctrine of birth-sin or birth-pollution ? ; and 
 we have noted the fact that Tertullian’s elaboration of the 
 doctrine of ‘ seminal identity,’ on the basis of his ‘ tradu- 
 cianist ’ psychology, naturally pointed in the direction of a 
 theory of all Adam’s descendants as hereditarily invested 
 with the legal responsibility for his Fall, a responsibility 
 which to the mind of a juristic theologian might seem to 
 constitute the ‘pollution’ apparently presupposed by 
 infant baptism. But Tertullian, hecause of his dread of 
 increasing the possibility of ost-baptismal sin, strongly 
 objects to paedobaptism, and hence never explicitly 
 develops the idea of Original Guilt. Cyprian, disregarding 
 on this point the authority of ‘the Master,’ took a step 
 which has proved momentous for Western thought con- 
 cerning birth-sin and baptism when he wrote his fifty-sixth 
 Epistle, in the name of himself and of a Council of sixty-six 
 bishops, to a certain bishop Fidus, who had thought that 
 the baptism of an infant should be delayed until the eighth 
 day after its birth, on the analogy of the Jewish rule regarding 
 circumcision. Cyprian urges that, on the contrary, baptism 
 
 1 The first two were Minucius Felix and Tertullian. 
 
 2 Jerome tells us (de vivis ill. 53) that Cyprian used to spend some time 
 every day in reading the works of Tertullian, demanding the volume from 
 his secretary with the words ‘ da magistrum.’ 
 
 3 vu. supra, p. 220 ff. 
 
296 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 should be administered as soon as possible after birth ; the 
 passage of immediate interest for our purpose runs as follows : 
 
 Assuredly, if the remission of sins is given even to the worst 
 offenders and to those who have previously sinned much against 
 God, when afterwards they have believed, and if no one is for- 
 bidden the reception of baptism and of grace, how much more 
 ought an infant not to be forbidden, who being newly born has 
 committed no sin, save that being carnally born according to Adam 
 he has by as first birth contracted the infection of the ancient death ? 
 and, indeed, an infant approaches to receive the remission of 
 sins more easily through this very fact, that the sins which are 
 remitted unto him <in baptism> are not his own but another’s.+ 
 
 Here it is clearly taught (a) that to be carnally born as 
 a descendant of Adam involves participating in a hereditary 
 infection by sin, (0) that the sin in question, which is remitted 
 in baptism, is not the newly born’s own, but the sin of 
 ‘ another ’—that is, presumably, of Adam. The thought of 
 the passage is obviously confused, and oscillates illogically 
 between what we have called the medical and the forensic 
 ways of regarding sin 2; but such a confusion, as we shall 
 see, is inherent in the idea of Original Guilt. It is certainly 
 curious that the transgression of Adam, the guilt whereof is 
 said to be forgiven to infants in baptism, should be described 
 in the plural number as feccata ; but the phrase is no doubt 
 chosen in order to avoid admitting an essential difference 
 between the spiritual effects of infant baptism and of adult 
 baptism, both alike conveying the vemissa peccatorum ; and 
 if challenged on the point, Cyprian would doubtless have 
 contended, like Augustine later,? that Adam’s primal sin 
 
 1 ep. |xiv. (Hartel’s text, in Vienna Corpus Script. Eccl. Lat. Til. 2): 
 ‘porro autem si etiam gravissimis delictoribus et in Deum multum ante 
 peccantibus, cum postea crediderint, remissa peccatorum datur et a 
 baptismo adque (= atque) gratia nemo prohibetur, quanto magis pro- 
 hiberi non debet infans qui recens natus nihil peccavit, nisi quod secundum 
 Adam carnaliter natus contagium mortis antiquae prima nativitate con- 
 traxit, qui ad remissam peccatorum accipiendam hoc ipso facilius accedit 
 quod illi remittuntur non propria sed aliena peccata.’ This passage was 
 read out, with great rhetorical effect, by St. Augustine, in the anti-Pelagian 
 sermon preached by him on June 25, 413, in the‘ basilica Maiorum’ at 
 Carthage (serm. ccxciv. ; cf. de gestis Pel. 25). 
 
 2 Cf. pp. 133, 241. The passage quoted above almost, but not quite, 
 falls into the absurdity of alluding to the ‘ remission’ of an ‘ infection.’ 
 
 * See Lecture V, p..364. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 297 
 
 included within itself several distinct sins, such as pride, 
 greediness, disobedience, and others. 
 
 (2) Lactantius. Curiously enough, the fourth great 
 member of the African succession of jurists turned theo- 
 logians, Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (b. c. A.D. 250, 
 d. 325), represents, in regard to the development of Fall- 
 speculation, an abrupt reversion to an ultra-° Hellenic ’ and 
 “minimising ’ position comparable to that of the Alexandrine 
 Clement. This is, perhaps, the more surprising because 
 Lactantius appears to possess a good share of the fanati- 
 cism characteristic of the African Church, the general tone 
 of his treatise de mortibus persecutorum, in which he narrates 
 with evident gusto the miserable ends of the Emperors who 
 had oppressed the Church, being strongly reminiscent of the 
 conclusion of Tertullian’s de spectaculis, the famous passage 
 in which the father of African theology anticipates with glee 
 the sight, which he expects to enjoy at the Last Day, of 
 pagan kings and philosophers writhing in eternal flames.? 
 Nevertheless, though in his systematic defence and exposi- 
 tion of Christianity, divinarum institutionum libri vir, he 
 duly narrates the substance of the Scriptural Fall-Story, he 
 noticeably refrains from attaching any theory of ‘ Original 
 Sin’ to it, and attributes only external and mechanical 
 consequences to the Fall, such as man’s loss of physical 
 immortality and of Paradise.2 His own view of the ground 
 of human sin is that man is naturally prone to evil because 
 of the earthly or physical elements in his nature ; and though 
 he uses the actual phrase depravatio naturae <humanae>, the 
 depravatio is illogically regarded as inherent in the necessary 
 conditions of man’s being.? He does not appear to face the 
 
 1 Gibbon’s comments on this passage (Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, ii. p. 27) are well known, and not unjustifiable. 
 
 2 op. cit. li. 13 ; see also epitom. div. inst.27. div. inst. ii. 15 contains 
 an original version of the ‘ angel-story’ of Gen. vi. which asserts that the 
 “sons of God’ were sent to earth by the Lord Himself, in order to be 
 guardians of the human race, but that through their sin they became 
 daemons themselves and begat daemons. 
 
 8 de iva det, c. xv. (ed. Brandt, Corpus Script. Eccl. Lat. XXVIIT) : 
 “sic et nos ex duobus aeque repugnantibus conpacti sumus, anima et 
 corpore: quorum alterum caelo adscribitur, quia tenue est et intractabile, 
 alterum terrae, quia conprehensibile est: alterum solidum est et aeternum, 
 alterum fragile atque mortale. ergo alteri bonum adhaeret, alteri malum, 
 
298 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 fact that this position makes the Creator ultimately respon- 
 sible for man’s sin.! The theology of Lactantius is in general 
 somewhat eccentric and defective—he was better at attack- 
 ing Paganism than at expounding Christianity—and it 
 would therefore be unjustifiable to cite his words as evidence 
 for a supposed reaction against the Fall-theory at the end 
 of the third or the beginning of the fourth century. As in 
 the earlier case of Clement of Alexandria, it is probably 
 truer to suggest that even a scanty and (so to speak) grudging 
 mention of the Adam-story, by an author whose charac- 
 teristic positions demand the uncompromising maintenance 
 of free-will, is an unconscious testimony to the amount of 
 general acceptance which the Fall-theory had obtained ; 
 though this doctrine is alien to his whole way of thinking, 
 it is now too firmly rooted in Christian tradition for him to 
 be able to ignore it altogether. 
 
 (3) St. Hilary of Poitiers (d. A.D. 368). However this 
 may be, it is at least certain that we have no evidence for 
 any further development of the specifically ‘ African’ Fall- 
 doctrine until we come to the writings of Hilary of Poitiers, 
 in the fourth century. At this point our narrative leaves 
 Africa, the original home of the ‘ twice-born ’ doctrine, for 
 Western Europe, not to return until we come to consider 
 the final formulation of this doctrine by the last and greatest 
 of the African doctors, St. Augustine himself. The passing 
 allusions made by Hilary to Adam’s sin and its consequences 
 are, on the whole, in line with Tertullian’s doctrine, with the 
 
 alteri lux vita iustitia, alteri tenebrae mors iniustitia. hinc extitit in 
 hominibus naturae suae depravatio, ut esset necesse constitui legem qua 
 possent et vitia prohiberi et virtutis officia imperari.’ (This position is 
 described as ‘ illogical’ in the text, because a ‘ depravation’ implies a 
 previous good state of that which has suffered the depravation.) Cc. xviii. 
 contains an expression of the same idea—‘ sed ideo <homo> procedit 
 in vitium, quia de terrena fragilitate permixtus non potest id quod a deo 
 sumpsit incorruptum purumque servare.’ Lactantius, in fact, shares 
 the view which we have already found in the Book of Job (see Lecture I, 
 p- 17) and shall find again in the writings of Dr. F. R. Tennant (see 
 Additional Note E.), the view, namely, that man’s moral weakness is simply 
 due to his creaturely nature, and that there is no more to be said on the 
 subject. 
 
 1 See Additional Note E (‘ Dr. F. R. Tennant’s Alternative Theory of 
 the Origin of Sin’), p. 530. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 299 
 
 important exception that ‘ traducianism ’ is emphatically 
 repudiated. The vwitium originis® (we notice that this 
 phrase, taken over from Tertullian, has now become all but 
 technical) is not transmitted directly from the soul of the 
 progenitor to the soul of the offspring, but is acquired by 
 the newly created soul through its union with the flesh 3 ; 
 hence the flesh is the seat of ‘ Original Sin,’ a theory which 
 represents a return to the strictly Pauline view. But, 
 though the mould in which the idea of ‘ seminal identity ’ 
 had been shaped into consistency and toughness is thus 
 discarded, the idea itself stands fast ; and there are two or 
 three passages which seem to imply that the human race 
 was in Adam, or was Adam, when he fell—such as the 
 following ‘in unius Adae errore omne hominum genus 
 aberravit.’* It is, however, clear that this Father took no 
 very great interest in the theology of the Fall and its conse- 
 quences, and the aggregate amount of space occupied by 
 his few incidental allusions to the subject is almost infini- 
 tesimal in comparison with the length of his great treatise 
 on the Holy Trinity and of his polemical writings against 
 the Arians. Not as an elaborator of the Fall-doctrine, but 
 as the ally of Athanasius and the champion of the Nicene 
 Christology in the West, did Hilary earn the titles conceded 
 him by both East and West of Doctor and Confessor of 
 the Church. 
 
 (4) St. Ambrose (bishop of Milan, A.D. 374-397). This 
 great man is popularly conceived as illustrious through 
 practical rather than through intellectual gifts—as a powerful 
 administrator, a zealous pastor, a princely prelate, a friend 
 and on occasion a severe monitor of emperors, an organiser 
 
 1 tvact. in cxviil. ps., litt. iv.: ‘anima, quae alterius originis est, 
 terrae corporis adhaesisse creditur’; de tvin. x. 20: ‘cum anima omnis 
 opus Dei sit, carnis vero generatio semper ex carne sit’; ibid. 22: 
 ‘<anima> nunquam ab homine gignentium originibus praebetur.’ 
 
 2 tract. in cxviii. ps., litt. xiv. 20: ‘natura quidem et origo carnis 
 suae cum detinebat : sed voluntas et religio cor eius ex eo in quo manebat 
 oviginis vitio ad iustificationum opera declinat.’ 
 
 8 So I understand the difficult passage comm. in Matthaeum, X. 23, 24. 
 
 4 ibid. xviii. 6; the context contains what appears to be the first 
 instance of the application of the Parable of the Lost Sheep to the Fall of 
 man. Cf. also tract. in cxxxvi. ps. 5: ‘ quisquis ergo in crimine primi 
 parentis Adae exsulem se factum illius Sion recordabitur .. .2; 2bid. 7: 
 ‘qui in Adam extorres se factos esse caelestis Ierusalem meminerunt.’ 
 
300 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of liturgical worship, rather than as a learned doctor or subtle 
 theologian. It is doubtless true that no one original en- 
 richment of Christian thought can be placed to his credit : 
 but the part which he played in the elaboration of the 
 ‘maximising’ version of the Fall-doctrine was of no little 
 importance, inasmuch as in his mind the cardinal elements 
 of this version were for the first time assembled and held 
 side by side, though not yet wrought into a single coherent 
 unity. Though his writings do not contain a systematic 
 treatise on the doctrine of the Fall (the book de paradiso is 
 rather a mystical commentary on the whole narrative of 
 Gen. ii. and iii. than an exposition of the ‘ Fall’ in particular), 
 yet his numerous allusions to the subject when collected 
 together give us an ultra-‘ African’ type of Fall-theory, 
 which may not unreasonably be described as Augustinianism 
 before Augustine. If we remember that it was in great part 
 the attraction of Ambrose’s majestic personality which 
 drew Augustine through his great spiritual crisis to Catholic 
 Christianity, and the hand of Ambrose which baptised and 
 anointed him,! we shall find it difficult not to believe that 
 the brilliant young neophyte must have drunk in Ambrose’s 
 teaching on the Fall together with the rest of his dogmatic 
 exposition of the Faith, through private catechetical 
 instruction or through the homilies which the great bishop 
 was accustomed to deliver in the basilica of Milan and to 
 which the not-yet-converted Augustine listened entranced. 
 If this is so, the place occupied by Ambrose in the history 
 of the ‘maximising’ Fall-doctrine may be defined as that 
 of the workman who collected the materials out of which 
 the more gifted master-builder Augustine constructed the 
 finished edifice. 
 
 Ambrose is the first of the Latin Fathers to teach in 
 unequivocal terms the doctrine of the ‘ Original Righteous- 
 ness’ or ‘ Perfection’ of man, an idea which seems to be 
 the necessary starting-point of the ‘maximising’ Fall- 
 theory, considered as a logical scheme; for only if the 
 , original state of man be made one of unqualified perfection 
 and bliss is it possible to represent the primal transgression 
 
 1 Cf. S. Aug. Conf. v. 13,14; vi. 4; ix. 5; c.Iulian.i. 4,10; op. imp. 
 c. Iulian. i. 2. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH - 301 
 
 as a sin against the fullest possible ight, as an act of wanton, 
 unmotived, inexcusable malice, and therefore as invested 
 with an infinite degree of guilt. He tells us that Adam in 
 Paradise was a ‘ heavenly being,’ 1 ‘ breathing ethereal air,’ ? 
 like unto an angel,? exempt from the cares and weariness of 
 this life,” resplendent with celestial grace and accustomed 
 to speak face to face with God,* endowed from the moment 
 of his creation with that perfect balance of reason, will, and 
 appetite ° which fallen man can only recover by painful 
 effort and the continuous assistance of the Holy Spirit.® 
 It is a remarkable fact that this Rabbinical figment was, | 
 as we have already pointed out, being propagated by Gregory 
 
 of Nyssa in the East just about the same time that Ambrose 
 appeared as its champion in the West ’7: and it would seem 
 probable that the same ultimate cause lay behind both 
 of these happenings, namely, the invisible pressure of the 
 second great wave of Oriental dualism which was then 
 silently flooding Europe, Manicheism. We have already, 
 in speaking of Gnosticism, called attention to the reaction 
 which the impact of dualistic theories tends to stimulate 
 within the Church: the affirmation of the co-eternity of 
 good and evil inevitably drives the mind of the Christian 
 society back upon the principle implied in its fundamental 
 
 1 in ps. cxvili. expos. serm. xv. 36: “‘ Adam cum in paradiso esset 
 coelestis erat.’ 
 2 ibid. iv. 5: ‘ beatissimus auram carpebat aetheream, curas vitae 
 
 huius et taedia nesciebat.’ 
 
 3 de parad. ix. 42. 
 
 4 in ps. xlilil. enarr. 75: ‘in conspectu Dei erat Adam, in paradiso 
 vigebat, coelesti gratia refulgebat, loguebatur cum Deo.’ 
 
 5 expos. ev. sec. Luc. vii. 142: ‘ quod utique tunc facit, cum caro in 
 naturam regressa vigoris sui agnoscit altricem, atque ausu deposito 
 contumaciae moderantis animae coniugatur arbitrio: qualis fuit cum 
 inhabitanda paradisi secreta suscepit, antequam veneno pestiferi serpentis 
 infecta sacrilegam famem sciret.’ 
 
 6 Note that Ambrose follows the exegetical tradition (for which 
 v. supra, pp. 192, 251) which identifies the ‘ Paradise’ of Gen. iii. with that 
 of 2 Cor. xii. 2: im ps. Cxvili. expos. serym. iv. 2: ‘ denique eiectus de 
 paradiso, hoc est, ex illo sublimi et caelesti loco ad quem raptus est Paulus 
 sive in corpore sive extra corpus nesciens.’ 
 
 ? It may be noted that Ambrose, unlike Augustine, had an excellent 
 knowledge of the Greek language, and was much influenced by Origen and 
 Basil : it is possible that he may have derived the idea of “ original perfec- 
 tion’ directly from the Cappadocians. 
 
302 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 monotheism, that of the absoluteness and necessity of good 
 and of the contingency of evil, a principle which since the 
 Maccabean age has been embodied in the Fall-theory. 
 And doubtless it was the peculiar vigour and compactness 
 of the doctrines of Mani,! as contrasted with the vagueness 
 and variety of the systems collectively known as Gnosticism, 
 which impelled Gregory of Nyssa in the East, and Ambrose 
 in the West, all unconsciously to accentuate the idea of the 
 Fall by prefixing to it the idea, borrowed from Jewish 
 legend, of a state of paradisal ‘ perfection,’ which goes far 
 beyond the conception of that ‘infancy’ which was 
 attributed by the earliest Greek-Christian writers to the 
 ancestors of the race. It is interesting, however, to note 
 that (if a passage in one of Ambrose’s letters is to be taken 
 as containing his permanent thought on the subject) man’s 
 ‘Original Righteousness’ was not, in this Father’s view, 
 destroyed at one blow by the first transgression, as Augustine 
 and Calvin were later to maintain ; it became progressively 
 diminished in each succeeding generation of Adam’s 
 descendants and eventually died out altogether, in much 
 the same way that the attractive force of a magnet holding 
 a series of iron rings becomes weaker in each ring that is 
 added to the series.’ 
 
 The influence of this significant addition of ‘ Original 
 Righteousness’ to the growing fabric of the ‘ African’ 
 theory is reflected in a terminological tendency exactly 
 analogous to that which we have noted in the writings of 
 the Cappadocian Fathers—the tendency, namely, to speak 
 of Adam’s sin not merely as a ‘ transgression ’ (praevaricatio, 
 which literally means ‘ walking crookedly,’ and is an almost 
 exact rendering of the Scriptural and primitive term 
 mapapacts) but as a ‘ Fall,’ or lapsus.2 We have already 
 
 1 For an authoritative summary of Manicheism, based upon the latest 
 
 researches, see F. C. Burkitt, The Religion of the Manichees (Donnellan 
 Lectures for 1924). 
 
 * ep. xlv. 14: cf. St. Athanasius, de incarn. 12 (commented on above, 
 p. 262). ) 
 
 8 Cf. hexaemeron vi. 42: ‘secundum hunc imaginem (sc. Dei) Adam 
 ante peccatum: sed ubi Japsus est, deposuit imaginem caelestis, sumpsit 
 terrestris effigiem’; de excessu fratr. sui Satyri, ii. 6: ‘ lapsus sum in 
 Adam ’ (see below, p. 305, n. 4, for the rest of the passage) ; in ps. cxviii. 
 expos. XXlil. 30: ‘ suscipe me in carne, quae in Adam Japsa est’; apol. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 303 
 
 pointed out that the idea of a failure on the part of man to 
 pursue an upward line of moral progress marked out for 
 him by his Maker is very different from the idea of a fall 
 from a pre-existing condition of moral and spiritual per- 
 fection ; and it is hardly necessary to add that the former 
 conception of the primal catastrophe is not contradicted by 
 the information given us by science with regard to the 
 origin and primitive condition of our race, whereas. the latter 
 would seem in the light of modern knowledge to be purely 
 mythological. It is fair to observe that the use of the 
 term ‘fall’ (that is, of the verb Jab: and its cognate sub- 
 stantive /apsus) in this connexion is not predominant in 
 Ambrose ; and it is not until the close of the patristic period 
 that /apsus takes the place of praevaricatio as the technical 
 designation in Latin of the primordial sin. 
 
 The allusions in St. Ambrose’s writings to ‘ Original Sin,’ 
 in the sense of the inherited bias towards evil, are so 
 numerous that it is impossible to do more than summarise 
 their general import.1 The phrase ‘all we men are born 
 under sin’? gives the key-note of his thought on this 
 matter ; and the ‘ sin,’ or ‘ danger of sinning,’ ? which dogs 
 man’s path from his birth is described as ‘ the iniquity of 
 our heels, which compasseth us about... of that heel 
 which was bitten by the serpent, and causes us to go limping ’ 4 
 —as the net in which Adam enveloped his whole posterity,° 
 or the chain with which he bound the human race ®—as the 
 inheritance of a vitxum * (Tertullian’s and Hilary’s word)— 
 as the entailed curse, which makes our flesh to be sin. But 
 the question, what is the precise psychological account to be 
 given of this vitzum, or curse, is left in judicious vagueness. 
 
 
 
 David, xi.: “ nec conceptus iniquitatis exsors est, quoniam et parentes 
 mon carent lapsu’; apol. David alteva, iii. 19: ‘ post primi hominis 
 labsum’; de paradis. xiii. 62: “<Adam> vitio uxoris lapsus est’; de 
 " Cain et Abel,i.: ‘ Adam et Evae lapsus.’ 
 1 Some of these passages were collected by St. Augustine, de pecc. 
 orig. xli. 
 
 * de poenitent. I. iii. 13 : ‘ omnes homines sub peccato nascimur.’ 
 
 3 in ps. xlvili. enarr. 9. i Teleee ney 
 
 5 in ps. CXVili. expos. 47; ep. Ixxiii. 9. 6 ep, Ixxiato, 
 
 7 in ps. xlili. enarr. 75. 8 in ps. CXVill. expos. 21. 
 
304 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 When he does raise it, he shows the influence of that 
 curious vein of subconscious feeling which we have noted 
 as running all through the history of the Fall-doctrine, 
 a feeling which may be described as a horror or phobia of 
 sex. It is not surprising to discover traces of this feeling 
 in the writings of so prominent a champion of virginity and 
 asceticism ; and the reader will doubtless remember what 
 has been said above concerning the tendencies of the ‘ twice- 
 born’ temperament in regard to the matter.1 Hence in 
 one passage” he toys with the repulsive notion, already 
 suggested by Origen,®? of a ‘bad mana’ inherent in the 
 physiological processes of conception and birth ; and in the 
 same passage he implies that sexual intercourse is itself 
 sinful, so that we are ‘ born in’ the ‘sin’ of our parents. 
 This leads on to the lamentable suggestion that the 
 miraculous birth of Christ was necessary in order to the 
 avoidance of the physical or quasi-physical pollutions 
 inherent in normal birth. Full use is made of the familiar 
 proof-texts, Ps. li. 5, ‘ Behold, I was shapen in wickedness,’ 
 and the Septuagintal mistranslation of Job, ‘ There is no one 
 free from defilement, not even if his life has been but a 
 day upon the earth.’* Nevertheless, the wound of man’s 
 nature, whatever its kind and seat, does not abolish free- 
 will or reponsibility ; and it is impossible not to appreciate 
 the manliness and common-sense of Ambrose’s declaration, 
 “Let him not fear the danger of heredity, who desires to 
 hold the standing-ground of virtue.’ ® 
 
 In view of the general character and tone of Ambrose’s 
 Fall-doctrine as indicated by these preliminary observations, 
 we shall naturally expect to come across some strong 
 affirmations of ‘ Original Guilt.’ It is true that the context 
 of the passage last cited contains a declaration that ‘ the 
 iniquity of our heels,’ which is identified with the sin of 
 Adam or its inherited results, will not be laid to our charge 
 at the Day of Judgment—a declaration which is clearly 
 tantamount to a denial of our personal responsibility for 
 the first sin.® But we may set against this isolated utterance 
 
 1 See Lecture III, p. 155. 2 apol. David, xi. 
 3 vu. SUPYa, P. 224. 4 vu. supra, Pp. 224, Nl. 2. 
 5 in ps. xlviil. enarr. 9. 6 ibid. 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH = 305 
 
 other passages which with equal clearness affirm this idea, 
 together with its logical foundation of ‘ seminal identity.’ 
 In the writings of the great bishop of Milan the theory that 
 we all were in Adam and were Adam, and therefore fell 
 in his Fall, or ‘sinned in’ him, attains to conscious and 
 explicit formulation. There is no mistaking the significance 
 of such passages as this: ‘ Assuredly we all sinned in the 
 first man, and by the inheritance of his nature there has 
 been transfused from that one man into all an inheritance 
 of guilt. . . . So then Adam is in each one of us; for in 
 him human nature ttself sinned.’ (We notice in this last 
 clause the first appearance of a refined form of the theory of 
 “seminal identity,’ which sublimates the concrete individual 
 Adam into the abstract universal of ‘humanity,’ and 
 regards this universal as having somehow ‘sinned’; this 
 is a thought which runs through the whole subsequent 
 history of the Western theology of sin and redemption, 
 finding its latest expression in Dr. R. C. Moberly’s great 
 work on the Atonement.?) Equally striking utterances of 
 the same view are the following: ‘Adam existed, and in 
 him we all existed. Adam perished, and in him all 
 perished ’?; and ‘ In Adam I fell, in Adam I was cast out 
 of Paradise, in Adam I died; how may God recall me, 
 unless He find me in <thesecond> Adam, justified in Christ, 
 even as I was rendered subject to guilt, and the destined 
 prey of death, in the first Adam?’* Here the full 
 implications of Irenaeus’ ‘ recapitulation ’-theory are drawn 
 out with a plainness from which its original author would, 
 perhaps, have shrunk.® It is one of the many paradoxes 
 
 1 apol. David alteva, 71: ‘ nempe omnes in primo homine peccavimus, 
 et per naturae successionem culpae quoque ab uno in omnes transfusa 
 successio est . . . Adam ergo in singulis nobis est. in illo enim conditio 
 humana deliquit, quia per unum in omnes pertransivit peccatum’ ; cf. also 
 ibid. 69: ‘ cui se fateatur noster David non solum in se ipso, sed etiam 
 in primo homine peccasse, dum praecepta divina temerantur.’ 
 
 2 R. C. Moberly, Atonement and Personality (1904), p. 88 f. 
 
 3 expos. ev. sec. Luc. vil. 234: ‘ fuit Adam, et in illo fuimus omnes ; 
 periit Adam, et in illo omnes perierunt.’ 
 
 4 de excess. fratris sut Satyri, ii. 6: ‘ lapsus sum in Adam, de paradiso 
 eiectus in Adam, mortuus in Adam; quomodo revocet, nisi me in Adam 
 
 invenerit, ut in illo culpae obnoxium, morti debitum, ita in Christo iustifi- 
 catum ?’ 
 
 5 uv. supra, p. 197. 
 
306 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 revealed by a close study of the history of dogma, and one of 
 the many facts which warn us against an over-rigid classi- 
 fication of primitive Christian thinkers, that the idea of 
 ‘Original Guilt,’ which became the most characteristic 
 constituent of the African and Latin presentation of the 
 Fall-doctrine should have been suggested in the first 
 instance by a theologian so typically Hellenic in thought 
 and feeling as the great second-century bishop of Lyons. 
 
 Like Hilary, Ambrose finds himself able to hold the 
 theory of the identity of the race with its first father, whilst 
 discarding the ‘ traducianism ’ which in Tertullian’s thought 
 had supported and reinforced this theory. So far as 
 Ambrose is concerned, we may safely attribute this 
 phenomenon to the fact that (as we have just suggested) the 
 identity of mankind with Adam is ceasing, in his mind, to 
 be a merely material or ‘ seminal ’ identity, and is becoming 
 a logical or metaphysical identity; following, we may 
 suppose, the lead of those Fathers who had recognised that 
 the Hebrew ’Adham merely means ‘ man,’! he seems to 
 think of Adam as (so to speak) the Platonic Idea of man, as 
 hypostatised ‘human nature,’ conditio humana. It would 
 not be germane to this historical portion of our enquiry to 
 raise the question whether the statement that a hypostatised 
 class-concept ‘ sinned,’ and so infected the particulars sub- 
 sumed under it with sin, is ultimately intelligible or not. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to add that in the thought of 
 Ambrose the divinely appointed remedy for the hereditary 
 disease of human nature is baptismal regeneration. We 
 may note that in the treatise de mysteriis * he seems to ad- 
 vocate the curious view that ‘ original guilt’ is remitted by 
 the liturgical washing of the neophyte’s feet after baptism, 
 or at least that this was effected in the case of the Apostles 
 through the washing of their feet by our Lord, as narrated 
 in St. John xiii. 1-11. 
 
 Though they have no bearing on the logical structure 
 
 1 uv. Supra, PP. 192, D. 2, 203, 229. 
 
 2 de myst. vi. 32: ‘ mundus erat Petrus, sed plantam lavare debebat ; 
 habebat enim primi hominis de successione peccatum, quando eum sup- 
 plantavit serpens, et persuasit errorem. ideo planta eius abluitur, u# 
 
 hasreditaria peccata tollantuy; nostra enim propria per baptismum 
 relaxantur.’ 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH = 307 
 
 of Ambrose’s Fall-doctrine, we may notice here two mytho- 
 logical decorations of the Adam-story which occur in his 
 works, and which illustrate the fact that even after two 
 centuries of gradual crystallisation the tradition was still 
 plastic enough to admit of haggadic additions at the will of 
 each of its exponents. The first is the curious idea that 
 Adam, after his expulsion from Paradise, was banished to 
 a ‘ castellum,’ to do penance for his sin! ; he is also said to 
 have been clothed with skins and not with silk, for the same 
 reason, the skins being apparently conceived as a kind of 
 hair-shirt.2, The second is a belief which still survives as an 
 artistic convention ; this is the idea that Adam was buried 
 on the hill which was afterwards to be consecrated by the 
 Passion of the Son of God, immediately under the spot upon 
 which the Cross was destined to be reared, an idea from 
 which has sprung the familiar custom of portraying a skull 
 as lying at the base of the Cross,.in painted or sculptured 
 representations of the Crucifixion.* It is fair to add that 
 this is only mentioned as a possible opinion. This drapery 
 of folk-lore which clings about the developed Fall-doctrine, 
 even in the last half of the fourth century A.D., shows that 
 the pseudepigraphic and Rabbinical Jewish writings still 
 exercised a certain influence upon Christian thought, and 
 that the sentimental ties which had bound the Catholic 
 Church to its Jewish mother were even at this date not 
 completely severed. 
 
 (5) ‘ Ambrostaster.’ This writer* clearly indicates by 
 his comments on Rom. v. vi. vii. that he accepts the idea 
 of ‘ Original Sin’; but he has only one sentence which 
 (apparently) implies the idea of ‘ Original Guilt.’ The 
 sentence to which we refer is, nevertheless, of the most 
 
 1 in ps. CXVill. expos. 23; 1n pS. XXXVI. enarr. 20. 
 
 2 de poemttent. II. x1. 99. 
 
 3 ep. Ixxi. 10; im Luc. x. 114. Maldonatus, commenting on Matt. 
 XXVil. 33, gives a list of other Fathers who held the same opinion. Louis 
 Ginzberg (Monatsschrift fiir Gesch. u. Wissensch. Judentums, xliii. 69 ff.) 
 has shown that this story is a Christianised version of the Jewish legend 
 that the body of Adam was compounded from dust gathered on the future 
 site of the altar of burnt-sacrifice. 
 
 4 For a discussion of the question of his identity see A. Souter, A Study 
 of Ambrosiastey (Cambridge Texts and Studies), 1905, which contains a 
 full bibliography. 
 
308 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 crucial importance in the development of the ‘ twice-born ’ 
 Fall-theory, because Ambrosiaster thereby provided, per- 
 haps unwittingly, the doctrine of ‘ Original Guilt’ with 
 what it had hitherto lacked, namely, a Scriptural proof-text 
 to be its formal basis: the ignorance of Greek now prevalent 
 in the West, and the consequent inability of many Latin 
 theologians to read the actual words of the New Testament, 
 effectually screened the fact that the supposed proof-text 
 rested upon a blunder in translation. Its relevant portions 
 run as follows: 
 
 In whom, that is, in Adam, all sinned. The Apostle said 
 “in whom’ in the masculine gender (7 quo) although he is speak- 
 ing about the woman, for this reason, that his reference is to the 
 whole race of man, not to the particular sex <which as a matter 
 of fact sinned first>. So then it is plain that all have sinned 
 in Adam as in a lump (guast in massa) ; for all the children whom 
 Adam begat, having been himself corrupted by the woman 
 (tpsa) through sin, have been born under sin. From him there- 
 fore all are sinners, because from him are we all; for Adam 
 lost the gift of God when he transgressed, having become un- 
 worthy to eat of the tree of life, so that he died. 
 
 The cardinal error in this sentence les in the mis- 
 translation of St. Paul’s phrase eg’ @ mavtes 7papror, * for 
 that allsinned ’ (R.V.), as though it were ev @ mavres juaprov, 
 ‘in whom, sc. the “one man’”’ just mentioned, all sinned.’ 
 Ambrosiaster is, of course, relying on a Latin version which 
 renders ef’ 6 as 1” quo, a translation which has been per- 
 petuated in the Vulgate. This rendering is inexact and 
 ambiguous enough in all conscience, but it does not compel 
 us to assume that quo is masculine ; a reader who possessed 
 only the Latin version, without any knowledge of the original 
 Greek, and read it without any preconceived ideas as to 
 “Original Guilt,’ would probably understand im quo as 
 equivalent to quod or quantum, ‘in so faras all sinned.’ In 
 any case the words unum hominem are too far distant from 
 
 1 comm. in Rom. v.12: ‘in quo, id est, in Adam, omnes peccaverunt. 
 ideo dixit 7m quo, cum de muliere loquatur, quia non ad speciem rettulit, 
 sed ad genus. manifestum itaque est in Adam omnes peccasse quasi in 
 massa ; ipsa enim per peccatum corruptus, quos genuit, omnes nati sunt 
 sub peccato. ex eo igitur cuncti peccatores, quia ex eo ipso sumus omnes ; 
 hic enim beneficium Dei perdidit, dum praevaricavit, indignus factus edere 
 de arbore vitae, ut moreretur.’ 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 309 
 
 the relative guo to be its grammatical antecedent. Ambrosi- 
 aster has therefore bequeathed to Western Christendom as 
 the supposed Scriptural foundation of its characteristic 
 doctrine of ‘ Original Guilt’ a gratuitous misunderstanding 
 of a faulty rendering of what St. Paul actually wrote. 
 
 The fatal legacy was received only too gladly : Augustine 
 quotes this passage, mistranslation and all, as from the 
 writings of ‘sanctus Hilarius, 4 who is undoubtedly 
 ‘Ambrosiaster.. Nor has its malign influence even yet 
 come to an end: I have in my possession a Roman Catholic 
 pamphlet? in which the words of Rom. v. 12 are quoted in 
 defence of the idea of ‘ Original Guilt,’ in the form‘ . . . in 
 whom all have sinned,’ without the slightest apparent 
 consciousness that St. Paul wrote nothing of the kind. 
 
 It is, indeed, doubtful whether Ambrosiaster himself 
 really intended to place on this clause (7m quo omnes pecca- 
 verunt) the sense which Augustine took him to intend, and 
 which has been adopted without question, on Augustine’s 
 authority, by so many later writers in Western Christendom. 
 For, in commenting on v. 14 of the same fifth chapter of the 
 Epistle to the Romans, he lays down a principle which 
 logically seems to exclude “ Original Guilt’ altogether. His 
 text of this verse runs ‘ sed regnavit mors ab Adam usque 
 ad Moysen, in eos qui peccaverunt in similitudinem praevari- 
 cationis Adam’; which, it will be noticed, like Origen’s 
 text, pre-supposes a Greek original not containing the word 
 py before duaptjoavras.? This reading, right or wrong, clearly 
 connects the incidence of death with the commission of 
 actual sin; and Ambrosiaster expounds it to mean that 
 only actual sin deserves the ‘second death,’ or Gehenna. 
 
 1c, wu. epp. Pelag., IV, iv. 7. By ‘sanctus Hilarius’ Augustine 
 apparently means Hilary of Poitiers: but this is almost certainly mistaken. 
 Souter (op. cit., pp. 161 ff.), following Dom Germain Morin, concludes 
 tentatively that the ‘ Hilarius’ who is to be identified with ‘ Ambrosiaster ’ 
 is Decimius Hilarianus Hilarius, a distinguished Christian layman who 
 was proconsul of Africa in 377, praefectus urbi in 383, praefectus praetorio 
 Italiae in 396, and praefectus urbi for the second time in 408. 
 
 2 Original Sin, by the Rev. C. C. O’Connor (Catholic Truth Society), 
 p. 22. F. X. Schouppe, S.J. (Elementa Theologiae Dogmaticae, tom. i. 
 tract. 7, c. 3, 2, § 195) appears to rely on this traditional mistranslation ; 
 but Pohle-Preuss (God, the Author of Nature, 1912, p. 249) have grave 
 
 doubts about it. 
 3 For a note on this reading, v. supra, p. 125, N. 2. 
 
310 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Moreover, like most Latin writers after Tertullian, he 
 repudiates ‘ traducianism.’? It is, therefore, possible that 
 by the assertion that all men ‘sinned in Adam, as in a 
 lump’ he may merely mean that they ‘ became sinners’ or 
 “acquired a sinful tendency’; in other words, he may 
 intend to affirm merely ‘ Original Sin,’ and not “‘ Original 
 Guilt.’ But the idea of ‘ Original Guilt’ had by this time 
 become so popular, and the apparent discovery of a Scrip- 
 tural basis for it was so welcome, amongst thinkers who 
 knew no Greek, that critical considerations of this kind do 
 not seem to have occurred to any of Ambrosiaster’s readers ; 
 and his mistranslation of 颒 & wavtes 7japrov took its place in 
 the armoury of controversial arguments for the ‘ twice-born’ 
 version of the Fall-doctrine. This momentous error, andthe 
 emergence of the conception of fallen humanity as a sinful 
 massa,2 or ‘lump,’ bring us up to the very threshold of 
 Augustinianism ; where it will be appropriate to pause, and 
 survey the ground which has been covered in this lecture. 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 It must be confessed that the section of our journey 
 which has just been completed very considerably exceeds in 
 length those which have preceded it ; but it may be hoped 
 that the cardinal importance for our enquiry of the Church’s 
 pre-Augustinian infancy will have justified a somewhat 
 detailed examination of this period. We are now in a 
 position to attempt answers to the two main questions 
 formulated at the beginning of this lecture as necessarily 
 arising out of our historical method of determining what is 
 ‘the ecclesiastical doctrine’ of Man and of Sin—namely : 
 (xr) Can it be said that the ideas of the Fall and of Original 
 Sin were held universally within the Christian Church—that 
 
 1 comm. in Rom. vii. 22: ‘ si enim anima de traduce esset et ipsa, et in 
 ipsa habitaret peccatum, quia anima Adae magis peccavit quam corpus: 
 sed peccatum animae corrupit corpus . . . in anima autem si habitaret 
 <peccatum>, numquam se cognosceret homo: nunc autem cognoscit se, 
 et condelectatur legi Dei.’ 
 
 * This term may have been suggested by the use of dvpaya (Vulg. 
 “massa ’) in Rom. ix. 21. 
 
THEePALE-DOCTRINE IN: THE CHURCH. + 31x 
 
 they were believed ubique, semper, et ab omnibus—during 
 this period? and (2) if they were, can any given set of 
 solutions of the ‘five crucial problems’ implicit in the 
 Adamic Fall-theory claim a similar degree of oecumenical 
 acceptance ? 
 
 (1) To answer this question with exactness, we must 
 distinguish between the doctrine of the ‘ Fall,’ that is, the 
 belief that there has been some great prehistoric moral 
 catastrophe which has separated man from God, and the 
 doctrine of ‘ Original Sin,’ that is, the affirmation that the 
 ground of this separation lies in man’s consequent infection 
 by a hereditary weakness or taint which is interior or 
 psychological in nature. It may reasonably be concluded 
 from the evidence which we have adduced from the greatest 
 teachers of the pre-Augustinian Church (to which, if space 
 allowed, might be added more cursory references to the 
 subject by writers of lesser importance?) that the doctrine of 
 the Fall was accepted, in a vague and general way, by most 
 Christians of this period, at least from the canonisation of 
 St. Paul’s Epistles onwards : and we have shown reason for 
 dismissing the contention that the uncertainty which appears 
 to have reigned in the Church with regard to this matter 
 destroys the claim of the Fall-doctrine to fulfil the second of 
 the Vincentian qualifications, that of acceptance semper. 
 Though in all probability the rank and file of the Christian 
 society took little interest in the matter,? and though the 
 thought of the consequences of Adam’s sin would seem to 
 have possessed little vividness or reality for their imagina- 
 
 1 See Additional Note H, p. 554, ‘ Passages bearing on the Fall-doctrine 
 from pre-Augustinian writers not mentioned in Lecture IV.’ 
 
 * This popular lack of interest in the subject seems to be reflected in 
 the Apocryphal Gospels, which are the products of vulgar and non- 
 theological Christianity, both Catholic and heretical. In the whole of 
 Dr. M. R. James’ convenient collection of these documents (The A pocryphal 
 New Testament, 1924) there appear to be only three references to the Fall 
 of Adam, one of which occurs in the ‘ Book of John the Evangelist’ (op. 
 cit. p. 189 f.), a Bogomil work which in its present form is not earlier than 
 the twelfth century, and is therefore of no value as evidence for primitive 
 Christian opinion ; the other two occur in the‘ Questions of Bartholomew ’ 
 (pp. 173, 178), which may represent the ‘ Gospel of Bartholomew’ 
 mentioned by Jerome (praef. in comm. super Maitt., Vallarsi, vil. 2), and, 
 if so, is a version of a pre-Augustinian writing—but this is highly doubtful 
 see James, p. 166). 
 
312 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 tions in comparison with the idea of invisible daemons 
 swarming around them and instilling subtle suggestions of 
 evil into their minds—an idea which came to them with the 
 direct authority of our Lord’s own words—they would at 
 least not have denied the teaching of Rom. v. 12-21; it is 
 not conceivable that, after the recognition of St. Paul’s 
 letters as Scripture, any member of the Church would have 
 asserted that the Apostle was mistaken when he connected 
 the universal prevalence of death and sin with the trans- 
 gression of the first man. 
 
 The question whether the idea of ‘ original sin,’ in the 
 sense defined above, enjoyed an equal measure of explicit 
 acceptance is prima facie more disputable. It was shown in 
 Lecture III that the language of Rom. v. vi. vii. is most 
 naturally and easily comprehensible on the supposition that 
 St. Paul meant to weld together the Fall-theory of the 
 apocalyptists and the yécer-theory of the Rabbis, and to 
 exhibit the ‘ evilimpulse ’ as the legacy of the primordial sin. 
 If this is so, the Pauline teaching is that the disastrous 
 entail of the Fall involves, not merely physical mortality, 
 but evil consequences of an interior, psychological, and 
 spiritual nature. But the Apostle’s obscure and com- 
 plicated sentences, in which he is struggling to express ideas 
 which are not completely articulated or defined even in his 
 own mind, though they would seem to be penetrated by this 
 assumption of the psychological character of the main 
 legacy of the Fall, do not contain any express affirmation of 
 it; and hence it was possible for a tendency to manifest 
 itself in some quarters towards construing the consequences 
 of the first sin as of an external or mechanical kind, as 
 consisting in the circumstance that since the Fall men have 
 been born outside Paradise, or subject to some commercially 
 conceived obligation or servitude to the Devil. Neverthe- 
 less, a reasonable interpretation of the Vincentian Canon will 
 allow for temporary misunderstandings and local failures 
 to grasp the full inwardness of these vast and mysterious 
 ideas ; and the conceptions of ‘ banishment from Paradise ’ 
 and ‘ legal servitude to the devil’ may well be regarded as 
 superficial and mythological rationalisations of that pro- 
 found and poignant experience of self-condemnation, which 
 
THE FALL-DOCTRINE IN THE CHURCH 313 
 
 is the heart of true penitence and the foundation of the 
 whole Fall-doctrine. 
 
 (2) The ideas of the Fall and of ‘ Original Sin,’ in a 
 broad general sense, may thus be taken on the whole to 
 satisfy the Vincentian test (interpreted in that elastic sense 
 which does not exclude doctrinal development) so far as the 
 first four centuries of Christian history are concerned. But 
 it will have become clear in the course of our exposition that 
 neither of the two classical versions of the Fall-doctrine— 
 neither the Hellenic, ‘ once-born,’ and ‘ minimising,’ nor 
 the African, ‘ twice-born,’ or ‘ maximising’ version (which 
 includes as a characteristic constituent the formidable con- 
 ception of ‘ Original Guilt ’)—enjoyed oecumenical accept- 
 ance during this period. Neither the one nor the other 
 can claim to have been believed ubique, semper, et ab omnibus 
 down to the point which our narrative has reached. This 
 fact would seem by itself to dispose of the common assump- 
 tion that the African theory is ‘ the ecclesiastical’ or ‘ the 
 Catholic’ doctrine, in an exclusive sense. Given the 
 Vincentian criteria of Catholicity, it is clear that the title of 
 the ‘ Catholic’ doctrine can only be claimed by the common 
 substratum, or the highest common factor, of the Hellenic 
 and the African views. And this highest common factor is 
 nothing more or less than the teaching of St. Paul—that 
 ‘Adam’ sinned (however ‘Adam’ is to be construed, 
 whether as archetypal idea, race-spirit, or historic individual) 
 and that in consequence all men inherit a congenital inordi- 
 nation of appetite or debility of will (whichever mode of 
 expression be preferred), with liability to physical disease 
 and death. It may be predicted, without improper antici- 
 pation, that at the end of the historical portion of our 
 enquiry we shall not see reason to revise the provisional 
 judgment to which our study of the first four centuries of 
 Christianity has led us, that the genuinely ‘ Catholic’ 
 doctrine of the Fall and of Original Sin is simply and strictly 
 identical with the New Testament doctrine. 
 
 It should be added, in order to complete our picture of the 
 mind of the Church with regard to this subject during the 
 pre-Augustinian epoch, that none of the writers who have 
 been reviewed so far asserts that the Fall-doctrine belongs to 
 
314 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the essence of the Christian message, that is, to ‘ the Gospel ’ 
 or ‘ the Deposit of Faith.’ The ideas of Adam’s sin and of 
 its gloomy consequences would seem rather to have been 
 placed in the not very precisely limited category of indis- 
 pensable prolegomena to Christianity, contained in the 
 Jewish sacred books. Itisa significant fact that no mention 
 of these doctrines occurs either in the local baptismal creeds 
 of the period or in the great oecumenical symbol of Nicaea. 
 It was reserved for Augustine to declare that they belonged 
 to ‘ the very foundations of the Faith.’ 2 
 
 1 By this is meant, of course, the Creed as promulgated by the Council 
 (‘N’), though the statement is equally true of ‘ C,’ the so-called Niceno- 
 Constantinopolitan symbol. The phrase ‘ who for us men and for our 
 salvation came down from heaven’ does not, so far as its verbal form is 
 concerned, necessarily mean more than that the object of the Incarnation 
 was to redeem us from actual sin. 
 
 2c. Iulian. i. 6, 22: ‘hoc autem unde nunc agimus ad ipsa fidei 
 pertinet fundamenta.’ 
 
Ve 
 
 THE ‘TWICE-BORN’ VERSION OF THE 
 FALL-DOCTRINE FULLY DEVELOPED— 
 AUGUSTINIANISM 
 
GAN’ ef dvOpwmot aKovrTés Elot KaKOL Kal ToLOdTOL Ody EKdVTES, OUT av TLS TODS 
 adixobvras aitidoaito, ovre Tods maayortas ws 4.’ adtovs tadra mdcxovras. cf bé 
 57) Kal dvayKn ovtw KaKods yivecOat cite b70 THs hops cite THs apxis Sidovons 7d 
 axdAovbov evredbev, dvaixds odtws. ei dé 57) 6 Adyos adds €oTW 6 TOWWY, TAS 
 ovkK doiKa ovTws; GAAd Td peév GkovTes, OTL Guaptia aKovotov' Todro dé ovK 
 dvaipet TO avtods Tovs mpaTrovTas map’ avta@v elvar, AAA’ ért adrol mrototar, dia 
 TOOTO Kal avTol GuapTdvovow* 7 0d’ av GAws Huaprov p17) avTOL Ot moLodyTES OvTES. 
 
 PLOTINUS* “ancien fo: 
 
 ‘Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart 
 At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin, 
 The Corruption of man’s heart. 
 
 BROWNING: Gold Hair; a story of Pornic. 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 THE ‘“TWICE-BORN’ VERSION OF THE 
 FALL-DOCTRINE FULLY DEVELOPED— 
 AUGUSTINIANISM 
 
 Rom. vii. 22, 23: ‘ For I delight in the law of God after the inward 
 man: but I seea different law in my members, warring 
 against the law of my mind, and bringing me into 
 captivity under the law of sin which is in my members.’ 
 
 In our last lecture it was shown that the primitive pre- 
 Augustinian Church, whilst holding the doctrines of the 
 Fall and of an inherited taint or weakness in a vague and 
 undefined shape, did not regard these ideas as constituting 
 parts of the ‘ Gospel,’ that is, of the revelation of Himself 
 made by God through Christ. They are nowhere described 
 as essential elements of the Canon, Rule, or Deposit of 
 Faith. For the Church of the first four centuries, ‘ the 
 Faith’ was that which was contained in the baptismal 
 Creeds, consisting mainly in the doctrines of God and of 
 Christ. But this central nucleus of the Faith, though in- 
 vested with a unique majesty and authoritativeness, was 
 never regarded as standing alone: it was set in a frame 
 or context of presuppositions and corollaries, less definite 
 and clean-cut, but not less generally accepted. To the 
 category of presuppositions or prolegomena belonged the 
 ideas which Christianity had inherited from Judaism, the 
 belief in the unity of God, in the inspiration of the Old 
 Testament scriptures, and that which forms the subject 
 of our present enquiry, the belief in the first sin and its 
 disastrous legacy ; to the latter, the category of corollaries 
 or consequences, belonged the as yet undeveloped doctrines 
 of the Church, the Ministry and the Sacraments, things 
 
318 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 which for the most part 1 were taken for granted as facts, 
 and used rather than theoretically analysed. In other 
 words, the central body of Trinitarian and Christological 
 ideas which constituted ‘the Faith’ was surrounded by a 
 fringe or penumbra of less defined ideas, which had not yet 
 formed the subject-matter of authoritative definition, and 
 in regard to which individual speculation was as yet un- 
 trammelled, or limited only by the words of Scripture. 
 This rudimentary organisation of Christian thought con- 
 trasts vividly with those later systems of theology which 
 are most familiar to ourselves, which contain, as integral 
 parts of a defined and coherent whole, not merely the two 
 great original sections dealing with the doctrines of God 
 and of the Incarnation or of ‘the Person of Christ,’ but 
 three further sections, to all appearance equally authori- 
 tative, devoted to the doctrines of Grace or of ‘ the Work 
 of Christ,’ of the Church, and of the Sacraments—additions 
 which represent the gradual expansion of the sphere of 
 dogma proper by the progressive embodiment into the 
 central nucleus of large tracts of the penumbra. Hence 
 the doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin now appear 
 to the student of Christian thought as permanently em- 
 bedded in the main fabric, forming as they do the founda- 
 tion of that segment of it which is known as ‘ the doctrine 
 of Grace’; they are now very generally regarded as dogmas 
 of the Christian Church, constituting parts of its essential 
 message just as truly as the ideas of the Incarnation, or 
 the Second Coming. It would be premature to express any 
 opinion now with regard to the validity and desirability of 
 this development ; our immediate task is to reconstruct the 
 way in which it came to pass. The development of the 
 third section of Christian doctrine, the doctrine of Grace, 
 carrying within it the doctrines of the Fall and of Original 
 Sin, is associated with the name of Augustine, whom we 
 have already observed as it were from a distance, standing 
 on the frontier which separates classical antiquity from the 
 
 1 It is true that the ‘ holy Church’ is mentioned in the Old Roman 
 Creed, ‘ remission of sins through the holy Church ’ in the African Creed of 
 the third century, and baptism in the Jerusalem Creed of ¢. A.D. 348: but 
 no specific doctrine about these things is defined. 
 

 
 AUGUSTINIANISM 319 
 
 Middle Ages, and of whom it has been strikingly said that 
 the miserable existence of the Roman Empire in the West 
 would seem to have been providentially prolonged into the 
 fifth century solely in order that Augustine might arise 
 within the shelter of its domain, in order to discharge his 
 predestined task of infusing, through his writings, the 
 thought and culture of the old world into the rude and 
 barbarous vitality of the new. 
 
 The history of Christian thought, like that universal 
 history of which it forms a part, is in great measure the 
 history of its creative spirits; and though the plan of our 
 enquiry, seeking to determine that which has been believed 
 ubique, semper, et ab ommibus, necessarily involves the 
 laying of a special emphasis upon the continuous life of 
 the Church and the unbroken self-identity of that diffused 
 corporate consciousness of the Christian society which is 
 the real bearer of its traditional ideas, this conception 
 needs to be perpetually balanced by the recognition of the 
 part played in dogmatic development by the fresh bursts 
 of spontaneous energy which spring from great individual 
 personalities. One such creative personality we have 
 noted in St. Paul, who laid down the lines on which Christian 
 anthropology was to develop. Another has been marked 
 in Origen, the Platonist of Alexandria, some of whose 
 speculations may provide useful material when we come 
 to the constructive part of our task. But the end of the 
 ancient world and the beginning of the Middle Ages was 
 marked by the figure of an even greater Platonist, greater, 
 that is, in the immediate effect which his life and writings 
 produced upon the thought of Christendom. Origen’s 
 influence during his life affected only part of the East and 
 did not extend into the West; and, three centuries after 
 his death, his most daring speculations were repudiated, 
 and he himself was branded as a heretic, by Justinian’s 
 ecclesiastical henchmen, But Augustine from his obscure 
 seaport on the North African coast swayed the whole 
 Western Church as its intellectual dictator, a position from 
 
 1 See Fr. Diekamp, Die origenistischen Streitigketten im sechsten Jahr- 
 hundert und das fiinfte allgemeine Concil, Minster, 1899; L. Duchesne, 
 L’Eglise au vieme siécle (1925), p. 171 f. 
 
320 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 which he has not even yet been deposed, and the mighty 
 energies of his mind and spirit initiated reverberations 
 which affected every sphere of thought. According 
 to Eucken, he was the greatest of purely Christian 
 philosophers, whose fame not even Thomas Aquinas can 
 rival. Like his great master Plato,? he was gifted with 
 the resplendent imagination and the flow of gorgeous 
 imagery which spring from the union of poetic and philo- 
 sophic genius, and he wielded a passionate yet lucid style, 
 which at times could rise, as in the Confessions, to heights 
 of almost dithyrambic power; the derisive nickname of 
 ‘Punic Aristotle’ 3 bestowed upon him by his opponent 
 Julian of Eclanum falls harmlessly to the ground in so far 
 as it may be thought to have implied a disparagement of 
 his literary skill, whilst it admirably describes the encyclo- 
 paedic range of his intellectual interests. He fused Neo- 
 Platonism and Christian theism into a far more intimate 
 and organic synthesis than had been effected by the Alex- 
 andrine Fathers, educing therefrom a vast cosmic picture 
 of the ordo naturarum stretching continuously, in hierarch- 
 ical gradation, from that Divine nature, which is the 
 supreme and unchangeable Good, down to the lowest 
 level of irrational and inanimate natures, a picture of 
 Being not less magnificent than the Plotinian, but unlike 
 it, portraying God as personal and Matter as real.4 He 
 expounded the argument, cogito, ergo sum, before Descartes,°® 
 and the relativity of Time before Kant.® His Confessions 
 represent the most penetrating achievement of Christian 
 
 1 R. Eucken, Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker*, p. 216. 
 
 2 Cf. E. Norden, in Die Kultur dey Gegenwart (1905) i. 8. p. 394. 
 
 3 “ Aristoteles Poenorum’ (op. imp. c. Iul. ili. 199) : ‘ philosophaster 
 Poenorum ’ (ib7d. v. 11). 
 
 4 A brilliant study of St. Augustine’s metaphysic will be found in T. A. 
 Lacey, Nature, Miracle, and Sin (1916), Lectures II and III. 
 
 5 de civit. Dei, xi. 26: ‘nulla in his veris Academicorum argumenta 
 formido, dicentium, quid, si falleris ? si enim fallor,sum. nam qui non 
 est, utique nec falli potest: ac per hoc sum, si fallor’; cf. de vera rvelig. 
 73; solilog.ii.1; de lib. arbitr. ii. 3. 
 
 6 de civit, Det, xi. 6: ‘ quis non videat quod tempora non fuissent, 
 nisi creatura fieret, quae aliquid aliqua motione mutaret ?’ zbid.: ‘ procul 
 dubio non est mundus factus in tempore, sed cum tempore’; conf. xi. 26: 
 ‘inde mihi visum est nihil esse aliud tempus quam distentionem—sed 
 Ccuius rei, nescio, et mirum, si non ipsius animi,’ and the whole of 27. 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 321 
 
 antiquity in the domain of introspective psychology. His 
 treatise ‘On the City of God’ created the science of the 
 philosophy of history, and by its workings in the mind of 
 Charlemagne may well have helped to bring that strange 
 romantic phantom, the Holy Roman Empire, to the birth.! 
 In Christian theology, he developed the Western conception 
 of the Triune Being of God to a point on which no sub- 
 stantial advance has since been made, and by his influence 
 on Pope Leo the Great helped to determine the final formula- 
 tion of the Chalcedonian Christology. 
 
 But more remarkable than any single one of these 
 mental achievements is the general domination exercised 
 for centuries by his spirit, ideas, and manner of thought 
 over the religious life of Western Europe, a domination 
 which has not even yet entirely passed away. Through 
 the doctrine of the Church and the ministry, as articulated 
 by him to meet the exigencies of the Donatist controversy, 
 and through the doctrine of Grace, as elaborated against 
 the Pelagians, his genius played a foremost part in fixing 
 upon Western Christendom that predominantly institu- 
 tional and practical bias, which, reinforced by racial 
 antipathies, inevitably tore it loose from the enfeebled 
 Byzantine East (temporarily in the schism of Photius, 
 and finally in the catastrophe of A.D. 1054), and shaped it 
 into a self-contained organism, a mighty theocratic empire 
 of souls, the Latin Catholic Church of the Middle Ages.? 
 Yet, all through the mediaeval period, within the bosom of 
 the most imposing ecclesiastical system which the world 
 has ever known, Augustine the predestinarian mystic was 
 silently contending with Augustine the hierarch, and the 
 Reformation of the sixteenth century was in great measure 
 the posthumous rebellion of Augustine against Augustine. 
 
 1 Charlemagne ‘ delighted in the books of St. Augustine, and specially 
 in those that bear the title ‘“‘ Of the City of God’”’’ (Einhard, Vita Carol, 
 24, quoted by B. B. Warfield, ERE ii. p. 222). 
 
 2 Cf. H. Reuter, Augustinische Studien (1887), vii. (( Zur Wurdigung der 
 Stellung Augustins in der Geschichte der Kirche’), p. 499: ‘ (Er hat) 
 durch sein geniales litterarisches Schaffen, durch die Wucht der Person- 
 lichkeit, in so epochemachender Weise auf das theologische Denken in 
 Occidente eingewirkt, in demselbe nachgewirkt, dass man sagen darf, die 
 spatere Trennung desselben von dem Oriente sei wider seine Absicht dennoch 
 von thm vorbereitet.’ 
 
 Y 
 
322 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 From Augustine the leaders of the Protestant revolt in- 
 herited the overwhelming sense of God’s universal causality, 
 of the impotence of human nature and the emptiness of 
 human merit, which in logic makes all sacramental and 
 institutional religion otiose: and in Augustine, too, is to 
 be found that lofty conviction of the divine mission of 
 the institutional, visible Church, which nerved Loyola, 
 Borromeo, and Peter Canisius to roll back the flood of 
 rebellion against the Papacy beyond the Alps and the 
 Rhine. The two main camps into which the Reformation 
 sundered the mediaeval Western Church continued to take 
 the authority of Augustine for granted, as second only to 
 that of the inspired writers. The Preface ‘ Of Ceremonies ’ 
 in our own Prayer Book enquires, with rhetorical passion, 
 ‘What would St. Augustine have said ...?’ as though 
 a dictum from him would constitute a final solution of any 
 ecclesiastical dispute. The doctrines of Grace set forth 
 in the Canons of the Council of Trent, in the Thirty Nine 
 Articles, in the Inustitutio of Calvin, in the Augsburg Con- 
 fession, are so many modified and competing versions of 
 Augustinianism.t As in St. Paul’s interpretation of the 
 Old Testament Abraham was the spiritual father of circum- 
 cised and uncircumcised Christians alike,? so in the genealogy 
 of Western religious thinkers Augustine is the ancestor 
 both of the Ultramontane and of the Evangelical? ; and 
 it is no wonder that his version of the Fall-doctrine has 
 stamped itself so deeply upon the imagination of his 
 descendants that it is still very generally believed to be the 
 only Fall-doctrine. 
 
 There could hardly be a greater contrast than that which 
 is presented by the fortunes of Origen, exiled, largely 
 repudiated during his lifetime and anathematised after his 
 death, and those of Augustine, for centuries the unchallenged 
 master of Western theology. Yet it may now be said, 
 without undue anticipation, that one of the conclusions 
 
 1 See Lecture VI. 2AIOMs 1 Val Bes 
 
 3 See Reuter, op. cit. vii. pp. 497-513. This author, however, finds 
 more of the Catholic than of the Evangelicalin Augustine ; cf. the following 
 two judgments: (a) ‘ Augustin gilt auch mir als Begrinder des rdmischen 
 Katholizismus im Occidente’ (p. 497); (0) ‘ fragmentarisch, aber wirklich 
 Evangelisches ist in Augustin ’ (p. 513). 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 323 
 
 which will emerge from our historical review will be that 
 in regard to the particular subject-matter of our enquiry, 
 the ‘once-born’ or ‘ Hellenic’ scheme, as worked out 
 (however imperfectly and confusedly) by the Greek Fathers 
 of the fourth century on the basis of Origen’s speculations, 
 represents not merely the maximum of doctrine to which 
 historical Christianity as such can be said to be committed, 
 but also the only type of Fall-doctrine which is capable 
 of reconciliation with modern knowledge: and that the 
 characteristic elements in the ‘twice-born’ or ‘ African’ 
 theory, as completely elaborated by Augustine, possess 
 neither oecumenical authority nor intrinsic reasonableness. 
 The greater part of this judgment has been already estab- 
 lished in the preceding lecture ; its remainder must now be 
 vindicated by what, in view of the vast field to be covered, 
 will necessarily be a relatively brief and summary sketch 
 of Augustine’s teaching with regard to human nature and 
 the origins of sin.4 
 
 AUGUSTINE'S EARLY LIFE AND TEACHING 
 
 As was observed in the case of Origen, any attempt to 
 estimate the value of a great thinker’s work must begin 
 with some indication of the most important facts of his life. 
 Augustine was born in A.D. 354 at Tagaste,? a small town in 
 Proconsular Numidia, as the son of Patricius, a citizen of 
 curial rank, at that date still a pagan, and his Christian wife 
 Monnica, who has been canonised by the piety of subsequent 
 generations as a pattern of Christian motherhood. He was 
 
 1 The incomparable wealth of documents at our disposal makes it 
 impossible to give anything like an exhaustive list of references and 
 quotations in the course of this highly compressed review, and we shall, 
 therefore, confine ourselves to printing a few of the more important or 
 interesting. The reader desirous of more detailed information must be 
 referred to the monumental works of G. J. Vossius (Historiae de contro- 
 versits quas Pelagius eiusque reliquiae moverunt, lib. vii, 1655) and Petavius 
 (De Pelagiana et semi-Pelagiana haeresibus, 1644); cf. also J. Turmel, 
 Le dogme du péché originel dans St. A. (Revue d’histoive et de littérature 
 religieuse, Vii. p. 128). 
 
 2 Now Souk-Aras, ‘ & vingt-cinq lieues de Bone’ (Portalié, in DTC, 
 col, 2268). 
 
324 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 made a catechumen in his youth, but, owing to Monnica’s 
 dread of the responsibilities which full membership of the 
 Church would impose upon his passionate nature, was not 
 baptised. At the age of sixteen he became a student at 
 Carthage, where his sensuous temperament hurried him into 
 the immoral connexion described in the second book of the 
 Confessions1; and, three years later, his restless intellect, 
 which had already begun to busy itself with the problem 
 of evil, became enmeshed in the toils of that superficially 
 attractive solution which, as we have seen, always has been 
 and must be the deadly foe of Christian monotheism, 
 namely, dualism ; which manifested itself at that time and 
 place in the form of Manicheism. For nine years? he re- 
 mained in a prison of his own creation, morally shackled by 
 the liaison to which we have alluded, and intellectually 
 fettered by the terrible theory of an eternal and 
 indestructible principle of evil, of equal power with God 
 Himself. It would seem that though during this period he 
 accepted dualism as the starting-point for his enquiries into 
 the origin of evil, he never arrived at any completely satis- 
 fying conclusions; and that his status in regard to the 
 Manichean sect was that of a ‘hearer,’ or catechumen, 
 attached to it in the hope of eventually obtaining full 
 enlightenment concerning the questions which tormented 
 him, and not that of the ‘ elect ’ or fully initiated members.? 
 
 The double stress to which Augustine was subjected 
 during this period—the moral agony involved in fighting a 
 losing battle with his own animal passions, and the mental 
 strain of a seemingly futile search for the truth as to the 
 
 1 It was then that the celebrated prayer was uttered—‘ da mihi 
 castitatem, sed noli modo’ (Conf. viii. 7, 17)—the cry of a divided person- 
 ality. Loofs’ suggestion (PRE, ii. p. 261, art. ‘ Augustinus’) that con- 
 cubinage was then tolerated by the Church, and that Augustine’s conduct 
 was therefore not as reprehensible, from the point of view of de facto 
 Christianity, as he himself believed it to be, appears to rest on a misunder- 
 standing of the 17th canon of the Council of Toledo, held in a.p. 400 
 (Hardouin, i. 992) ; see Portalié, op. cit., DTC, col. 2269. 
 
 2 That is, from 373 to 382, the date of his departure from Africa— 
 “novem totos annos’ (de moribus manich. 19). 
 
 3 On the two grades of membership in the Manichean Church, see 
 F. C. Burkitt, Religion of the Manichees, pp. 44 ff. Augustine was later 
 accused of having been a priest of the sect (c. litt, Petil. iii. 20). 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 325 
 
 origin of evil—constituted the psychological conflict which 
 eventually gave birth to his characteristic doctrines of 
 Grace. At the age of twenty-eight he abandoned the formal 
 profession of the Manichean creed, on discovering that 
 Faustus of Milevis, the archpundit of the cult, who had 
 been held up to him as an inspired teacher capable of solving 
 all his difficulties, was nothing but a pretentious quack. 
 There followed his sojourn in Italy and his contact with 
 Ambrose,” whose life and teaching induced in him the con- 
 viction that the Catholic Christianity of his boyhood was 
 in possession of the key to the intellectual problem, without, 
 however, communicating to him the means of solving the 
 moral problem, that is, of regaining control over his sensual 
 appetites. We need not recount again the world-famous 
 story of the spiritual crisis which gripped him in the garden 
 at Milan,® of the childish voice chanting the sentence folle 
 lege, tolle lege, of the solemn words which met his eye as he 
 opened the New Testament—‘ Not in rioting and drunken- 
 ness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and 
 envying ; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not 
 provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.’4 With the 
 perusal of these words the long-repressed complex in his 
 subconscious mind was broken up, the powerful stream of 
 sexual feeling which had for so long stormed and fretted 
 against, and every now and then by sheer force broken 
 through, the repressing activities of the moral censorship, 
 was diverted into a new channel, and henceforward fertilised 
 his whole life with a passion for God—‘ the beauty so ancient 
 yet so new,’ *—expressed under the form of ascetic mon- 
 asticism. His new-found Christianity ®° was deepened and 
 
 1 Conf. v. 3-6. Other reasons contributed to bring about his secession, 
 notably the scandalous lives of the Manichean ‘ elect’ (de moribus manich. 
 li, 18-20), 
 
 2 v. supra, Lecture IV, p. 300. This period covers the years 383-386. 
 
 3 Conf. viii. 12. SOM. Si Tock As 
 
 * Conf. x. 27: ‘sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, 
 sero te amavi.’ 
 
 ‘ T assume that the narrative of the Confessions may be taken ‘ at its 
 face value,’ and that the theory advocated by M. Gourdon (Essai sur la 
 conversion de St. Augustin, 1900), according to which the experience in the 
 Milanese garden was a conversion to philosophy, not to Christianity, need 
 not be seriously considered ; see Portalié, op. cit., col. 2273, 4. 
 
326 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 philosophically formulated in dialectical converse with his 
 friends at the sylvan retreat of Cassiciacum, where doubtless 
 his private leisure was devoted to the further exploration of 
 those ‘ books of the Platonists ’1 (probably the Emneads of 
 Plotinus, in Victorinus’ Latin translation) with which he 
 had already become acquainted at Milan. The year 387 
 witnessed his baptism by Ambrose, the death of Monnica, 
 and his return to Africa, where he began that monastic 
 life? for which the newly transfigured instincts of his nature 
 craved, and which later caused many of the religious orders 
 of the mediaeval Church, friars, eremites, and canons 
 regular, to claim him as their spiritual father and legislator.? 
 Four years before the close of the century he became bishop 
 of Hippo Regius, the modern Bona, a small seaport on the 
 Mediterranean coast which his name has immortalised for 
 ever. 
 
 It is not necessary for our present purposes to carry 
 this sketch of his biography any further, inasmuch as his 
 theology of grace, with its core of anthropology, was already 
 complete in essentials by the time of his consecration to the 
 episcopate, long before he had heard the name of his great 
 opponent Pelagius. We note here a fact which must be 
 borne in mind when we approach our final evaluation of the 
 Augustinian ideas—the fact that they represent that version 
 fof the Christian theory of the origin of evil into which his 
 powerful and ardent spirit was naturally drawn in its recoil 
 from the Iranian theory of an eternal dualism.) Augustine’s 
 conception of the Fall and its consequences was the pro- 
 duct of a reaction,/not against Pelagianism but against 
 Manicheism,) thus constituting the most impressive and 
 celebrated instance of the law which seems to determine the 
 movements of Christian opinion with regard to the subject 
 of our enquiry—the law, namely, that contact with dualism 
 stimulates the mind of the Church towards a fresh accentua- 
 
 1.Conf, vii: 9.3 vill. 2. 
 2 At first in the home which he had inherited from Patricius at Tagaste, 
 
 then at Hippo in a house attached to the church, and finally in the episcopal 
 residence itself. 
 
 3 The so-called “ Rule of St. Augustine’ is an adaptation of a letter 
 (ep. ccxxi.) of general direction and guidance, which he wrote in a.D. 423 
 to a community of women at Hippo. 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 327 
 
 tion of the Fall-doctrine ; and it would seem to have been 
 worked out in comparative peace, not under the stress of 
 controversy, during the first ten years which immediately 
 succeeded Augustine’s conversion. 
 
 We find it, mildly phrased but already complete in 
 essential outline, in the first book of the treatise de diversis 
 guaestionibus ad Simplicianum, a work written in A.D. 397 
 to explain certain difficult passages of Scripture for the 
 benefit of Simplician, Ambrose’s successor in the see of 
 Milan.1 f Augustine here asserts that ‘sin,’ which for the 
 moment seems to be synonymous with ‘ concupiscence * 
 (the passage under discussion is Rom. vil. 7-25, in which, as 
 we have already seen,? duapria and émOupia appear to be 
 more or less convertible terms) originated in the transgression 
 of Adam.* This ‘sin’ has become ingrained into human 
 nature and is transmitted by physical heredity.*/ Here for 
 the first time in the history of Christian thought we meet the 
 epoch-making phrase originale peccatum, meaning a sinful 
 quality which is born with us and is inherent in our con- 
 stitution. But this sinful quality, it is clear, is conceived 
 by Augustine to be ‘sin’ in the fullest sense of the term, 
 albeit involuntarily acquired, for it deserves ‘ punishment,’ ® 
 and therefore involves guilt ; and a little later we find the 
 actual term oviginalis reatus, ‘ original’ or ‘ connatural’ 
 ‘guilt.’® The guilt in question, however, appears at this early 
 stage of Augustine’s thought to be, not so much the supposed 
 
 1 In later years Augustine was accustomed to appeal to this work as 
 evidence for the continuity and consistency of his teaching with regard to 
 Grace throughout his episcopate ; see de don. persev. xxi. 55; de praedest. 
 sanct, iv. 8. 
 
 *eLeecure TIT, p. 142 f: 
 
 3 ad Simplic. 1. q. I, 4: ‘sane quod ait, peccatum revixit adveniente 
 mandato, satis significavit hoc modo aliquando vixisse peccatum, id est 
 notum fuisse, sicut arbitror, in praevaricatione primi hominis, quia et ipse 
 _ mandatum acceperat.’ 
 
 4 ibid. 10: ‘ quod si quaerit aliquis unde hoc scit, quod dicit habitare 
 in carne sua non utique bonum, id est peccatum: unde nisi ex traduce 
 mortalitatis et assiduitate voluptatis? illud est ex poena originalis 
 peccatt, hoc est ex poena frequentati peccati. cum illo in hanc vitam 
 nascimur, hoc vivendo addimus.’ 
 
 5 ibid. 10: ‘ ex poena originalis peccati.’ 
 
 ® zbid. 20 (quoted below, p. 328, n. 3). 
 
328 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 hereditary responsibility for Adam’s transgression,’ as the 
 guilt of having ‘ concupiscence’ in usatall. Itisin any case 
 certain that originale peccatum in Augustine always includes 
 the idea of ‘ original guilt’; and we shall, therefore, for the 
 purposes of this lecture suspend the popular use of the 
 English term ‘original sin’ as meaning merely the bias or 
 tendency towards sin )(which Augustine denotes by con- 
 cupiscentia), and employ the phrase as the strict equivalent 
 of originale peccatum. By virtue of its intimate saturation 
 with ‘ concupiscence ’ and ‘ original guilt,’ the human stock 
 constitutes a single massa peccati or ‘lump of sin’ (this 
 terrible phrase was presumably suggested by Ambrosiaster’s 
 words ‘ all have sinned in Adam as in a lump’?) which as 
 such is justly doomed to everlasting death.* The freedom 
 of the individual will is indeed nominally preserved *; but 
 inasmuch as in unregenerate man the will is invariably 
 determined by ‘ sin,’ that is, by an inborn aversion from the 
 Creator and propension towards creatures, this freedom 
 appears to be little more than a phrase. 
 
 1 So far as we have found traces of the idea of ‘ original guilt’ in 
 pre-Augustinian writers, this is the form which it seems to have taken. 
 
 2 comm. in Rom. v. 12, quoted above, Lecture IV, p. 308, n. 1. 
 
 3 ad Simplic.i.q.2, 16: ‘sunt igitur omnes homines (quandoquidem, ut 
 apostolus ait, in Adam omnes moriuniur, a quo in universum genus huma- 
 num origo ducitur offensionis Dei) una quaedam massa peccati, supplicium 
 debens divinae summaeque iustitiae, quod sive exigatur sive donatur nulla 
 est iniquitas’; 20: ‘ tunc facta est una massa omnium, veniens de traduce 
 peccati et de poena mortalitatis . . . concupiscentia carnalis de peccati 
 poena iam regnans, universum genus humanum tamquam totam et unam 
 conspersionem, oviginali veatu in omnia permanante, confuderat’ (‘ con- 
 spersio’ here means ‘ dough’ or ‘ paste,’ as in 1 Cor. v. 7 Vulg., where it 
 represents ¢uvpaya, Tert., adv. Marcion. iv. 24, et al., and carries on the 
 metaphor of massa). The following variants of the phrase massa peccati, 
 as applied to fallen mankind, have been collected by the learned 
 Benedictine, Dom O. Rottmanner (Der Augustinismus, p. 8): massa 
 Ppeccatorum, lutt, iniquitatis, ivae, mortis, damnationis, offensionis, massa 
 tota vitiata, damnabilis, damnata. 
 
 4 ibid.i.q.1, 11: ‘ velle enim, inquit, adiacet mihi, perficere autem bonum 
 non invenio, his verbis videtur non recte intelligentibus velut auferre 
 liberum arbitrium. sed quomodo aufert, cum dicat, velle adiacet mihi ? 
 certe enim ipsum velle in potestate est, quoniam adiacet nobis ; sed quod 
 perficere bonum non est in potestate, ad meritum pertinet originalis 
 peccati . . . quod non vult malum, hoc agit, superante concupiscentia, 
 non solum vinculo mortalitatis, sed mole consuetudinis roborata.’ 21: 
 ‘liberum voluntatis arbitrium plurimum valet, immo vero, est quidem ; 
 sed in venumdatis sub peccato quid valet ? ’ 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 340 
 
 In God’s resultant dealings with the human race His 
 mercy and justice are equally exhibited. Out of the massa 
 peccatt His mercy selects a fixed number of souls, who 
 through no merits of their own are brought to baptism, 
 ‘justified’ (which in Augustine’s terminology means 
 ‘sanctified ’), and saved.. The rest of mankind is left by His 
 justice in the ‘ lump of sin,’ rolling on its way unhindered to 
 the bottomless pit. The equity of this procedure, which 
 glorifies a small body of arbitrarily chosen favourites, and 
 abandons all other human beings (who are ex hypothesi not 
 more deserving of damnation than the fortunate objects of 
 predestination) to their fate, is defended partly by the 
 consideration that the lost have in any case no right to 
 complain, inasmuch as they only get what they have 
 deserved (by ‘ original guilt ’), and that the predestined have 
 every reason to be satisfied with the arrangement, so far as 
 it affects themselves 1: partly by an appeal to mystery and 
 to the transcendental nature of the workings of the Divine 
 Mind.* ‘ How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways 
 past finding out!’ 
 
 It will be recognised at once that we have now reached 
 the fully rounded, logically coherent expression of that 
 ‘African’ or ‘ twice-born’ type of Fall-doctrine which in 
 our last lecture was seen, slowly assuming definite shape and 
 consistency, in a succession of Latin writers reaching from 
 Tertullian to Ambrosiaster. Considered as a formal dog- 
 matic scheme, it purports to be based upon the well-known 
 Scriptural texts which we have already met with in previous 
 
 1 ad Simplic. i. q. 2,22: ‘ debitum si non reddis, habes quod gratuleris : 
 si reddis, non habes quod queraris ’—an epigram in which, we may surmise, 
 the reprobate would find but cold comfort, if Augustinianism represented 
 objective fact. Cf. also de praedest. sanct. viii. 16: ‘ cur autem fides non 
 omnibus detur, fidelem movere non debet, qui credit ex uno omnes isse in 
 condemnationem sine dubitatione iustissimam: ita ut nulla Dei esset 
 iusta reprehensio, etiam si nullus inde liberaretur.’ 
 
 2 1bid.i.q.2,16: ‘atque ita tenacissime firmissimeque credatur, idipsum 
 quod Deus cuius vult miseretur et quem vult obdurat, hoc est, cuius vult 
 miseretur et cuius vult non miseretur, esse dlicuius occultae atque ab 
 humano modulo investigabilis aequitatis, <ibid.: ‘eorum autem non 
 miseretur, quibus misericordiam non esse praebendam aequitaie occultis- 
 sima et ab humanis sensibus remotissima iudicat. ‘‘ inscrutabilia enim 
 sunt iudicia eius, et investigabiles viae ipsius.’”’’ For comments on this 
 conception of an ‘ occult justice ’’ as an attribute of God, see below, p. 381 f. 
 
330 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 writers, reinforced by the predestinarian passages in the 
 Epistle to the Romans: but, considered as a psychological 
 document, it proclaims itself to be the product of Augustine’s 
 own personality and of the unique circumstances of his life. 
 It was doubtless natural that an African Christian, 
 meditating on the problems of human nature and sin, 
 should have taken the teaching of Tertullian and Cyprian 
 for granted, and that one of Ambrose’s catechumens should 
 have reproduced and developed the Fall-doctrine of his 
 princely master.1 And Augustine’s imperfect acquaintance 
 with Greek would inevitably shut him off from contact with 
 that ‘minimising,’ more humane and reasonable type of 
 Fall-doctrine which we have seen to be characteristic of 
 primitive and Hellenic Christianity. But the ultimate 
 factors, psychological and environmental, which underlay 
 Augustine’s Fall-doctrine, are susceptible of a deeper analysis. 
 Augustinianism embodied some of the more unlovely features 
 of North African Christianity in a peculiarly concentrated 
 form. The crude lights and hard shadows which the burning 
 sun of Africa casts upon its desert sands seem to have sunk 
 into the minds of Tertullian and Cyprian and to have been 
 there transmuted, as by some refracting medium, into the 
 legalistic precision and the pitiless logic of Latin-Punic 
 theology. The narrow, clean-cut idea of the Church and the 
 indifference to the fate of those outside it, the predominantly 
 forensic mode of conceiving sin, and the quasi-commercial 
 treatment of merit which had become traditional in the 
 Christian thought of his native country, left unmistakeable 
 marks upon Augustine’s fully elaborated notions of ‘ seminal 
 identity,’ ‘ original guilt,’ and the massa peccatr. Equally 
 patent is the influence exerted upon his convictions by the 
 less admirable traits of his own character. The downright 
 brutality which led him to discard his mistress of fifteen 
 years’ standing, the mother of Adeodatus, without, appar- 
 ently, so much as a thought of making reparation for his 
 fault by marrying her, appears in his theology as the heart- 
 lessness which leaves the great bulk of mankind, even 
 
 1 But see E. Buonaiuti, Agostino e la colpa ereditaria (Ricerche religiose, 
 Sept. 1926, pp. 401 ff.), who minimises the influence of Ambrose on Augus- 
 tine’s Fall-doctrine, and emphasises that of Ambrosiaster. 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 331 
 
 helpless infants, in the massa perditionis, doomed to ever- 
 lasting flames for a sin which is not theirown. The terrible 
 strength of the sexual passions which devastated his youth 
 and early manhood accounts for the prominence which the 
 idea of ‘ concupiscence’ assumes in his writings; and the 
 apparently instantaneous sublimation of these emotions 
 through his conversion explains the feeling of irresistible 
 grace upon which his theology of predestination and election 
 was founded, as well as the ultra-puritan fanaticism which, 
 as we Shall see, coloured his opinions with regard to wedlock 
 and procreation. Augustine’s personality, in short, was that 
 of the typical ‘ introvert,’ or ‘ twice-born’ religious genius. 
 We have in a previous lecture shown how such ‘ sick souls,’ 
 distracted by the conflict between their stormy passions and 
 the no less insistent longing for immediate communion with 
 and possession of God, attain to peace and unification only 
 through a mental and emotional explosion which diverts the 
 greater part of the obscure energies of sex into the channel of 
 mystical religion, through an interior bouleversement which 
 appears in consciousness as the hand of God reaching down 
 from the clouds to pluck the brand from the burning, the 
 favoured sinner from the ‘ lump of perdition.’ The theology 
 which is based upon experience of this kind will always 
 appeal to Augustine’s psychological kinsfolk, those who not 
 merely believe but intuitively know the Eternal God to be 
 the supreme fact of life, the one immediately apprehended 
 and luminously self-evident presupposition of thought, 
 emotion, and action. Paul, Augustine, Luther, Newman— 
 the great succession of the ‘ twice-born’ giants of religion 
 stretches across the centuries, transcending denominational 
 and credal barriers, and doubtless will stretch through ages 
 yet unborn. 
 
 The Catholic or Universal Church, however, if it is to be 
 true to its name, must provide spiritual shelter and nourish- 
 ment, not merely for the minority of introverts or mystics, 
 but also for the more normal, prosaic, and healthy-minded 
 type of man, to whom the ideal of ethical goodness makes 
 a direct and intelligible appeal, but whose strictly religious 
 feelings are naturally weak and need nursing throughout 
 the whole of his life. If the Christian society is to be more 
 
332 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 than a select coterie of mystics, it must reckon with the fact 
 that the majority of its members will be—and, given the 
 facts of human nature, ought to be—of the extravert, 
 practical, and ‘ hard-headed’ type. Ina favourable environ- 
 ment, there is no reason why the normal unimaginative man 
 should not develop a Christianity as sincere and as intense, 
 in its own way, as the more passionate and introspective 
 strain of devotion which commends itself to the small band 
 of those who are ‘ born religious.’ It is a singular coinci- 
 dence—a believer in the Divine governance of history will 
 call it providence—that whilst the fiery African monk, 
 Augustine, was working out what seemed to be the impli- 
 cations of repentance, as experienced by the ‘ twice-born ’ 
 temperament, and systematising the severer version of the 
 Fall-doctrine, which naturally arises from it, another monk, 
 born in these islands, was simultaneously and independently 
 constructing a doctrine of human nature and of sin, which is 
 the classical product, within the sphere of Christian anthro- 
 pology, of the ‘ once-born,’ healthy-minded, strongly ethical 
 but feebly religious type of personality. 
 
 PELAGIANISM 
 
 Pelagius, according to Jerome, was ‘ natione Scottus,’ 
 that is, an Irishman. His name is presumably the Hellenic 
 equivalent of some such Gaelic appellation as Mwrchu, 
 ‘hound of the sea.’1 He was not in Holy Orders, and does 
 not seem, at the date of his appearance on the stage of 
 history, to have been attached to any particular monastic 
 community. In his youth he may have been a coenobite 
 and so sheltered by the cloister from those temptations 
 which had left ineffaceable scars upon Augustine’s soul. 
 He is admitted even by his adversaries to have been a man 
 of great piety and virtue,” except in regard to the single 
 
 1 j. B. Bury, Life of St. Patrick, p. 43. 
 
 2 Cf. Aug. de pecc. merit. iii. 1: ‘ Pelagii quaedam scripta, viri ut 
 audio sancti et non parvo provectu Christiani’; 5: ‘ bonum et praedican- 
 dum virum.’ I do not know on what ground Dr. W. Bright accuses 
 Pelagius of a ‘ defect of humility’ (Select Anti-Pelagian Treatises, Introd, 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 333 
 
 point of truthfulness ; and even here it is probable that the 
 assertions of vehement controversialists require to be con- 
 siderably discounted. He is first heard of in Rome, at the 
 beginning of the fifth century, engaged in what appears to 
 have been a kind of ‘mission’ to the capital city. The 
 moral standard of Roman Christianity was low enough as 
 the result of a century’s influx into the Church of half- 
 converted heathens; and the figure of Pelagius presents 
 itself to us, if we may so say, as a combination of Savonarola 
 and Charles Kingsley, denouncing the sins of society and 
 inculcating a highly ethical and puritan type of religion, 
 which represented the external and disciplinary element in 
 monasticism as contrasted with the interior and mystical 
 element which so largely inspired the thought of Augustine. 
 This fifth-century exponent of ‘muscular Christianity ’ 
 found his most fervent disciple and colleague in a man 
 of very different type from himself, the anaemic lawyer 
 Caelestius, who carried his monastic enthusiasm so far as 
 to insist upon literal and absolute poverty as an indis- 
 pensable condition of true Christian life. The strongly 
 ethical and non-mystical type of religion inculcated by the 
 two missioners necessarily presupposed an intense insistence 
 upon the absolute, uncontrolled, undetermined freedom of 
 the will. Pelagius had no patience with moral weaklings 
 or invalids ; he could not understand the idea of the ‘ moral 
 struggle.’ The contention, that the frailty of human 
 nature made conformity with the highest ideals a matter 
 of striving and effort, seemed to him merely a dishonest 
 excuse, put forward by hypocrites who intended to go on 
 sinning, and a disparagement of the justice and benevolence 
 of God, in that He is thereby accused by implication of 
 having given commandments which are difficult of fulfilment 
 by man. This naturally led to a revival of the position 
 maintained by Lactantius in the previous century, in which 
 the emphasis is laid on the rational natureand autonomous 
 free-will of man, as efficient causes of his salvation, rather 
 
 p. viii) and even of ‘ unchristian pride’ (The Age of the Fathers, ii. p. 164)— 
 unless it be on the ground that disbelief in original sin is per se an infallible 
 symptom of these qualities. 
 
334 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 than on the grace of God. Human nature is asserted to be 
 absolutely unimpaired, in a condition of perfect poise and 
 equilibrium ; and all sin, instead of being the rebellion of 
 the lower part of man’s nature against the higher, is regarded 
 as the deliberate, conscious self-expression of the whole 
 personality. There are no such things as ‘ sins of weakness’ ; 
 men sin according to Pelagius because they choose to sin, 
 because they have calmly and deliberately faced the question 
 of sin, and decided that sin represents for them the most 
 desirable course of conduct. We may postpone for the 
 moment any comments upon this amazing psychology, and 
 content ourselves with pointing out that such a position 
 went far beyond the libertarianism of the Greek Fathers, 
 qualified as this was by the admission of a ‘ weakness’ or 
 tendency to ‘ disintegration ’ inherent in man; and neces- 
 sarily led to the repudiation of the whole of that floating 
 tradition as to an innate flaw or disease of human nature, 
 which, though not part of the Faith, was very generally 
 accepted throughout the Church as part of the necessary 
 presuppositions of the Faith. Pelagianism was not an 
 extreme development of the “ once-born’ form of the Fall- 
 doctrine, but a round denial of that doctrine in all forms. 
 Whilst the Celtic monk was thus developing a puritan 
 and semi-monastic type of religion at Rome, the African 
 monk Augustine was absorbed in the duties of his episcopal 
 office, and in the controversy with the Donatists. We have 
 already drawn attention to the fact that the systems of the 
 two great antagonists Augustine and Pelagius were developed 
 in entire independence of each other. The characteristic 
 ideas of Augustine, as we have seen from the treatise ad 
 Simplicianum, had assumed their essential shape as early 
 as 397, long before he had ever heard of Pelagius. The 
 views of Pelagius, on the other hand, appear in his commen- 
 tary on the Epistles of St. Paul, and particularly in his 
 
 1 This commentary seems in the first instance to have been issued 
 anonymously, though the secret of its origin leaked out here and there: 
 hence it survived the downfall of its author, and continued to be quoted 
 and copied throughout the Middle Ages, eventually coming, by some 
 inexplicable chance, to be included in a codex of the works of St. Jerome 
 used by Erasmus for his edition of the works of that Father, and so passing 
 into all the standard editions of Jerome, down to Migne’s PL, Its true 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 3355 
 
 exposition of the crucial passage Romans v. 12 ff.1; this 
 commentary, according to Dr. Souter, was written between 
 A.D. 406 and 410.2 We must conceive of Augustinianism 
 and Pelagianism as two great cycles of teaching which 
 during the first ten years of the fifth century were slowly 
 spreading from two centres, Carthage and Rome. Sooner 
 or later they were bound to collide; and the only question 
 was, which would be the first to secure the allegiance of the 
 greater part of the West. The Augustinian system had 
 
 
 
 provenance has now been established, and its text critically re-constructed, 
 
 by Dr. A. Souter, Pelagius’s Expositions of Thirteen Epistles of St. Paul 
 ~ (Cambridge Texts and Studies, IX.) Vol. I, Introduction (1922), Vol. II, 
 Text (1926). 
 
 1 The specifically ‘ Pelagian ’ character of his exegesis may be illustrated 
 by the following comments: Rom. v. 12: ‘ proptevea sicut per unum 
 hominem in hunc mundum peccatum introit et per peccatum mors, exemplo 
 vel forma... et tta in omnes homines (mors) pertransiit, in quo omnes 
 moriuntuy dum ita peccant, et similiter moriuntur : non enim in Abraham 
 et Isaac (et Jacob) pertransiit, de quibus dicit Dominus: ‘“‘ omnes enim 
 ili vivunt’’ . . . Sive: in eos pertransiit qui humano (et) non caelesti 
 ritu vivebant.? Rom. v.15: ‘ si enim unius delicto multt morvtui sunt etc, 
 plus praevaluit iustitia in vivificando quam peccatum in occidendo, quia 
 Adam tantum se et suos posteros interfecit, Christus autem et qui tunc 
 erant in corpore et posterosl iberavit .hi autem qui contra traducem 
 peccati sunt, ita illam impugnare nituntur: “si Adae’’ inquiunt “‘ pecca- 
 tum etiam non peccantibus nocuit, ergo et Christi iustitia etiam non 
 credentibus prodest ; quia similiter, immo et magis dicit per unum salvari 
 quam per unum ante perierant.”’ deinde aiunt “si baptismum mundat 
 antiquum illud delictum, qui de duobus baptizatis nati fuerint debent hoc 
 carere peccato: non enim potuerunt ad filios transmittere quod ipsi 
 minime habuerunt.”’’ (See below, p. 367, nn. 3, 4, for Augustine’s reply to 
 this objection.) ‘. . . iniustum esse dicentes ut hodie nata anima, non 
 ex massa Adae, tam antiquum peccatum portet alienum, dicunt etiam 
 nulla ratione concedi ut Deus, qui propria homini peccata remittet, 
 imputet aliena.’ (Augustine, who quotes part of this extract, from 
 ‘deinde aiunt ’ onwards, in de pecc. merit. iii. c. 3, suggests that Pelagius’ 
 use of the third person to introduce his own opinions betrays a conscious- 
 ness that those opinions were contrary to the received faith of the Church. 
 This does not seem a justifiable inference: the form of speech in question 
 need not imply more than the dominance of the theory, which Pelagius 
 wishes to controvert, at Rome and in the West.) Rom. vii. 8: ‘ occastone 
 ergo accepta peccatum per mandatum ’—the innate ‘sin’ which appears in 
 this chapter is explained to be the personal Devil. 18-24: the agonising 
 moral struggle depicted by the Apostle is represented as a struggle against 
 voluntarily acquired habit, not against congenital weakness or sinfulness. 
 Cf. also 1 Cor. xv. 22: ‘ sicut in Adam omnes moriuntur etc. sicut per 
 Adam mors intravit, quia primus ipse mortuus est.’ 
 
 * op, cit. 1, p. 4. 
 
336 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the advantage of being embodied, not in express words but 
 aS a pervading inspiration, in one of the greatest literary 
 and devotional classics of all time, namely, the Confessions, 
 which, it would seem, were as much a household book in 
 serious Western Christian families of the fifth century as 
 was The Christian Year in those of the Victorian epoch, 
 and doubtless did as much to spread the Augustinian point 
 of view as did Keble’s volume to disseminate the principles 
 of Tractarianism. The first shot in the great battle was 
 fired when an unnamed bishop! quoted in the presence 
 of Pelagius the famous prayer da quod tubes, et tube quod 
 vis 2‘ give what Thou dost command,’ that is, ‘ give me 
 the power to fulfil Thy commands,’ and then ‘ command 
 whatever Thou dost will.’ This seemed to Pelagius to con- 
 tain teaching of the most pernicious kind, as implying the 
 utter helplessness of man to raise himself out of the morass 
 of sin, and as therefore likely to weaken that tone of healthy 
 self-reliance which he wished to encourage in his disciples. 
 Dr. W. Bright imaginatively reconstructs the thoughts of 
 Pelagius on da quod tubes as follows : 
 
 Give what Thou commandest! . . . Is God to be expected to 
 save us “ without our stir’? Are we to sit with folded hands, 
 instead of striving, wrestling, taking the kingdom by force, 
 labouring and energizing in the work of our salvation? Surely 
 Christians are too ready, as it is, to excuse their own idleness 
 under the pretence of depending on God’s working ; to deceive 
 themselves by talking of their weakness ; to forget that they can 
 serve Him if they will; to fancy that they honour Him by a 
 listlessness which wears the mask of pious humility, but is in 
 fact no better than undutiful and ungrateful sloth.® 
 
 From this moment onwards, Pelagianism and Augustini- 
 anism, the final expressions of the extravert and introvert 
 types of religious and ethical experience, stood before the 
 Christian world as two opposed theories of man, sin, and 
 
 1 de dono persev. 53: ‘ quae mea verba Pelagius Romae, cum a quodam 
 fratre et coepiscopo meo fuissent eo praesente commemorata, ferre non 
 potuit.’ 
 
 * Conf. x. 29: ‘O amor, qui semper ardes et numquam extingueris, 
 caritas, Deus meus, accende me! continentiam iubes: da quod iubes, et 
 iube quod vis.’ ‘da quod iubes’ also occurs in de pece, merit, ii. 5 ; de spir, 
 et litt. 22. 
 
 3 The Age of the Fathers (1903), ii. p. 163. 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 337 
 
 grace, destined for the next generation to be locked in 
 deadly conflict, and pushing each other, by virtue of their 
 mutual repulsion, into more and more undesirable extremes. 
 
 ~It will be appropriate here to sketch the completed form 
 of Pelagianism, as the issues raised in the fifth century are 
 fundamentally identical with those which confront the 
 Christian speculator on the problem of the origin of evil 
 to-day: and by Pelaganism I do not mean so much the 
 personal views of Pelagius as the whole coherent and rounded 
 system which grew out of his controversy with Augustine, 
 and for the elaboration of which his two chief disciples, 
 Caelestius and Julian, bishop of Eclanum, were as respon- 
 sible as Pelagius himself. This sketch must be prefaced by 
 the warning that it will be necessary, for the sake of lucidity, 
 to keep our attention strictly concentrated upon the anthro- 
 pological sector of the battlefield fought over by the two 
 great champions, that is, upon the ideas of the Fall and 
 Original Sin only, and to neglect the vast and mysterious 
 questions which lie on either side of these ideas, the question 
 of Divine predestination, on the one hand, and of the nature, 
 operation, and efficacy of Divine grace, on the other. Such 
 an artificial abstraction of the anthropological development 
 from its soteriological context will, indeed, involve a certain 
 relative mutilation of history ; which, nevertheless, will not 
 be censured by those who accept the Bergsonian position, 
 that every particular science must necessarily mutilate 
 Reality, by isolating a given aspect of it, in order to render 
 it intelligible. What follows, therefore, does not purport 
 to be a conspectus of the whole of Pelagianism or of the 
 Pelagian controversy, but merely of such elements in them 
 as are relevant to the scope of our present enquiry. 
 
 The practical and evangelistic interests which lay at the 
 roots of Pelagius’ thought have been already explained. We 
 have now to lay bare the theoretical assumptions on which 
 it was formally based. Pelagius meant to be, and believed 
 himself to be, an orthodox Catholic Christian ; and both he 
 and his disciple Caelestius professed a special reverence for 
 the auctoritas of the Apostolic see.1_ Those who are familiar 
 
 1 Pelagius (libellus fidet ad Innocent. papam, ap. 5. Aug. opera, 1700, 
 tom, x., appendix ii, pp. 64-65) says: ‘ haec est fides, papa beatissime, 
 Zz 
 
 id 
 
338 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 with the history of the primitive Church will find nothing 
 paradoxical in the statement that in his veneration for 
 ecclesiastical tradition Pelagius resembled all the great 
 heresiarchs of antiquity. Apart from the Gnostic leaders 
 alluded to in our last lecture, most of whom were heathens 
 endeavouring to borrow some of the clothes of Christianity 
 rather than erring or eccentric Christians,! those thinkers 
 whose speculations were destined to ultimate rejection by 
 the common mind of the ‘ Great Church’ wrote and taught 
 under the influence of one or other of two beliefs—either 
 that they were explaining, not impugning, some hitherto 
 unformulated portion of the deposit of Faith, or that the 
 questions with which their characteristic opinions had to do 
 were such as had been left open by the Apostolic tradition. 
 Pelagius was dominated by the latter conviction. He was, 
 of course, perfectly familiar with the Pauline texts which 
 assert a causal connexion between the sin of Adam and the 
 sinfulness and mortality of his descendants: and he was 
 well aware, as his commentary on the Pauline Epistles 
 shows,? of the existence of the widely diffused theory which 
 interpreted that connexion in terms of psycho-physiological 
 heredity. But he believed that the consensus of opinion 
 in support of the tvadux peccati was not so great as to consti- 
 tute this theory a doctrine of the Church or to make it a part 
 of the essential Gospel. Hence, at the synod of Diospolis, 
 when reproached with certain indiscreet passages in his 
 letter to the pious widow Livania, he replied ‘ I anathema- 
 tise these words as foolish, but not as heretical, seeing that 
 there is no question of a matter of dogma ’ 8 ; and Caelestius 
 at Carthage affirmed that, whilst well aware that the Fall- 
 doctrine was widely held 7m the Church, he had always 
 understood that it was not held by the Church, having known 
 various orthodox presbyters who had denied it without cen- 
 
 quam in ecclesia catholica didicimus . . . in qua si minus perite aut 
 parum caute aliquid forte positum est, emendari cupimus a te, qui Petri et 
 fidem et sedem tenes.’ For the attitude of Caelestius, cf. de pecc. orig. 
 7: “immo se omnia quae sedes illa damnaret damnaturum esse promisit.’ 
 
 1 v, supra, Lecture IV, p. 182. 
 
 * For quotations see above, p. 335. 
 
 3 de gest. Pelag. 6: ‘ anathematizo quasi stultos, non quasi haereticos, 
 siquidem non est dogma.’ 
 
 
 
 < —_— ee ee a ee a 
 
 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 339 
 
 sure.t Asan instance of such a person, he quoted ‘ Rufinus, 
 who stayed at Rome with the holy Pammachius’?; he 
 might with greater effect have cited Clement of Alexandria.® 
 If the state of Church opinion on this subject down to the 
 conversion of Augustine has been correctly summarised in 
 our preceding lecture, it must be allowed that the Pelagians 
 were, at the moment, well within their rights in taking up 
 this attitude. From the standpoint of the modern historian, 
 as he looks back upon the Pelagian controversy over an 
 interval of sixteen centuries, it may be (and we shall, at the 
 right time, argue that it is) fair to regard the wide diffusion 
 of a basic though ill-defined essence of Fall-doctrine in the 
 pre-Augustinian Church as sufficient, when taken in com- 
 bination with the persistence of this belief until now, to 
 vindicate its claim to satisfy the Vincentian test of semper, 
 interpreted with reasonable elasticity: but it would be 
 manifestly unjust to censure a thinker of the fifth century 
 for not anticipating this standpoint. Given the assump- 
 tions of his day, Pelagius was perfectly justified in challenging 
 the Fall-doctrine, in that “‘ twice-born’ shape which it then 
 wore in the West; it may be added, that a dispassionate 
 student of dogmatic development will feel no regret that the 
 experiment of producing an entirely indeterministic version 
 of Christianity should have been made. Theology, like 
 other sciences, progresses very largely by means of false 
 starts and experiments which come to nothing. The 
 gradual comprehension of Christian truth is a dialectical 
 process zig-zagging from side to side—an extreme and 
 exaggerated thesis provoking an equally over-emphasised 
 antithesis, until, in the course of ages, the final synthesis 
 which commends itself to the diffused consciousness of the 
 Christian society is ultimately attained. 
 
 1 de pecc. ovig. 3: ‘ dixi de traduce peccati dubium me esse, ita tamen 
 ut cui donavit Deus gratiam peritiae consentiam; quia diversa ab eis 
 audivi, qui utique in ecclesia catholica constituti sunt presbyteri’ ; 7b7d. 
 4: ‘iam de traduce peccati dixi, quia intra catholicam constitutos plures 
 audivi destruere, nec non et alios adstruere: licet quaestionis res sit ista, 
 non haeresis.’ 
 
 2 ibid. 3: ‘sanctus presbyter Rufinus Romae qui mansit cum sancto 
 Pammachio; ego audivi illum dicentem, quia tradux peccati non sit.’ 
 
 3 uv. supra, Lecture IV, p. 207, n. 4, for a passage in which Clement at 
 least verbally seems to deny ‘ original sin ’ in any sense. 
 
340 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 As an intellectual system, Pelagianism claimed to base 
 itself upon the essential goodness of God. | God is good, and 
 therefore everything that He has made is immutably good., 
 Here at the outset we come across a non sequitur ; Pelagius 
 does not allow for the possibility that the specific goodness 
 or excellence of a particular form of created being may pre- 
 suppose freedom, and a consequent capacity for temporary 
 or even permanent self-injury. It is explained that Adam 
 was endowed at his creation with a special ‘ grace,’ a state- 
 ment which at first sight seems to echo the Augustinian 
 language ; but the content of this ‘ grace’ is defined as con- 
 sisting solely in the powers of reason and of free-will which 
 distinguish humanity from the beasts. According to Julan, 
 Adam’s intellectual attainments were very low and his moral 
 character very high. He and his descendants would have 
 died whether there had been any transgression or not ; 
 the Divine institution of marriage, indeed, presupposes 
 death, as the begetting of children is designed to fill up the 
 gaps left in the ranks of humanity by physical dissolution. 
 Adam was also liable to pain and disease—a contention 
 against which Augustine directed shafts of ponderous and 
 tasteless sarcasm, dilating upon the ‘ Pelagian Paradise,’ + 
 full of aches, pains, cramps, diseases, and other ills, in much 
 the same style as that unhappily employed upon a well- 
 known occasion by Bishop Wilberforce in commenting on . 
 Huxley’s view of the animal ancestry of man. The primal 
 sin injured Adam himself—and presumably Eve—alone, and 
 that in a purely mechanical and external sense, in so far 
 
 1 op. imperf. c. Iulian. iii. 154: ‘naturam humanam a Deo bono 
 conditam magno inobedientiae peccato ita fuisse vitiatam, ut etiam 
 posteritas inde traheret mortis meritum atque supplicium ... et contra 
 vos et contra Manichaeos catholica fides dicit. sed vos qui hoc negatis, 
 quaeso, paulisper paradisum cogitate. placetne vobis, ut ponamus ibi 
 castos et castas contra libidinem dimicantes (the psychologist will find it 
 highly significant that this is the first instance of human misery to occur 
 to Augustine’s mind); gravidas nauseantes, fastidientes, pallentes; alias 
 in abortu puerperia immatura fundentes, alias in partu gementes et 
 ululantes ...? (there is much more in the same style) certe si talis 
 paradisus pingeretur, nullus diceret esse paradisum, nec si supra legisset 
 hoc nomen inscriptum ; nec diceret errasse pictorem, sed plane agnosceret 
 irrisorem. verumtamen eorum qui vos noverunt, nemo miraretur, si 
 adderetur nomen vestrum ad titulum, et scriberetur, paradisus Pelagi- 
 anorum. Cf. ibid. iii. 95,147; Vi. 25, 27, 28, 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 341 
 
 as it procured their banishment from the happy Garden. 
 Hence human nature, as such, is unaffected by Adam’s 
 or any other individual’s misdeeds. Whatever the sins of 
 previous generations may have been, every birth represents 
 a fresh start in human history—every infant is born in the 
 same condition as that enjoyed by Adam before the Fall, 
 with unimpaired free-will and no inherited psychological 
 handicap of any kind. _ Free-will is defined as consisting in 
 a mere capacity or possibility either of good or of evil,? that 
 is, in pure indetermination, in a mathematical point of 
 uncontrolled and unmotived spontaneity. We may com- 
 pare this perfect equilibrium of the will, as the Pelagians 
 conceived it, inclining in itself neither to virtue nor to vice, 
 with a balance of exquisite poise, of which the beam remains 
 absolutely horizontal, yet hung with such tremulous 
 delicacy that the faintest breath may incline it either this 
 way or that. So immutable is the freedom of the will that 
 the Pelagians, contradicting the most patent facts of human 
 experience, appeared to deny the existence of any such thing 
 as the tyranny of habit. A man may commit a sin one 
 hundred times, and yet after the hundredth sin he is no more 
 inclined to commit it, his willis no more biassed or trammelled 
 than it was before he began the series of sinful acts.? It 
 follows that this mechanically flawless free-will is quite 
 sufficient in itself to enable man to live without sin; and 
 
 1 Pelagius, bellus fidet, ad fin.: ‘nos vero dicimus, hominem semper 
 et peccare et non peccare posse, ut semper nos liberi confiteamur esse 
 arbitrii’; Julian, ap. op. imperf. i. 78: ‘libertas arbitrii, qua a Deo 
 emancipatus homo est, in admittendi peccati et abstinendi a peccato 
 possibilitate consistit’; 7bid. vi. 9: ‘liberum arbitrium, quod non est 
 aliud quam possibilitas peccandi et non peccandi.’ 
 
 2 op. wmperf. c. Iulian. i. 91 (Julian): ‘liberum autem arbitrium et 
 post peccata tam plenum est quam fuit ante peccata’; ibid. 96: ‘nos 
 dicimus peccato hominis non naturae statum mutari, sed meriti qualitatem.’ 
 Pelag. ap. Aug. de nat. et grat. 19: ‘ quomodo potuit humanam debilitare 
 vel mutare naturam quod substantia caret ?’ (Notice that both the great 
 protagonists accept the traditional Christian-Platonist view of the 
 anhypostatic nature of evil.) The Pelagians were, however, by no means 
 invariably consistent, permitting themselves occasionally to invoke the 
 “tyranny of habit’ as an explanation of the fact of the moral struggle ; 
 cf. Pelag. comment. in epp. S. Pauli, on Rom. vii. 7-24 (Souter, op. cit., ii. 
 p. 56 ff.); op. imperf. c. Iulian. iv. 103 (Aug.): ‘nam et ille qui dicit, 
 “non quod volo ago,’ certe secundum vos necessitate consuetudinis 
 premitur.’ 
 
342 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 in point of fact there were sinless individuals even before 
 the Incarnation—Abel, Enoch, and many others amongst 
 Biblical characters,| and many philosophers amongst the 
 Pagans.” Hence, there never can be any sort of excuse for, 
 or palliative of, sin of any kind. In his letter to Demetrias 
 Pelagius denounces the idea of human frailty as a delusion, 
 
 We contradict the Lord to His face when we say, It is hard; 
 it is difficult; we cannot; we are men; we are encompassed 
 with fragile flesh. O blind madness! O unholy audacity! We 
 charge the God of all knowledge with a two-fold ignorance, that 
 He does not seem to know what He has made nor what He has 
 commanded, as though, forgetting the human weakness of which 
 He is Himself the author, He had imposed laws on man which he 
 cannot endure.® 
 
 This unbalanced insistence upon the power of the will, which 
 takes no account of the innumerable types of morbid, per- 
 verted, asthenic wills which actually exist, seems to have 
 prevented the Pelagian school as a whole from arriving at 
 a single coherent theory of the relation of appetite, impulse, 
 and feeling to conscious volition, or at a single unanimous 
 judgment as to the moral value to be attributed to the sub- 
 rational elements in human nature. To denote these latter, 
 they had no other word than the unsatisfactory, already 
 somewhat question-begging, term ‘ concupiscence.’ Though 
 his fundamental axioms forbid him to speak of concupiscence 
 as sinful, Pelagius is monk enough to insist that it must be 
 perpetually repressed by will-power. Julian, however, the 
 jovial and worldly bishop of Eclanum, who may perhaps be 
 described as a fifth-century Talleyrand, was acute enough to 
 see that this view really conceded one of the key-contentions 
 of Augustinianism. For him, all the instincts of human 
 nature are innocent, and require only to be regulated, not 
 
 1 de nat, et grat. 42; Pelag. ad Demetriad. ep. iil. (ap. S. Aug. opera, 
 1700, tom. ii., appendix, pp. 4-13). 
 
 2 ad Demetriad. iii. 
 
 $) 408d. (KV, t) 0 . verum e contrario fastidioso ac remisso animo, 
 superborum ac nequam servorum more, in os Domini reclamamus ac 
 dicimus, durum est, arduum est, non possumus; homines sumus, fragili 
 carne circumdamur. o caecam insaniam! o profanam temeritatem! 
 duplici ignorantia accusamus Deum scientiae, ut videatur nescire quod 
 fecit, nescire quod iussit ; quasi oblitus fragilitatis humanae, cuius auctor 
 ipse est, imposuerit homini mandata quae ferre non possit.’ 
 
 a a 
 
 
 
 
 eS ee 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 343 
 
 suppressed, by reason using will as its instrument; they 
 only become evil fer accidens, when indulged to excess. He 
 does not hesitate to affirm that concupiscence, even in the 
 more restricted sense of the term, existed in Christ.1. Julian 
 may thus claim the credit of having been the first Christian 
 writer to grasp with absolute clearness the crucial idea of the 
 moral neutrality of bodily appetite—an idea which, as we 
 have seen, the Jewish elaborators of the yégerv-doctrine and 
 Gregory of Nyssa were on the verge of attaining, but never 
 actually attained, and which would have saved the later 
 Church from endless confusion of thought, had theological 
 passion not refused it the opportunity of a fair hearing. 
 From the unqualified libertarianism which has just 
 been sketched it follows that the empirical universality 
 of sin neither requires nor is capable of any explanation 
 other than the bald statement that most men have as a 
 matter of fact chosen to sin. There could, of course, be 
 no question in the minds of Pelagius and his associates of 
 repudiating St. Paul’s language as to the causal connexion 
 between the transgression of Adam and the sinfulness of 
 mankind: but this causality is explained as operating 
 solely by way of ‘social,’ as contrasted with biological, 
 inheritance, and as having no concern with or effect upon 
 the interior constitution of the soul. | Evil is transmitted 
 from generation to generation by bad examples, unjust 
 laws, profligate manners and customs;/ and the whole 
 idea of a physiological propagation of sin is rejected with 
 indignation, as making God responsible for the perpetual 
 creation of evil natures, and as being, in effect, Manichean.. 
 Pelagius’ adversaries were not slow to confront him 
 with a difficulty arising out of the assumed mutual implica- 
 tion of the practice of infant baptism and the theory of 
 
 1 op. imperf. c. Iulian. iv. 45-64 (note especially Julian’s rhetorical 
 question with regard to the incarnate Christ): ‘quae autem gloria 
 castitatis, si virilitas magis aberat quam voluntas, et quod putabatur 
 fieri de vigore animi veniebat de debilitate membrorum ?’ ‘The form of 
 this question can hardly be said to be characterised by the maximum of 
 reverence or good taste; but the point which it contains, that the denial 
 of any fundamental instinct to our Lord’s human nature is Apollinarian, is 
 a perfectly sound one, and Augustine can only meet it by the disastrous 
 argument that concupiscence cannot have existed in Christ, as His birth, 
 being miraculous, was not preceded by concupiscence. 
 
344 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 ‘ original sin’ (in the Augustinian signification of the term) : 
 our study of Origen and Cyprian, it will be remembered, 
 led us to the conclusion that whether or no there be a 
 logical connexion between the practice and the doctrine, 
 there is undoubtedly a historical and psychological con- 
 nexion, in the sense that the former was very largely . 
 responsible for the growth of the latter. The difficulty 
 may be expressed as follows: ‘ If newly born infants, who 
 in the nature of things cannot have committed actual sin, 
 are also free from any kind of birth-sin, what is the use 
 of infant baptism?’ A modern Pelagian would doubtless 
 not admit the existence of any difficulty ; we may reason- 
 ably imagine him as replying ‘ Considered per se, infant 
 baptism is of no use at all, at any rate so_far as any direct 
 effects upon the infant are concerned : i considered in 
 regard to its subjective influence upon parents, sponsors, 
 _ and others who may assist at the ceremony, it is often a 
 - source of edification, as vividly symbolising the enrolment 
 of the newly born in the ranks of the Christian society, and 
 the love and care with which humanity at its best surrounds 
 its weakest and most helpless members.’} Pelagius, how- 
 ever, as an orthodox Catholic Christian of the fifth century, 
 was disabled from dealing with the question in so trenchant 
 a manner. For him, as for all his contemporaries, baptism 
 was a sacramental mystery which ex opere operato 1m- 
 parted salvation to its recipients, and his loyalty to Church 
 authority forbade him to challenge the now firmly estab- 
 lished custom which sanctioned its administration to 
 infants!; indeed, his followers anathematised all those 
 who denied the necessity of infant baptism.? He therefore 
 drew a distinction between the positive and the negative 
 effects of baptism. The positive effects, which are received 
 by infants, are spiritual illumination, the adoption of the 
 sons of God, citizenship in the heavenly Jerusalem, 
 sanctification, admission into the number of the members 
 
 1 libellus fidei (op. cit. p. 65): * baptisma unum tenemus, quod iisdem 
 sacramenti verbis in infantibus quibus etiam in maioribus asserimus esse 
 celebrandum.’ Cf. alsoc. 11. epp. Pelag. iv. I, 2. 
 
 2 op. imperf. c. Iulian. 1. 53: (Julian) ‘ nos igitur in tantam gratiam 
 baptismatis omnibus utilem aetatibus confitemur, ut cunctos qui illam 
 non necessariam etiam parvulis putant, aeterno feriamus anathemate.’ 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 346 
 
 of Christ, and possession of the kingdom of heaven.t The 
 negative effects of the Sacrament, which consist in the 
 remission of sins, are not experienced by infants, because 
 they have no sins to be remitted. Adults, on the other 
 hand, receive both the positive and the negative. effects.? 
 His opponents were not slow to detect a weak spot in his 
 orthodox armour. The Creed of the one hundred and fifty 
 Fathers of Constantinople (our ‘ Nicene ’ Creed), which had 
 already acquired a position of great authority in the Church, 
 though a generation was still to elapse before it received 
 the stamp of formal oecumenicity from the Fathers of 
 Chalcedon, affirmed ‘ one baptism for the remission of sins’ ; 
 but, said the Augustinians, Pelagius was setting up two 
 kinds of baptism—adult baptism for spiritual illumination 
 and the remission of sins, and infant baptism for spiritual 
 illumination only. The Pelagians never succeeded in 
 parrying this dialectical thrust; the Constantinopolitan 
 Symbol had gained so strong a hold on the mind and 
 affections of Christendom that the repudiation of any one 
 of its phrases, even of those which did not occur in the 
 original Nicene Creed, had become impossible for those who 
 claimed to be orthodox Christians ; and various expedients 
 were invoked for the purpose of finding a way out of the 
 difficulty. Most of the Pelagians, it would seem, explained 
 the ‘ remission of sins’ believed to be imparted to babes, 
 in a hypothetical and proleptic sense, affirming that infants 
 are baptised in order that they may become Christians and, 
 as such, capable of receiving (presumably through Penance) 
 remission of the sins which they probably will commit 
 after arriving at years of discretion. We need not comment 
 now on this phase of the controversy, save by repeating 
 
 1 op. imperf. c. Iulian. 1. 53 (Julian) ‘ Christus enim qui est sui operis 
 redemptor auget circa imaginem suam continua largitate beneficia; et 
 quos fecerat condendo bonos facit innovando adoptandoque meliores. 
 hanc igitur gratiam [sc. baptismatis] per quam reis venia, inluminatio 
 spiritalis, adoptio filiorum Dei, municipatus Ierusalem caelestis, sanctifi- 
 catio, atque in Christi membra translatio, et possessio regni caelorum 
 mortalibus datur, qui aliquibus negandam putat, omnium bonorum 
 exsecrationem meretur.’ 
 
 2 This was, as a matter of fact, precisely the position held by St. 
 
 Gregory of Nazianzus (carm, i. [theol.| sect. i. 9. 87-92, quoted above, 
 Lecture:lV, p. 289 f.). 
 
346 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the observation that the practice of infant baptism presents 
 a considerable problem to the critical, even though 
 sympathetic, student of Catholic custom, and that there is 
 a stronger prima facie case for the Anabaptist position 
 than most English Church-people have hitherto been 
 willing to admit.t 
 
 With the question of the precise reasons for which infant 
 baptism is to be deemed necessary is inextricably bound 
 up the further question, What is the destiny in the next 
 life of infants who die unbaptised ? It will be remembered 
 that in our last lecture we noted the first emergence of the 
 ‘ eschatological issue,’ necessarily raised by the Fall-doctrine 
 when thought out to its ultimate consequences, in the 
 writings of the two Cappadocian Gregories.2 Like them, 
 the Pelagians solved the problem by the mild and humane 
 hypothesis of a limbus puerorum, of a state of natural 
 beatitude to be enjoyed by those who through no personal 
 fault but solely through lack of the baptismal character 
 are excluded from the immediate presence and vision of 
 God—a conception which we shall meet again in scholastic 
 theology and in the immortal epic of Dante.? This con- 
 ception followed inevitably from the Pelagian belief in the 
 inborn, unimpaired goodness of human nature, and stood 
 in diametrical contradiction to the lurid eschatology arising 
 from the Augustinian idea of mankind as a massa peccatt, 
 according to which all the unbaptised without exception, 
 and also such of the baptised as had not been predestined 
 to receive the gift of final perseverance, were justly doomed 
 to everlasting flames. The Augustinians pressed Pelagius 
 with a rigidly literal interpretation of the Saviour’s words 
 “except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot 
 enter into the kingdom of God’; he could only counter 
 this argument by drawing a somewhat forced distinction 
 between ‘ eternal life, on the one hand—which need not 
 mean more than existence in a Limbo of natural beatitude, 
 and to which the innocent unbaptised might accordingly 
 
 1 For a discussion of infant baptism on its merits, see Additional 
 Note G, p. 550. 
 
 2 v. supra, Lecture IV, pp. 279, 290. 
 
 8 Lecture VI, p. 406 f. 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 347 
 
 be held entitled—and ‘ entrance into the kingdom of God,’ 
 that is, into heaven in the fullest sense, on the other, which 
 since the Incarnation has been exclusively reserved for the 
 baptised. 
 
 THE CONDEMNATION OF PELAGIANISM 
 
 Such were the strictly anthropological tenets of Pelagi- 
 anism, as gradually hardened and systematised through 
 a generation of controversy. We have been obliged to 
 anticipate somewhat the course of history in the foregoing 
 sketch ; but this anticipation may be justified by the con- 
 sideration that nothing was really added to Pelagianism 
 from without, and that the effect of the struggle was merely 
 to draw out ideas and implications which were latent in it 
 from the first. The actual course of the controversy may 
 be read at length in the standard histories of the Church 
 and of dogma,? and need only be summarised here in the 
 briefest possible manner. The condition of suppressed 
 hostility between the two systems, which may be deemed 
 to have been initiated by Pelagius’ denunciation of da quod 
 wubes, flamed up into a definite state of war when Pelagius 
 and Caelestius, on the approach of the Goths to Rome 
 (A.D. 410), left Italy for North Africa, thereby walking 
 into the lion’s den. Pelagius himself went on to Palestine ; 
 but Caelestius, the enfant terrible of the Pelagian move- 
 ment, remained in Africa; and his tactless utterances 
 drew down upon him the condemnation of the African 
 Church, expressed by a great Synod held at Carthage 
 (A.D. 411-12). Having declared their opinion of Pelagian- 
 
 1 eg. B. J. Kidd, History of the Church to a.D. 461, iil. pp. 65-133 ; 
 L. Duchesne, Histoire ancienne de l Eglise, iii. c. 6; Harnack, History 
 of Dogma (E. tr. 1898), v. pp. 168-188; Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmen- 
 geschichte (1923), 1. pp. 546 ff.; Loofs, Leitfaden (1906) pp. 417 ff. 
 
 * The Acts of this Council have perished, save for a fragment which is 
 preserved by St. Augustine, de pecc. orig. iii. The positions of Caelestius 
 which were then condemned are given as follows, in de gestis Pel. 23: 
 “(1) Adam mortalem factum, qui sive peccaret, sive non peccaret, mori- 
 turus esset. (2) quoniam peccatum Adae ipsum solum laeserit, et non 
 genus humanum. (3) quoniam lex sic mittit ad regnum, quemadmodum 
 evangelium. (4) quoniam ante adventum Christi fuerent homines sine 
 
348 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 ism within their own territory, the Africans, with the 
 implacable fanaticism of their race, despatched the narrow 
 and embittered Orosius to stir up trouble against the author 
 of the movement in Palestine. To the great disgust of the 
 Augustinians, the more tolerant Easterns showed a certain 
 disinclination to follow their lead; Pelagius was acquitted 
 by two Palestinian synods—as the result of verbal pre- 
 varication, say Augustine and Jerome—and by the Pope 
 Zosimus, a Greek by birth,’ and therefore antecedently 
 likely to be deficient in sympathy with the characteristically 
 ‘“twice-born’ point of view. The African bishops, none 
 the less, stuck to their heresy-hunt with the grim tenacity 
 of hounds in full cry; the condemnation of Pelagianism 
 and the affirmation of the Augustinian position were renewed 
 in a second plenary council held at Carthage in A.D. 418.3 
 Simultaneously, by a remarkable coincidence, the Emperor 
 Honorius intervened in the controversy, decreeing exile 
 against Pelagius, Caelestius, and their followers, and the 
 whole weight of the secular sword was flung into the balance 
 on the side of Augustine. This may have been due to 
 genuine conviction on the part of the Emperor; but the 
 Pelagians were not slow to suggest that the imperial action 
 had been procured by the Africans through bribes judiciously 
 administered amongst the monarch’s entourage. 
 
 These events exerted a notable influence on the policy 
 of Pope Zosimus. Faced with the open revolt of Africa, 
 on the one hand, and the coercion of the civil Government, 
 on the other, the terrified pontiff changed his tune and 
 issued an encyclical letter known as the epzstula tractona, 
 
 
 
 peccato. (5) quoniam infantes nuper nati in illo statu sunt, in quo Adam 
 fuit ante praevaricationem. (6) quoniam neque per mortem vel praevari- 
 cationem Adae omne genus hominum moriatur, neque per resurrectionem 
 Christi omne genus hominum resurgat.’ 
 
 1“ natione Grecus ’ (liber pontificalis, ed. L. Duchesne, i. p. 225). 
 
 2 For the text of those canons of this Council, which directly refer to the 
 Fall-doctrine, see Additional Note B, p. 391. 
 
 Canon iii. condemns the belief in Limbo as the destiny of unbaptised 
 children, a belief which subsequently became part of the accepted teaching 
 of Latin Christendom ; Duchesne (Aist. anc., iii. p. 236, n. 1) notes that 
 this canon “ manque a plusieurs des collections canoniques d’ot nous vient 
 le texte de ce concile,’ and adds, significantly, ‘c’est 1&4 une suppression 
 voulue, car le canon est certainement authentique.’ 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 349 
 
 which affirmed the essentials of the Augustinian position 
 and condemned the ideas of Pelagius and Caelestius. Sub- 
 scription to this document was enforced by the Government 
 throughout the West ; but nineteen Italian bishops, headed 
 by Julian of Eclanum, refused to submit. This latter 
 prelate kept up the fight for another five years, alternately 
 appealing for a new hearing before a General Council and 
 endeavouring to gain the ear of Honorius. Failing in both 
 attempts, Julian and the remnants of the Pelagian party 
 then (A.D. 423) took refuge in the East, which, loyal to its 
 more vague and liberal conception of the Fall and of trans- 
 mitted sinfulness, does not seem to have been deeply im- 
 pressed by the tvactoria1; they found their natural allies 
 and protectors amongst those Eastern bishops who belonged 
 to the Antiochene school of Christological thought. Of 
 these, the most illustrious was Theodore of Mopsuestia, 
 a prelate distinguished alike for pastoral zeal and massive 
 erudition, who welcomed the exiles to his Cilician see-town. 
 
 We may digress for a moment in order to draw attention 
 to the fact that there is both a historical and a logical 
 connexion between the Pelagian doctrine of man and of 
 sin and the Antiochene presentation of the doctrine of the 
 Person of Christ. The historical connexion les in the fact, 
 vouched for by Marius Mercator, that the opinions expressed 
 by Pelagius in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans 
 had been suggested to him by one Rufinus, an otherwise 
 unknown Syrian, who himself had derived them from 
 Theodore and his immediate circle.2 If this is so—and 
 there seems to be no reason for doubting Marius Mercator’s 
 word—it will be a true and complete account of the genesis 
 of Pelagianism to state that its matter arose out of the 
 “once-born’ piety and moral earnestness of Pelagius and 
 Caelestius themselves, as explained above, and that its 
 intellectual form was borrowed by them from the thought 
 
 1 v, infra, pp. 386, 388. 
 
 2 lib. subnot., 2, 3 (PL XLVIII. 111). Asis well known, Theodore was 
 the author of a work against the doctrine of original sin; the surviving 
 fragments of it are printed by H. B. Swete, Theodore of Mopsuestia on the 
 Minor Epistles of St. Paul, ii. pp. 332-7. Photius (Bibliotheca, cod. 177) 
 
 gives the title of this work as QeoSdpov ’Avrixéws mpds tods A€yorras ducer 
 Kal ov yrooun Tralew Tovs avOpamous. 
 
350 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of Christian Syria. The logical connexion has been 
 luminously summed up by Dr. Gore in an epigram which 
 has now become famous, ‘The Nestorian Christ is the 
 fitting Saviour of the Pelagian man’!; as the Christology 
 of Nestorius did not differ in essence from the teaching of 
 Theodore, he might well have made‘ the Antiochene Christ ’ 
 the subject of the sentence.2 A few words will suffice to 
 draw out the implications of this dictum, which expresses 
 a far-reaching principle of permanent validity, concerned 
 with the very essence of the Christian religion, and with 
 the nature of that redemption which it professes to offer.’ 
 ~ Pelagianism, as we have seen, assumed the complete 
 indetermination of the human will, even in habitual sinners ; 
 man can save himself, if he chooses, by the exertion of 
 volitional effort. He does not, therefore, require more 
 external assistance in order to his salvation than may be 
 provided by sound moral instruction and the example of a 
 perfect human life set before him for his imitation. Given 
 these premises, it is natural to conceive the Redeemer 
 simply as a man, with his own human individuality and ego, 
 who has himself triumphed in the moral struggle and beaten 
 down the fiery assaults of desire, and thereby presented all 
 subsequent generations with an object-lesson of the power 
 of human will. But, if this example of supreme moral 
 achievement is to be efficacious, it must be real; and ifitis 
 to be real, the temptations which the Redeemer overcame 
 must have been real; and, if those temptations were real, 
 poignant, and distracting (it was argued) He cannot have 
 
 1 * Our Lord’s Human Example,’ in COR xvi. p. 298 (July 1883). 
 
 2 Nestorius’ own attitude towards Pelagianism was _ curiously 
 ambiguous; v. infra, p. 353. 
 
 ’ The logical connexion between the Antiochene and the Pelagian 
 systems was fully recognised, at least by the Augustinians, in the fifth 
 century: it is strongly insisted wpon by Cassian (de incarn. Christ. i. 
 3-5, PL L. 20 sq.) in reference to the case of the monk Leporius, who had 
 advanced from Pelagian premises to Nestorian conclusions; for this 
 personage’s subsequent retractation, see Lepovit libellus emendationts, 
 PL XXXI. 1221-1230, and Kidd, op. cit. iii. p. 137 f. A celebrated utter- 
 ance on this point is the ironical poem of Prosper of Aquitaine, epitaphium 
 Nestovianae et Pelagianae haereseos (PL LI. 153), which begins 
 
 ‘ (Nestoriana haeresis loquiiur) 
 Nestoriana lues successi Pelagianae 
 quae fuit in utero praegenerata meo,’ 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 381 
 
 been theoretically impeccable, though He was sinless in fact. 
 Like Julian, Theodore does not hesitate to affirm that 
 concupiscence must have existed in Christ, and that He 
 must have known the agony of wrestling with bodily 
 appetite +; though it is apparently implied that after the 
 Resurrection and the Ascension He attained to formal 
 impeccability in the fullest sense.* Hence it is not possible 
 simply to equate the human Jesus with God the Word, for 
 God ex hypothest is impeccable. The relation between the 
 human and the divine in Christ must be conceived as the 
 conjunction of two persons, the man Jesus and God the Son 
 Who indwelt and inspired Him. Doubtless the union 
 between them was so intense and intimate that the man may 
 be described as a ‘ vesture’ ? worn by the Divine Son, and 
 the Antiochenes fiercely repudiated the suggestion that 
 they were setting up two Sons or two Christs ; yet, though 
 the unity of Jesus and the Word was such that it justifies 
 the worship of Jesus, it is nevertheless only a moral unity, 
 resting on God’s ‘ good pleasure,’ which in no way abolishes 
 the ultimate ontological duality existing behind it. The 
 man and the Son of God were blent in a unity of sympathy 
 and moral harmony far transcending that of the most 
 devoted friendship or conjugal union ; yet in the last resort 
 they remain two and not one. 
 
 It is not likely that the Antiochene Christology will ever 
 be revived in this precise form. But the general conception 
 of a supremely inspired man, who ‘ redeems’ free human 
 beings only in the sense that he helps them towards right 
 living by his exalted ethical teaching and by the example of 
 his own interior triumph, is still with us, and forms the 
 
 1 de incarn. xv (reprinted in H. B. Swete, op. cit. ii. p. 311): aAé€ov 
 yap wyxAeiro 6 KUpios Kal Hywrilero mpos Ta Yuyixa maOn bTEp Ta TOD G&paTos, 
 Kal T@ Kpeitrove Aoytou@ Tas Hdovas exerpodro, THs Yedrntos Syrad1 peotrevovons 
 Kat Bonfovons att mpos Tv KatépOwow. 
 
 2 ibid. vii (Swete, ii. p. 297): otrws dé Aowwdv pera THY avdoracw Kal THY 
 eis ovpavods avdAniw émdeigas eavtov Kal ex THs oixelas yrwuns THs évdcews 
 aguov, mpocetAndws dé tavrnv Kal mpd tovrov év adtH TH StatAdce: TH TOO 
 deamdtov evdoKig, axpiBh Aowrdv Kal Tis évwcews Tapéxerae THY amddecéw, 
 ovdemlav Exwv KeXwpLoperny Kal amoreTuNpEerny evepyerav TOb Beod Adyou k.7.A. 
 
 8 The phrase 61a tov dopodvra tov dopovpevoy céBw is apparently attributed 
 to Nestorius in Cyril’s synodical letter Cum salvator (conveniently re- 
 printed in T. H. Bindley, The Oecumenical Documents of the Faith, 1906, 
 pp. 121 ff.). 
 
352 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 foundation of the Ritschlian or Liberal Protestant recon- 
 struction of Christianity ; it is as true to-day as it was in the 
 fifth century that a purely indeterministic anthropology 
 necessitates a merely ‘ exemplarist ’ soteriology.! The tradi- 
 tional scheme, to which this Pelagian-Antiochene sequence 
 of ideas stands in the sharpest opposition, consists in the 
 notions of human nature as hamstrung by the Fall, and of 
 redemption as meaning the restoration of human nature 
 through sacramental union with a Divine-human Saviour. 
 In Catholic theology, the inbred malady of mankind and the 
 sacramental remedy mutually imply each other? ; and some 
 modern thinkers who wish to get rid of the conception of 
 objectively efficacious sacraments have shown a true instinct 
 in attacking that idea of the origin and ground of sin which 
 alone gives sacraments any vital significance. It must not 
 be supposed that these logical connexions were consciously 
 realised by the Pelagians or the Antiochenes: they attached 
 as much importance to baptism, penance, and the Eucharist 
 as did the rest of the Great Church. But it remains true to 
 say that in so far as they insisted on a merely ‘ exemplarist ’ 
 conception of redemption, they were, all unwittingly, doing 
 their best to render the sacraments otiose and obsolete. 
 Nevertheless, the Antiochenes, and the Pelagians in so 
 far as they consciously adopted the Christology of Antioch, 
 deserve the credit of having stood for a true and funda- 
 mentally Scriptural position—that of the thoroughgoing 
 reality of our Lord’s human experience, of His human 
 example, of His human triumph over genuine temptations. 
 How, clothed in a sacred Humanity which knew no dis- 
 harmony between reason and will, and in which all the 
 functions and faculties of our nature maintained relatively 
 to each other that due and lovely proportion which God had 
 originally willed, He could yet be ‘ in all points tempted like 
 as weare,’? so that He could express gratitude to His friends 
 
 1 A striking fifth-century instance of the logical necessity of this 
 inference is provided by the treatise of the Pelagian monk Leporius 
 (Leporii libellus emendationis, PL XXXI. 1221-1230) ; see Kidd, op. cit. 
 lisp i374, 
 
 2 Of all the writers of antiquity, Gregory of Nyssa seems to recognise 
 this most clearly ; v. supra, Lecture IV, p. 278. 
 
 Pablepsiv £5. 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 353 
 
 for ‘continuing with’ Him in His ‘ temptations,’! is a 
 question too grave and mysterious to be investigated here. 
 Yet any explanation of our Lord’s sinlessness, which makes 
 His temptations even more unreal than the ‘ temptation ’ 
 which the opportunity of stealing a farthing might present 
 to a millionaire, must inevitably fall under the stigma of 
 Docetism: if it is true to say, with Dr. Bright, ‘a peccable 
 Christ could not be a lifegiving Christ,’ ? it is equally true to 
 say the same of an imperfectly human Christ. 
 
 We return from this digression to resume the thread of 
 our historical narrative. On the death of Theodore in 
 A.D. 428, Julian, Caelestius, and their adherents (Pelagius 
 himself has now disappeared from sight *) took refuge at 
 Constantinople, hoping to be protected by the new arch- 
 bishop, of tragic fame, Nestorius. This prelate’s attitude 
 towards them was curiously vacillating. At first he seems 
 to have favoured them, and wrote to Rome for information 
 concerning the causes for which they had been condemned : 
 then, when the Government of Theodosius II expelled them 
 from the capital of the Eastern Empire, at the instance of 
 Marius Mercator, he preached publicly against Pelagianism, 
 while condoling with Caelestius in private. The controversy 
 about the Fall and original sin now became overshadowed 
 by the gigantic duel between Cyril and Nestorius, which 
 arose out of the attack made by the latter’s chaplain, 
 Anastasius, upon the term Theotokos. Amidst the din and 
 excitement of this vast conflict it seemed as though the issue 
 raised by Pelagius had been forgotten, especially after the 
 death of Augustine in A.D. 430. It was, however, at least 
 momentarily recalled to men’s minds by the Cyrilline 
 Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431), now usually known as the 
 Third Oecumenical Council. This body, in its first and 
 fourth canons,* pronounced ecclesiastical censure upon 
 “those who hold the opinions of Nestorius or of Caeles- 
 
 1 Luke xxii. 28. 
 
 2 The Age of the Fathers, ii. p. 262. 
 
 3 The last we hear of him is Marius Mercator’s notice of his banishment 
 from Jerusalem in A.D. 424 (comm. iii. 5); probably he died not long 
 afterwards. 
 
 4 Hardouin, i. 1621, 1623; W. Bright, Canons of the first Four General 
 Councils (1892), pp. XXVli, xxviii. 
 
 24 
 
384 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 tius’1; and in a synodical epistle it informed Pope Caelestine 
 thatit had renewed the condemnations of Pelagianism enacted 
 by his predecessors 2—though, as Duchesne points out, the 
 Acts of the Council contain no evidence that this was 
 actually done.?® 
 
 Though the Cyrilline Council, in view of the irregularity 
 both of its constitution and of its proceedings, had at the 
 time of its meeting no genuine claim to oecumenicity, yet 
 the subsequent acceptance of its decrees by the Great 
 Church has been generally regarded as tantamount to the 
 imposition of an oecumenical character upon it. The 
 detailed examination of the two Ephesine canons which 
 touch our subject must be reserved for a later section of this 
 lecture: but it may be said here that the condemnation of 
 the opinions of Caelestius, vaguely expressed though it is, 
 would seem to amount to the elevation of the Fall-doctrine, 
 at least in a minimal form, to the rank of a Catholic dogma. 
 So far as the Church of the Graeco-Roman Empire was 
 concerned, Pelagianism was officially at an end; and its 
 subsequent recrudescences in Gaul and Britain are of no 
 importance for our present enquiry. 
 
 A CRITIQUE OF PELAGIANISM 
 
 It is probable that the immediate reaction of the average 
 Englishman (one, that is, whose judgments in matters of 
 religion are not controlled either by expert theological 
 knowledge or by stringent denominational loyalties), upon 
 considering the summary of Pelagianism contained in this 
 lecture, would be to approve this system whole-heartedly as 
 the embodiment of the soundest and most healthy common 
 Sense. Pelagianism originated in our island, and may, 
 
 1 can.1: el tis 6 pytpotoAirns THs émapxias . . . Ta Kedeatiov édpovncev 
 h dpovnoce . . . can. 4: et d€ Twes AmooTaTHoaeyv TAY KANpLKaY, Kal TOAUHCaLEY 
 H Kat’ tdiav 7 Snpocia ta Neoropiov 7 7a KeXeoriov dpovfoa. The absence of 
 any mention of Pelagius confirms the supposition that he was by this time 
 dead. 
 
 2 velatio ad Caelestinum, ad fin. (Hardouin, i. 1509). 
 
 3 hist. anc. iii. p. 357; he appends the dry comment ‘ De ces choses-la 
 on ne parle qu’au pape, avec l’intention évidente de s’en faire bien voir.’ 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM eps 
 
 indeed, be said to be endemic in it ; and the dispassionate 
 student will find much that is attractive in the speculations 
 of the first great British theologian. Julian’s view, at least, 
 of the moral neutrality of ‘ concupiscence ’ in its broadest 
 sense has now won a practically universal acceptance 
 amongst those who have shaken themselves free from the 
 savage conception of * bad mana’ and the dualistic idea of 
 the inherent evil of matter ; and the Pelagian position as to 
 the other-worldly destiny of unbaptised infants and of the 
 heathen would seem to be far more in accordance with a 
 genuine belief in the infinite love and mercy of God than the 
 opinions of Augustine with regard to the same subject. 
 Most attractive, at first sight, of all the Pelagian tenets is the 
 belief in the unimpaired sovereign freedom of the will. 
 Pelagius would have us declare, in the well-known words of 
 Henley, 
 
 I am the master of my fate: 
 I am the captain of my soul!; 
 
 and we may be reasonably sure that, in his evangelistic 
 campaign at Rome, the burly British monk must have dealt 
 with his converts in the spirit of a judicious psychotherapist, 
 who, far from insisting on the miserable condition in which 
 his patient finds himself, puts forth every effort to develop 
 the latter’s will-power, courage, and self-reliance. It is 
 hardly too much to say that on point after point of detail 
 Pelagianism stood for sanity and reason as against patho- 
 logical fanaticism. 
 
 Yet when all this has been admitted, and when we have 
 expressed the justifiable indignation which the suppression 
 of Pelagianism by the civil sword rather than by reasoned 
 argument naturally evokes, we are constrained to record the 
 judgment that its triumph would have been an unqualified 
 disaster for Christianity. The principal ground for this 
 judgment is the fact that the fundamental assumption of 
 Pelagianism—the assumption of an absolutely undetermined, 
 autonomous, sovereign free-will residing in all human beings 
 without exception—is simply untrue. It ignores the 
 agonising facts of ‘incontinence’ and the moral struggle, 
 
 1 Jnvictus. 
 
356 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 It represents a purely artificial conception of freedom, 
 deduced from the bare consciousness, which we have at 
 certain moments, of the power of choice. It leaves out of 
 sight the parts played by feeling, instinct, impulse, in the 
 inner life of man ; it recks not of the mighty tides of sensual 
 emotion, of self-assertive impulse, of ideal aspiration, of the 
 love of God, which swirl and mingle together in the seething 
 maelstrom of the human soul. It forgets that the affections 
 are as capable of being harnessed to bear the will up to 
 heights of heroic endeavour as of dragging it down to depths 
 of moral infamy. It reduces the spiritual life to a dull, 
 mechanical process of conformity with an external code ; it 
 is the negation of the profound maxim, of which the truth is 
 daily receiving fresh confirmation from psychological study, 
 “No virtue is safe which is not enthusiastic.’ 
 
 Some further consequences of this vicious doctrine of 
 unlimited indeterminism may be briefly summarised.’ Its 
 complete lack of correspondence with the facts of human 
 nature may be seen in its denial of the terrible power of 
 habit ; on the Pelagian hypothesis, the dipsomaniac, the 
 libertine, the recidivist, the gaol-bird are just as ‘ free,’ just 
 as instantaneously capable of the highest virtue and self- 
 sacrifice as the saint who has grown grey in the service 
 of God and man. Most damning indictment of all—the 
 Pelagian system is fundamentally irreligious, in so far as it 
 tends to destroy in the heart of man the feeling of childlike 
 dependence upon his Maker. By the possession of free- 
 will, Julian did not hesitate to say, man is “ emancipated 
 from God.’! /God creates a man, and thenceforward ceases 
 to play any part in his life, only re-entering it for the final 
 judgment. Pelagianism is a system of moral Deism, which 
 makes the God of Christianity into an Epicurean divinity 
 throned upon a distant Olympus and exercising no influence 
 upon the lives of His human creatures ; and its adherents 
 did not shrink from the declaration that prayer for spiritual 
 blessings is to be condemned, because man has it in his power 
 to acquire all spiritual blessings by the exercise of his 
 sovereign free-will.. Lastly must be mentioned the fact that 
 Pelagianism abolishes the reasonable and humane distinction 
 
 1 op. imperf. c. Iulian. i. 78. 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 357 
 
 formulated by the author of the first Johannine Epistle! 
 between a ‘ sin unto death’ and a‘ sin not unto death,’ that 
 is, roughly speaking, between what are now called ‘ mortal ’ 
 and ‘ venial’ sins. As every sinful act proceeds ex hypothes1 
 from an entirely free and conscious self-determination of the 
 will, it follows that even the most trivial lapses must be 
 regarded as wilful defiances of the majesty of God, and 
 relatively harmless peccadilloes assume a mountain-like 
 importance. On this showing, the adage which asserts that 
 to steal a pin is as great a sin as to steal any other thing is 
 amply justified. The mild and liberal ethics of Christianity, 
 which allow for the frailty of human nature, are thus 
 invested with a harsh and censorious rigorism,? and are 
 made to presuppose an ideal standard of self-control which 
 may be attained in another world, but which the facts of 
 experience show to be inapplicable to our inchoate, raw, and 
 unfinished personalities in this. Pelagianism has often 
 been accused of minimising the “ sense of sin’ ; but the exact 
 opposite is the truth : by insisting on the unlimited freedom 
 of the will, and by sweeping away the excuses which may 
 be found in natural weakness or the power of habit, it 
 exaggerates the sense of sin (of actual sin, that is) to a 
 degree at which it must become a burden to the sensitive 
 conscience no less intolerable than the opposite error, which 
 bids us mourn for the ‘ original guilt’ of a nature which 
 ex hypothest we cannot help possessing. 
 
 These considerations suggest that if Christianity had 
 accepted Pelagius’ account of human nature as its pre- 
 supposition, it would have ceased to be a ‘ religion’ in any 
 intelligible sense of the term. Religion is a fire, a passion, 
 an elemental pulsation of man’s being, an inborn yearning 
 
 EVO, 17. 
 
 2 This rigoristic aspect of Pelagianism, which was largely ignored by 
 earlier historians of doctrine, has been brought into prominence by the 
 Pelagian documents edited by C. P. Caspari in Briefe, Abhandlungen und 
 Predigien (Christiania, 1890): a single sentence, from the first of these 
 documents (p. 5), will give their key-note : ‘ de maioribus criminibus taceo, 
 quia nulli dubium est, maiora exercere delicta non licere, Cui nec minora 
 conceduntur.’ 
 
 3 An extreme instance of the ascetic tendency in Pelagianism is to be 
 found in Caelestius’ declaration that rich Christians could not enter the 
 kingdom of heaven unless they renounced all their riches: de gest, Pel. 23. 
 
388 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 and aspiration towards the unknown Infinite Good which 
 is God. Pelagianism would have made Christianity into 
 a compound of Judaism and Stoicism, a dull and joyless 
 puritanism, an external code of civic and secular morals. 
 Its interior spirit is aptly summed up in the third of the 
 propositions attributed to Caelestius and condemned at 
 the Carthaginian Synod of A.D. 411-12‘ That the (Mosaic) 
 Law is as good a guide to heaven as the Gospel.’ 1 
 
 It is therefore both possible and reasonable, without 
 invoking any authoritarian assumptions whatever, to 
 conclude that the Third Oecumenical Council was, as a 
 matter of fact, in the right when it decided that the Pelagian 
 view of human nature, despite the good and noble elements 
 in it, was untrue; inasmuch as this view rests upon an 
 artificial conception formed by the abstraction of one 
 psychical phenomenon—the consciousness of choice—from 
 its context in the rest of our interior experience. But the 
 assertion that the root-idea of Pelagianism represents such 
 an exaggeration of one side of our moral experience as to 
 be untrue, and that its failure was on the whole a blessing 
 for the Church and for humanity, is not by any means to 
 admit that its mighty victorious rival, Augustinianism, 
 was necessarily in the right. Before we can formulate a 
 final judgment with regard to St. Augustine’s view of 
 human nature and the origin of sin, we must pick up again 
 the thread of our historical survey, and supplement the 
 provisional sketch of Augustinianism as it stood in its 
 embryonic form before the clash with Pelagianism, which 
 we drew just now, by a picture of St. Augustine’s system 
 as it stood at the close of his life, embodied in such a 
 work as the ofus imperfectum contra Iulianum, and fully 
 developed, with every nerve and lineament drawn out into 
 high relief, through twenty years of controversy. It will 
 be convenient to group the data yielded by the fifteen works 
 which are generally styled ‘the anti-Pelagian treatises,’ 
 and by occasional passages in other works, under heads 
 corresponding to the five fundamental issues which were 
 defined at the beginning of Lecture IV as necessarily arising 
 
 1 “quoniam lex sic mittit ad regnum, quemadmodum evangelium ’ 
 (quoted above, p. 347, N. 2). 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 359 
 
 out of the Pauline Fall-doctrine, and the two further issues 
 which emerged during the course of the pre-Augustinian 
 patristic development; for the sake of clearness, these 
 seven problems shall be here reformulated. They are: 
 
 (i) Is the Paradise-narrative of Gen. iii. to be inter- 
 preted literally or allegorically ? 
 
 (i) What was the condition of man before the Fall— 
 one of ‘ non-moral innocence,’ or one of ‘ original 
 righteousness ’ and ‘ perfection’ ? 
 
 (ii) What is the undesirable thing, state, or quality 
 asserted to have been acquired by the first man 
 in consequence of the Fall, and to have 
 been thereafter transmitted by him to all his 
 descendants? Is it the lack of the super- 
 natural endowments originally possessed by 
 him, weakness of will, inordinate ‘ concupiscence,’ 
 legal responsibility for the initial act of sin, or 
 any or all of these taken together ? 
 
 (iv) What is the mode of transmission whereby Adam 
 transmits this damnosa haereditas to his posterity 
 ——biological or merely ‘ social’ heredity, mystical 
 or ‘ seminal’ identity ° 
 
 (v) What is the resulting state of human nature, with 
 which Redemption now has to deal? is free- 
 will intact and complete, gravely hampered, 
 or for all practical purposes annihilated ? 
 
 (vi) What is the vationale of infant baptism ? can any 
 theoretical basis be found for this custom other 
 than the supposition that ‘original guilt’ is 
 thereby remitted to beings who, in the nature 
 of the case, cannot be subject to the guilt of 
 actual sin ? 
 
 (vii) What is the destiny in the next life of persons— 
 such as unbaptised infants and virtuous pagans 
 of adult age—who, without having committed 
 actual sins, die subject to the consequences of 
 Adam’s Fall, not having obtained redemption 
 through Christ and His Church ? 
 
360 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 The number and the complexity of these issues show vividly 
 the greatness of the tree into which the seed sown by the 
 Jewish apocalyptists had grown. 
 
 DEVELOPED AUGUSTINIANISM 
 
 (i) During the greater part of his life as a Christian 
 thinker/St. Augustine’s exegesis of the Biblical Paradise- 
 story is strictly literalistic) He had, indeed, at one time 
 played with the allegorical interpretation, tentatively 
 suggesting, in the treatise de Genest ad Manichaeos, which 
 was written between A.D. 388 and 391, that Adam’s body 
 was transparent, celestial, and in no need of physical 
 nourishment, and that the union of our first parents was 
 of a purely spiritual nature, designed solely ‘ ut copulatione 
 spirituali spirituales fetus ederent, id est bona opera divinae 
 laudis.’1 Only a few years later, however, uncompromising 
 literalism makes its appearance in the treatise de Genesz 
 ad litteram,? and thenceforward its domination of Augustine’s 
 anthropology is unquestioned. 
 
 (ii) Augustine’s beliefs as to the Paradisal state of un- 
 fallen man represent the culminating point of that tendency 
 to exalt it to the highest pitch of ‘ original righteousness ’ 
 and ‘ perfection,’ which we have already noted as beginning 
 to emerge in some great writers of the fourth century, both 
 Western and Eastern: which doubtless represents a subtle 
 infiltration of Rabbinical ideas into the mind of the Great 
 Church, though why such an infiltration should have taken 
 place at this precise epoch we cannot tell: and which has 
 always exercised a powerful influence on Fall-speculation 
 of the ‘ twice-born’ type, inasmuch as, the more glorious 
 man’s original state and endowments are made, the deeper, 
 by contrast, become the criminality and the guilt of the 
 Fall.2 So we find, according to Augustine, that Adam in 
 
 1 ii.15; cf. de catech. rud. 29. 
 
 2 vi. 30-36, 39; viii. 7; etc. It is noteworthy, however, that even 
 in this treatise he still retains what may be described as a symbolical 
 interpretation of the ‘ days’ of creation: cf. iv. 51-53. 
 
 3 For the development of this Augustinian tendency by Baius and the 
 Reformers, see Lecture VI, pp. 422, 427. 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 361 
 
 Paradise was exempted from all physical evils, and endowed 
 with immortal youth and health which could not be touched 
 by the taint of sickness or the creeping debility of old age.4 
 The gift of immortality lay within his reach?; the taste 
 of the Tree of Life would have enabled him to transcend 
 physical limitations, to refine and transubstantiate his 
 earthly nature into pure spirit, so that it would have 
 passed painlessly from this life to the fuller life of Heaven, 
 without the gloomy passage through the grave and gate 
 of death. His intellect was endowed with an ‘ infused 
 knowledge’ which, we are told, made his mental powers 
 as far superior to those of the most brilliant modern 
 philosophers as the flight of birds surpasses in swiftness 
 the sluggish movements of the tortoise.4 This speculation 
 is supported by the curious contention that Adam’s in- 
 tellectual abilities are proved to have been of this tran- 
 scendent order by the feat which he performed in thinking 
 of appropriate names for the various species of animals 
 which were brought to him by the Creator °—an idea 
 developed by Bishop Bull some thirteen centuries later in 
 a famous passage which I cannot refrain from quoting : 
 
 I might here insist upon that admirable philosophy lecture 
 which Adam (appointed by God Himself to that office) read on 
 all the other animals, for although his theme here was a part of 
 natural philosophy yet his performance herein, if we look to its 
 circumstances, cannot but be judged by every considering man 
 to be the effect of a more than human sagacity: that, in the 
 infinite variety of creatures never before seen by Adam, he 
 should be able, on a sudden, without study or premeditation, to 
 give names to each of them, so adapted and fitted to their 
 natures as that God Himself should approve the nomenclature. 
 
 1 de Gen. c. manich. ii. 8. (References are given only to one or two 
 typical passages on each point ; for others, see the Benedictine indices.) 
 
 2 de Gen. ad litt. vi. 36; op. imperf. c. Iulian. vi. 39. 
 
 3 de Gen. ad ttt. ix. 6: ‘ . . . si iuste omnes obedienterque viverent, 
 tunc fieret illa commutatio, ut sine ulla morte animalia corpora conversa in 
 aliam qualitatem, eo quod ad omnem nutum regenti se spiritui deservirent, 
 et solo spiritu vivificante sine ullis alimentorum corporalium sustentaculis 
 viverent, spiritalia vocarentur. potuit hoc fieri, si non praecepti trans- 
 gressio mortis supplicium mereretur’; cf. also Io. 
 
 4 op. imperf. c. Iulian, v. 1. 
 
 5 Gen. ii. 19, 20; for the modern critical interpretation of this passage 
 see) Lecture II, p..41, n. 2. 
 
362 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 How astonishing a thing is it: what single man among all the 
 philosophers since the Fall, what Plato, what Aristotle amongst 
 the ancients, what Descartes or Gassendi among the moderns, 
 nay, what Royal Society durst have undertaken this ? + 
 
 These exalted intellectual attainments were combined 
 with a moral character equally lofty. (Man as originally 
 created had freedom in the proper sense, that is, undeter- 
 mined autonomy, the faculty of being able not to sin,) 
 posse non peccare.*2. This autonomous free-will was the 
 absolute sovereign of his microcosm, exercising a most 
 calm and perfect control over all the movements of appetite 
 and feeling. {A tendency towards evil did indeed exist 
 in Adam, but only in a faint degree ; there was just enough 
 of it in him to constitute his Paradisal condition a state of 
 trial or testing, but no more.? The sexual appetite in 
 particular was entirely subject to the control of the will. 
 If Adam had remained in Paradise he would indeed have 
 begotten children, but in accordance with the dictates of 
 reason, and without any excess of concomitant emotion.* 
 His will, moreover, was confirmed in goodness by an im- 
 planted rectitude, an interior spirituality, a settled bias 
 and determination towards virtue, which was the equivalent 
 of that steadfast character which the greatest saints have 
 acquired through a lifetime of struggle.® Yet Adam in 
 Paradise knew no struggle: his character of perfect holiness 
 was presented to him as it were ready-made by his Creator. 
 He had no temptations with which to contend; all he had 
 to do was to keep out of the way of temptation, and to 
 preserve the ‘ original justice ’ with which God had endowed 
 him. 
 
 The question has been raised, whether Augustine in his 
 
 1 Works (Oxford, 1846), ii. Discourse V, p. 125 f. 
 
 2 de corvept. et grat. 33; the posse non peccare in the moral sphere was 
 parallel to the posse non mori in the physical. But Adam’s posse non 
 peccave was a state inferior to the non posse peccare now enjoyed by the 
 blessed. 
 
 8 So J. B. Mozley, Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination (1855), 
 p. 91, drawing out the implications of op. imperf. c. Iulian. v. 61. 
 
 4 de nupt. et concup. i. I, 6, 7, 8. 
 
 5 op. imperf. c. Iulian. v. 61: ‘ illa itaque perfectio naturae quam non 
 
 dabant anni sed sola manus Dei non potuit nisi habere voluntatem eamque 
 non malam.’ 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 363 
 
 own mind separated sharply between the glorious super- 
 natural qualities which he believed to have been enjoyed 
 by Adam before the Fall, and the qualities of reason and 
 voluntary action which distinguished him from the beasts 
 and which he continued to possess even after the Fall: 
 in other words, whether he consciously recognised a contrast 
 between what the Schoolmen were later to describe as the 
 donum supernaturale of ‘ original righteousness’ and ‘ per- 
 fection, and the pura naturalia, or properties belonging 
 simply to human nature as such. According to some 
 scholars, notably M. Turmel,1 Augustine drew no such 
 distinction. For him, it is contended, the primitive state 
 of Adam was merely the state which is natural to man as 
 such. Human nature as it now exists is in a wounded and 
 abnormal condition: the paradisal perfection of the proto- 
 plast is the norm from which it has declined.2 On the 
 other hand, it is the case that some at least of Adam’s more 
 splendid endowments are expressly attributed by Augustine 
 to a special grace, a superabundant generosity on the part 
 of God: such are his holiness, his freedom from con- 
 cupiscence, his immortality—possibly also his immunity 
 from disease and his colossal intellectual powers.? It 
 appears safest to say that Augustine never made his mind 
 decisively up with regard to this point, and that the germs 
 of both opinions—-both that of the Schoolmen, who dis- 
 tinguished the donum superadditum from the pura naturala, 
 and that of the Reformers and Baius, who identified them— 
 are to be found in his writings. 
 
 It follows from this exalted view of man’s paradisal 
 condition that the malice of the first sin was infinite in its 
 demerit, precisely because it was the jirst. (It is probably 
 
 1 Revue @ hist. et de littér. velig. vii. p. 224 f. 
 
 2 This is apparently implied by retract. i. 15, 6: ‘itemque in eo quod 
 dixi, natura esse malae animae nullo modo queunt; si quaeritur quomodo 
 accipiamus quod ait Apostolus, fuimus et nos natura filit ivae stcut 
 et ceteyt; respondemus, naturam in his verbis meis me intelligi voluisse 
 illam, quae proprie natura vocatur, in qua sine vitio creatisumus. nam 
 ista propter originem natura appellatur ; quae origo utique habet vitium, 
 quod est contra naturam.’ 
 
 8 See numerous references given by J. Tixeront, Histoire des dogmes, 
 
 iE Pp. 465. ‘ 
 
364 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 unnecessary to utter the warning that we are for the moment 
 engaged in stating Augustine’s ideas, not in criticising or 
 evaluating them.) ( All subsequent sins, indeed, (according 
 to Augustine) have been due to the inordinate power of 
 concupiscence and the corruption of man’s nature en- 
 gendered by the Fall. )But the Fall itself was not due to 
 concupiscence, because that ex hypothesi barely existed in 
 unfallen man’ It was therefore due to pure senseless 
 perversity ; it was a sin solely of the will and not of the 
 appetite, and it was committed, not as a result of weakness 
 or frailty, but against a settled habit of virtue.1_ It was 
 not a mere floating with the stream of human tendencies, 
 but a deliberate attempt to swim against the stream. 
 _Hence, apart from the question of its consequences, it was 
 an unique and dreadful tragedy, because it was the moral 
 débacle of a saint. Trivial as the act of tasting the for- 
 bidden fruit may appear to us, it was none the less a direct 
 transgression of the divine command, and as such included 
 in itself all possible forms of sin. It involved the sin of 
 pride, which claims to be independent of God ; of infidelity, 
 which refuses to believe in His word; of homicide, in that 
 it rendered both Adam and his descendants liable to death ; 
 of spiritual fornication, inasmuch as it corrupted his moral 
 integrity ; of avarice, which claimed more than was man’s 
 just due. The passage of the Enchiridion which discovers 
 all these forms of vice in the first sin concludes with an 
 anticlimax, of which Augustine is not often guilty: the 
 first sin included the sin of theft, inasmuch as the forbidden 
 fruit was not Adam’s property.? 
 
 In retribution for this infinitely malicious self-determi- 
 nation of his free-will in hostility to and contempt of his 
 Maker, Adam was justly pronounced by the dread judicial 
 sentence to lie under the doom of everlasting death, both of 
 body and of soul. 
 
 (iii) The universal sinfulness, which, in the words of 
 the Apostle, ‘has passed unto all men,’? is original or 
 
 1 op. imperf. c. Iulian. i. 71: ‘ praecessit mala voluntas, qua serpenti 
 subdolo crederetur ; et secuta est mala concupiscentia, qua cibo inhiaretur 
 inlicito.’ 
 
 2 enchind. xlv. % Romy. 12: 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 365 
 
 transmitted sin—feccatum originale or peccatum ex traduce. 
 But what precisely is the nature of this communicated 
 taint? The direct question is one which somewhat em- 
 barrassed St. Augustine, for the anti-Pelagian treatises do 
 not yield any explicit definition of original sin, and he 
 himself excuses his failure to supply a logically perfect 
 conception of transmitted sin by the abstruseness and 
 difficulty of the subject; ‘nihil est ad praedicandum 
 notius, nihil ad intelligendum secretius.’! Subsequent 
 thought, however, is indebted to him for clearing up the 
 confusion which had hitherto reigned in regard to the two 
 metaphors, medical and legal, under which men had found 
 it natural to describe the spiritual effects of Adam’s Fall 
 upon his posterity. By distinguishing between the vitium 
 and the veatus of original sin he showed, in effect, that the 
 Western version of the Fall-doctrine (which, of course, he 
 himself believed to be the primitive and Catholic doctrine) 
 contained two independent propositions, either of which 
 could theoretically be held without the other, namely, 
 (2) ‘Man suffers from a hereditary moral disease, first 
 acquired by Adam and since transmitted from generation 
 to generation of his posterity,’ and (b) ‘ Man is born subject 
 to the inherited legal liability—to judicial punishment for 
 Adam’s sin.’ It will be convenient to consider these two 
 propositions, which together constitute the specifically 
 Augustinian doctrine of original sin, separately. 
 
 (a) First of all what, according to Augustine, is the 
 vitium of original sin, the flaw in human nature which is 
 inherited from Adam? When the question is narrowed 
 down to this point it is not difficult to discern the answer. 
 The vitizum consists precisely in the unbridled and inordinate 
 tyranny of concupiscence over the rest of man’s interior 
 
 microcosm. In Augustinian thought, concupiscence may 
 
 be generally defined as the tendency which impels man to 
 turn from the supreme and immutable good, which is God, 
 in order to find his satisfaction and comfort in that which is 
 mutable and less than God, that is, in creatures. Even in 
 the best of men its involuntary, undesired ebullitions are 
 symptomatic of the flaw inherent in human nature as such. 
 
 1 de mor, eccl, cath, 1. 40. 
 
366 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 It is a languor or malady of the soul, consisting in the 
 hypertrophy of those bodily instincts which in themselves 
 are necessary for the preservation of the individual or the 
 race—so far Augustine does not appear to go beyond the 
 Pauline teaching as to the ‘ innate infirmity ’—and (a more 
 disputable position) it is both sin and the penalty of our 
 first father’s sin: ‘sic est hoc peccatum, ut sit poena 
 peccati.’ 
 
 Of man’s disordered instincts, however, the most violent 
 and the least amenable to the commands of reason and of 
 God is the reproductive instinct : and hence in Augustine’s 
 thought ‘ concupiscence ’ tends to be predominantly used in 
 its most restricted sense. We thus arrive at an equation$ : 
 ‘original sin’ (considered as wittwm) = ‘ concupiscence ’ 
 == sexual passion: an equation which determines his view 
 as to (iv) the mode of transmission of the malady of the 
 
 soul. Inasmuch as sex-feeling of the kind now experienced f 
 
 by, fallen man is for Augustine intrinsically sinful, it follows 
 /that the very act of begetting a child inevitably stains it 
 “with ‘ original sin,’ so that we are in a quite literal sense 
 “born in sin,’ that is, in the ‘sin’ of our parents.* It is for 
 this reason, he thinks, that it was necessary for the Saviour 
 to be born miraculously, in order that His human nature 
 might be free from the entail of sin.? The Pelagians were 
 not slow to challenge this apparent-Condemnation of one of 
 the primary instincts of human nature as essentially Mani- 
 chean; and they enquired, with considerable cogency, 
 ‘How is it, then, if baptism entirely abolishes “ original 
 sin,’ that baptised persons are still tormented by “ con- 
 
 1 Lecture III, p. 156. 
 
 2 de pecc. mer. et vem. i. 36. 
 
 3 I find that Buonaiuti (op. cit. p. 401, n. 1) has independently arrived 
 at the same phrase : ‘ l’equazione matematica posta fra il peccato originale 
 e listinto sessuale.’ In this Augustinian position we reach the high- 
 water-mark of a tendency which we have noticed running all through the 
 history of Fall-speculation, both Jewish and Christian. 
 
 4 de pecc. mer, et vem. i. 57: ‘ quod igitur in membris corporis mortis 
 huius inobedienter movetur, totumque animum in se deiectum conatur 
 adtrahere, et neque cum mens voluerit exsurgit, neque cum mens voluerit 
 conquiescit, hoc est malum peccati, in quo nascitur omnis homo.’ 
 
 5c. Iulian. Pel. v. 52: ‘quia Mariae corpus quamvis inde (sc. ex 
 concupiscentia) venerit, tamen eam non traiecit in corpus quod non inde 
 concepit.’ 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 367 
 
 cupiscence,’ apparently to as great an extent as the 
 unbaptised ? and why are the children of Christian parents 
 not born free from original sin?’ To the former argument 
 Augustine replied that what he condemned was not the in- 
 stitution of marriage in itself, for that existed in Paradise, 
 but rather the excessive and irrational exaltation of feeling 
 due to the dislocation of human nature consequent on the 
 ‘Fall, which now almost invariably 1 attends even its lawful 
 use.2. (Why ‘ excessive’ feeling merely as such should be 
 stigmatised as ‘ sinful,’ rather than as pathological, he does 
 not explain: like many Fall-speculators of the ‘ twice-born ’ 
 school, he easily passes, without knowing it, from the medi- 
 cal to the forensic way of regarding psychic disharmony.) 
 The latter was parried by means of the distinction between 
 the actus of concupiscence, that is, the psychological fact of 
 its existence, and its veatus, the guilt which attaches to its 
 possession: baptism cancels the veatus, but leaves the actus 
 still in existence.* Hence it follows that, even though the 
 parents may have been freed by baptism from the reatus, 
 their offspring is none the less born with both the actus and 
 the veatus of concupiscence inherent in it: for the actus 
 infects the child in the first moment of its conception, and 
 an unbaptised person who possesses the actus is necessarily 
 also subject in the sight of God to the veatus.* 
 
 This theory, that the vitiwm of original sin is directly 
 
 1 Augustine allows for the possibility of strictly sinless marriages in 
 de nupt. et conc. i. 9. 
 
 * This appears to be the general sense of such passages as de pecc. orig. 
 39-43; de nupt. et conc. 1. 8, il. 25. 
 
 3 de nupt. et conc. i. 29: ‘in eis ergo qui regenerantur in Christo cum 
 remissionem accipiunt prorsus omnium peccatorum, utique necesse est, 
 ut reatus etiam huius licet adhuc manentis concupiscentiae remittatur, 
 ut in peccatum, sicut dixi, non imputetur . . . manent ergo <peccata>, 
 nisi remittantur. sed quomodo manent, si praeterita sunt, nisi quia 
 praeterierunt actu, manent reatu? sic itaque fieri e contrario potest, ut 
 etiam illud’ (sc. malum concupiscentiae) ‘ maneat actu, praetereat reatu.’ 
 
 4 de nupt. et conc. i. 20, 21: ‘propter hanc’ [sc. concupiscentiam] 
 ‘ergo fit ut etiam de iustis et legitimis nuptiis filiorum Dei, non filii Dei sed 
 filii saeculi generentur: qua et ii qui genuerant, si iam regenerati sunt, 
 non ex hoc generant ex quo filii Dei sed ex quo adhuc filii saeculi . . . ex 
 hac igitur concupiscentia carnis quod nascitur, utique mundo non Deo 
 -nascitur: Deo autem nascitur cum ex aqua et Spiritu renascitur. huius 
 concupiscentiae reatum regeneratio sola dimittit, ac per hoc generatio 
 trahit.’ 
 
368 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 propagated from parent to child in and through the act of 
 generation, would seem to have relieved Augustine of the 
 necessity of deciding between the ‘creationist’ and the 
 ‘traducianist ’ views of the origin of the soul; for it is 
 equally compatible with either. His personal inclinations 
 pointed in the direction of ‘ creationism’; but he found it 
 difficult to explain why God should have created so many 
 millions of souls in a state of innocence, only to be infused 
 into bodies which He knew were bound to pollute them with 
 concupiscence.t Moreover, the Pelagians, it would seem, 
 were ‘creationists’ to a man: hence, when charged by 
 them with holding ‘traducianism,’ Augustine shows a 
 distinct reluctance to repudiate the accusation.? His final 
 position with regard to this point seems to have consisted in 
 an affirmation of its indifference, provided that the reality of 
 the innate disease and of its hereditary transmission were 
 firmly maintained.? 
 
 (v) So oppressive and overwhelming is the tyranny of 
 fleshly appetite over fallen man, that he cannot even begin 
 to raise himself out of the mire of sinfulness without the help 
 of God’s prevenient grace. This position would seem logi- 
 cally to involve the negation of human free-will; and from 
 time to time Augustine uses phrases which can only be 
 construed in this sense.4 The condition of man after the 
 Fall is described as subject to a peccatum habendi dura 
 necessitas.» Yet Augustine strenuously refuses to admit that 
 our fallen race does not still possess free-will, and in order to 
 preserve a nominal freedom in man he is driven to make use 
 of shifts and expedients which, with all due respect for his 
 mighty intellect, it is difficult to regard as more than mere 
 verbal jugglery. In reply to Julian he admits that the 
 libertas which Adam possessed in Paradise has perished ; 
 this /zbertas is defined as freedom to remain in Paradise and 
 
 1 de anima et eius orig. i. 6, 13. 
 
 2 Cf. de pecc. merit. et rem, iii. 5; c. 11. epp. Pel. iii. 26; op. 1mperf. c. 
 Tulian. 11.178; iv. 104. 
 
 3 ¢, Iulian. Pel. v. 17: ‘ista fides non negetur, et hoc quod de anima 
 latet aut ex otio discitur, aut sicut alia multa in hac vita sine salutis labe 
 nescitur.’ 
 
 4 e.g. enchir. 30: ‘amissum est liberum arbitrium’; de perfect. iust. 
 
 hom. 9: ‘ poenalis vitiositas subsecuta ex libertate fecit necessitatem,’ 
 5 de perfect. iust. hom. 9. . 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 369 
 
 acquire the gift of immortality. But although freedom 
 (ibertas) has perished free-will (berum arbitrium) still 
 exists; and this elusive and all but incomprehensible 
 distinction between ‘ freedom’ and ‘ free-will’ is defended, 
 not by metaphysical arguments, but by an exposition of the 
 metaphorical language employed by St. Paul in Rom. vi. 20 
 with regard to the condition of unregenerate man: ‘ When 
 ye were enslaved to sin, ye were free in regard to righteous- 
 ness.’ The confusion introduced into Augustine’s con- 
 ception of free-will by his determination to use St. Paul’s 
 image, borrowed from the Roman law of slavery, as though 
 it were a metaphysical or psychological definition, is com- 
 plete. The will of fallen man is free, but in point of fact it 
 always freely chooses evil under the overwhelming influence 
 of concupiscence, or of the devil’s power.? We are free to 
 do what we like, but we are not free to like what we ought to 
 like. This interpretation of ‘freedom’ is justified by the 
 consideration that if freedom means the power to choose 
 either good or evil God Himself is not free, nor will the 
 blessed in Heaven be free, because they will be subject to 
 the beata necessitas non peccandr.* 
 
 It is not necessary to go into this very abstruse and 
 difficult conception of freedom any further, inasmuch as it 
 is clear that Augustine, whether consciously or not, is 
 
 Se, 4t. epp,. Pel, 3: 5. 2 Cfeibids it, 0. 
 
 8 Cf. op. imperf.c. Iulian.i. 100, 102; de civ. Det, xxii. 30: ‘ Deus ipse 
 numquid quoniam peccare non potest, ideo liberum arbitrium habere 
 negandus est ?’ and the whole context. The answer to this argument 
 surely is that God is not free, in the sense in which freedom is predicable of 
 human beings still1m via, in the state of probation ; if He were, it would 
 be an imperfection in Him, and He would in fact not be God. The same 
 consideration would also apply to the blessed, who are comprehensores in 
 patria: their blessedness is based upon the fact that they cannot now fall, 
 in other words, upon the fact that they are not ‘free.’ The discussion of 
 the whole matter, both by Augustine and by some of his successors, is 
 vitiated by a failure to distinguish between three senses of the word 
 ‘freedom,’ viz. (a) physical, in which it connotes absence of external 
 - constraint : in this sense, God undoubtedly is free, and man may or may 
 not be, according to circumstances ; (b) metaphysical, in the sense of interior 
 indetermination ; in this sense, God and the saints are not free, but man 
 in the state of probation is ; (c) metaphorical, in the sense of * freedom from 
 sin ’ or from concupiscence ; this actually means a fixed interior determina- 
 tion towards good, in other words, it implies the exact opposite of freedom 
 in sense (0). 
 
 2B 
 
370 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 really trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. 
 He wants to keep freedom in order to preserve man’s 
 responsibility for actual sin, and yet he wishes to throw it 
 overboard in order to provide scope for irresistible grace. 
 If we disregard verbal subtleties and concentrate our 
 attention on realities, we shall find that the Augustinian 
 system implies the negation of free-will in any except a 
 highly recondite and unnatural sense of the term. Mozley’s 
 words can hardly be bettered : 
 
 (Augustine) explained the corruption of human nature to 
 mean the loss of free-will; and this statement was the funda- 
 mental barrier which divided the later from the earlier scheme 
 and rationale of original sin. The will, according to the earlier 
 school, was not substantially affected by the Fall. Its circum- 
 stances, its means and appliances, were altered, not itself; and 
 endowed with spiritual aids in Paradise, deprived of them at the 
 Fall; re-endowed with them under the Gospel, it retained 
 throughout these alterations one and the same essential power, 
 in that power of choice whereby it was, in every successive state 
 of higher or lower means, able to use and avail itself of whatever 
 means it had. But in Augustine’s scheme the will itself was 
 disabled at the Fall, and not only certain impulses to it with- 
 drawn, its power of choice was gone, and man was unable not 
 only to rise above a defective goodness, but to avoid positive sin. 
 He was thenceforth, prior to the operation of grace, in a state of 
 necessity on the side of evil, a slave to the devil and to his own 
 inordinate lusts.? 
 
 As a result of the Fall, therefore, according to Augustine, 
 the nerve of the human will is severed, and concupiscence 
 rages unchecked. Yet Augustine is not prepared to draw 
 from these facts—or supposed facts—their logical conclusion, 
 which would seem to be the Calvinistic doctrine of the ‘ total 
 depravity ’ of human nature. We may surmise that it was 
 
 1 Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination, p. 125 f. 
 
 2 A well-known passage, de nat. et grat. 42, appears at first sight to 
 exempt the Blessed Virgin Mary from this law, and has been quoted as an 
 anticipation of the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception: ‘ excepta 
 igitur sancta virgine Maria, de qua propter honorem Domini nullam prorsus, 
 cum de peccatis agitur, haberi volo quaestionem : unde enim scimus, quid 
 ei plus gratiae collatum fuerit ad vincendum omni ex parte peccatum, quae 
 concipere et parere meruit, quem constat nullum habuisse peccatum ?’ 
 Yet, at their highest interpretation, these words do not appear to do more 
 than suggest that Mary may have been safeguarded, by a special grace, 
 from actual sin. 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 371 
 
 his Platonic monism which, perhaps subconsciously, re- 
 strained him from formulating this final corollary of the 
 ‘twice-born ’ version of the Fall-doctrine. For the Platonist 
 all being, in so far as it is true being, is good; and every- 
 thing that exists is either God or derived from God. Even 
 the nature of the devil, gua created nature, is good; he is 
 only evil as it were per accidens, because of the perversion 
 of his will.t Hence evil—even the evil of original sin—is 
 nothing positive: it isa defect of goodness, the absence of 
 virtue, just as darkness is not a substantive thing-in-itself 
 but merely the absence of light.2 These are ideas which 
 we have already encountered in the great Greek Fathers of 
 the fourth century,? and which need not be commented on 
 now, save by the observation that their logical effect would 
 necessarily be to blunt the edge of the antithesis between 
 ‘nature’ and ‘ grace,’ which arose out of Augustine’s own 
 specifically ‘twice-born’ experience. If this suggestion 
 does actually represent the interior workings of Augustine’s 
 mind, it would not be the first time that the harsh judgment 
 of human nature generated by the fervid emotions of an 
 African Fall-speculator had been mollified by the genial 
 influences of his Hellenic philosophical background: Origen 
 is an instance of the same phenomenon.* At any rate, it 
 is noteworthy that Augustine, in the opening chapters of 
 the treatise On nature and grace, explicitly admits that ‘ all 
 the good qualities which human nature, even as fallen, still 
 possesses in its constitution, its life, its senses, its intellect, 
 it has from the most high God, its creator and artificer’ >: 
 
 1 de civ. Det, xix. 13: “ proinde nec ipsius diaboli natura, in quantum 
 natura est, malum est ; sed perversitas eam malam facit.’ 
 
 2 Cf. de nat. boni 17: ‘non ergo mala est, in quantum natura est, ulla 
 natura; sed cuique naturae non est malum nisi minui bono’; enarr. in 
 ps. vil. 19: ‘non quod aliqua sit natura tenebrarum. ommnis enim natura, 
 in quantum natura est, esse cogitur. esse autem ad lucem pertinet : 
 non esse ad tenebras. qui ergo deserit eum a quo factus est et inclinat 
 in id unde factus est, id est in nihilum, in hoc peccato tenebratur.’ 
 
 3 Lecture IV, pp. 255, 260, 266, 278. 
 
 4 ibid. p. 209. 
 
 5 de nat. et grat. 3. As against Julian, he repudiates the idea that 
 human nature is essentially, not merely accidentally, evil: ‘non dixeram 
 naturam humanam malam non esse sed malum non esse: hoc est, ut planius 
 loquar, non dixeram vitiatam non esse, sed vitium non esse’ (op. imperf. 
 ili. 190). 
 
372 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 and, in the section of the Retractations dealing with this 
 book, he claims to have upheld grace ‘ not indeed in dis- 
 paragement of nature, but as that which liberates and 
 controls nature.’ } 
 
 (b) We now pass to the question of the results of the 
 Fall as viewed under the legal or forensic category, that is, 
 to the question of ‘ original guilt,’ of the inherited taint 
 considered as veatus rather than as vitvum, together with the 
 allied question of the mode of transmission or communica- 
 tion of such guilt. It is curious and noteworthy that, 
 whereas the transmission of original. sin, considered as 
 vitium, is said to take place by way of biological heredity 
 (the act of generation being the nexus which conveys the 
 fatal legacy of concupiscence from parent to child), the 
 communication of original sin, considered as reatus, from 
 Adam to his posterity is explained in accordance with the 
 theory of ‘seminal identity.’ No doubt it is possible to 
 harmonise these two conceptions of the mode of trans- 
 mission, but Augustine makes no effort to do so. When 
 ‘original guilt’ is in question, the latter theory is affirmed 
 in the stiffest and most uncompromising fashion. Adam, 
 by his wilful transgression, incurred infinite guilt and was 
 therefore justly doomed to eternal damnation. But, at the 
 moment when he committed his sin, he included within 
 , himself, in a strictly physiological sense, the whole of the 
 ~ human race, all the countless myriads who were to proceed 
 from his loins ; or, if the more metaphysical way of phrasing 
 the matter be preferred, Adam was the universal of human 
 nature, and as such subsumed in himself all the particular 
 men who have since been born. Consequently, all men 
 sinned ‘in Adam,’ in the sense that at the moment of the 
 Fall they were all infinitesimally minute portions of the 
 Adam who sinned, or particulars included in the universal 
 nature which sinned: their personalities and wills were all 
 implicit in Adam’s personality and will. The possibility of 
 such pre-natal participation in an ancestor’s act is demon- 
 strated by the instance of Levi, who was yet in the loins 
 of Abraham when the latter paid tithes to Melchisedek, and 
 who must therefore, in the mind of the author of the Epistle 
 
 1 yetract. il. 42. 
 
 C—O ee ee ee ee) 
 
 a 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 3/0 
 
 to the Hebrews, be deemed to have ‘seminally’ shared 
 in the payment of those tithes.1 It follows, according to 
 Augustine’s logic, that all human beings are born subject 
 to the penalty of eternal hell for a sin which they are alleged 
 to have pre-natally committed in Adam’s loins: and this 
 appalling sentence is duly executed upon all except those 
 whom the inscrutable decree of God’s predestination singles 
 out from the ‘mass of perdition,’ brings to the absolving 
 waters of baptism, and endows with the grace of final perse- 
 verance. The Doctor of Hippo repeatedly and vehemently 
 insists upon the ‘justice’ of this arrangement whereby 
 millions of the human race are condemned to an eternity 
 of torture as the punishment of a crime for which they 
 have ex hypothest no personal responsibility whatsoever.? 
 
 This macabre doctrine runs through the warp and weft 
 of Augustinianism like an endless black thread. Though 
 the passages in Augustine’s works which embody it are 
 innumerable, it may nevertheless be worth while to quote 
 two of the most gloomy and powerful. The first contains 
 its foundation, the theory of ‘seminal’ or ‘ metaphysical 
 identity ’ 
 
 God indeed created man upright, being Himself the author 
 of natures, not of vices. But man, having of his own free-will 
 become depraved, and having been justly condemned, begat 
 a posterity in the same state of depravation and condemnation. 
 For we all were in that one man <Adam>, seeing that we all 
 were that one man (omnes enim fuimus in illo uno, quando omnes 
 fuimus ille unus*®) who fell into sin through the woman, who was 
 made of him before the sin. Not yet had we received those 
 individually created and distinct shapes, in which we were as 
 separate individuals to live; but there was a seminal nature, 
 from which we were to be propagated; and, this having been 
 vitiated by sin, tied with the chain of death, and justly con- 
 demned, it follows that man would be born from man in no other 
 condition <than that in which Adam was after the Fall> .4 
 
 1 Heb. vii. 9, 10; quoted in op. wmperf. c. Iulian. i. 48. 
 
 2 It should be noted that original sin, according to the Augustinian 
 conception, really contains two distinct kinds of original guilt, viz. (1) the 
 guilt of having ‘sinned in Adam,’ and (2) the guilt of possessing con- 
 cupiscence, which is both pecegium and poena peccait. 
 
 3 Cf. Ambrose’s phrase ‘fuit Adam, et in illo fuimus omnes’ (expos. 
 ev. sec. Luc. vii. 234, quoted above, p. 305, n. 3). 
 
 4 de civ. Det, xiii. 14. 
 
374 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 The second illustrates the superstructure, that is, the 
 theory of original guilt : 
 
 Banished <from Paradise> after his sin, Adam bound his 
 offspring also with the penalty of death and damnation, that 
 offspring which by sinning he had corrupted in himself, as in a 
 root ; so that whatever progeny was born (through carnal con- 
 cupiscence, by which a fitting retribution for his disobedience 
 was bestowed upon him) from himself and his spouse—who was 
 the cause of his sin and the companion of his damnation—would 
 drag through the ages the burden of original sin, by which it 
 would itself be dragged, through manifold errors and sorrows, 
 down to that final and never-ending torment with the rebel 
 angels. ...So the matter stood; the damned lump of 
 humanity (totius humani generis massa damnata) was lying 
 prostrate, nay, was wallowing, in evil, it was ever falling head- 
 long from one wickedness to another ; and, joined to the faction 
 of the angels who had sinned, it was paying the most righteous 
 penalty of its impious treason. 
 
 It is, perhaps, better not to speculate with regard to 
 the amount of unhappiness which these ideas must have 
 brought to sensitive souls between the time of their first 
 promulgation and that of the final eclipse of Augustinianism 
 by Darwinism in the nineteenth century. 
 
 Two corollaries of the Augustinian doctrine of original 
 sin remain to be noticed. The first of these is the theory 
 which denies the possibility of virtue, good works, or merit 
 in the unbaptised, a theory which appears to survive in the 
 thirteenth of our Thirty-Nine Articles, in the intensified 
 form of the assertion that works before justification ? ‘ have 
 the nature of sin.’ Inasmuch as human nature, apart from 
 grace, is so deeply depraved, it is impossible for the heathen 
 to possess genuine virtue, though they may perform actions 
 which in Christians would be the symptoms of genuine 
 virtue. ‘ <Augustine> regards heathen morality as bad 
 
 1enchirid. 26, 27. 
 
 * This phrase is taken from the title of the Article: it is, however, fair 
 to mention the fact that the text of the Article only condemns ‘ works done 
 before the grace of Christ and the inspiration of his Spirit,’ which might, 
 verbally at any rate, be taken to mean works other than good works: 
 though in that case the body of the Article becomes a sonorous platitude. 
 
 3 In the beautiful treatise de spiritu et litera, which reveals only the 
 noblest and most humane side of Augustine, he admits that the good deeds 
 of the heathen may be praised ‘ merito recteque’: but he adds, as though 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 375 
 
 at the foundation, and therefore as hollow, false, and only 
 seeming morality itself.’ 1 
 
 God forbid [he exclaims against Julian] that we should admit 
 the existence of true virtue in anyone except he be righteous. 
 And God forbid that we should admit anyone to be truly 
 righteous, unless he lives by faith: ‘ for the righteous lives by 
 faith.’ Who then of those who wish to be thought Christians 
 (except the Pelagians alone, or perhaps you alone even amongst 
 Pelagians) will apply the epithet of ‘righteous’ to an infidel, 
 to an impious man, to one sold into the power of the devil ?— 
 even though such a one should be a Fabricius, a Fabius, a Scipio, 
 a Regulus, names by which you thought that I could be brow- 
 beaten, as though we were debating in the old Senate-house at 
 Rome ! 2 
 
 Hence even continence and chastity are no virtues when 
 displayed by the ‘impious,’ that is, non-Christians. The 
 Scriptural basis of this position appears to consist solely 
 in a scrap of the Epistle to the Romans, torn from its 
 context and expanded into a general principle which the 
 Apostle would never have recognised as his own: ‘ What- 
 soever is not of faith’ (that is, according to Augustine, 
 specifically Christian faith) ‘is sin.’* Though he did not 
 himself declare the virtues of pagans to be sflendida vitia, 
 this phrase, coined by his disciples of a later day, is 
 
 fearing that he has conceded too much, ‘ quamquam si discutiantur quo 
 fine fiunt, vix inveniuntur quae iustitiae debitam laudem defensionemve 
 mereantur’ (§ 48). In the following passages Augustine appears (some- 
 what inconsistently with his general position) to recognise the possibility 
 of real virtue outside the Church, though such virtue is solely the gift of 
 God: ep. cxliv. 2 (Polemo, a pagan, said to have renounced drunken- 
 ness) ; de patient. 23 (schismatic martyrs will, in view of their martyrdom, 
 be treated more leniently in the final judgment); de grat. Christi 25 
 (Ahasuerus changed by God’s interior operation from fury to gentleness). 
 
 1 J. B. Mozley, Augustinian Doctrine of Predestination, p. 127. 
 
 ecad uitam. Jel. iv 17, 
 
 8 ibid. ad fin. 
 
 4 Rom. xiv. 23, cited in de gestis Pel. 34; c. Iulian. Pel.iv.24. The 
 true meaning of the phrase, in relation to the vegetarian controversy 
 which the Apostle is discussing, has been well summed up by Sanday and 
 Headlam (ICC., p. 393, note in Joc.) in the sentence ‘ Weakly to comply 
 with other persons’ customs without being convinced of their indifference 
 is itself sin’ ; it has no reference to the ordinary conduct of non-Christians. 
 
376 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 not very far from expressing his real thought on the 
 point.? 
 
 The second corollary which deserves mention is the 
 doctrine of the necessary damnation of all persons dying 
 unbaptised, including personally guiltless infants. This 
 follows inevitably from the conception of the massa damnata, 
 which (with the exception of the company of predestined 
 souls arbitrarily picked out of it for exaltation to eternal 
 life) steadily gravitates, under the inexorable pressure of 
 the divine justice, towards the bottomless pit. At one 
 period of his life, indeed, Augustine appears to have shrunk 
 from the full rigour of this pitiless dogma. In A.D. 415 we 
 find him writing to Jerome for help. 
 
 Teach me [he begs] what I am to teach, teach me what I am 
 to hold, and tell me, if souls are individually created for all the 
 individuals who are this day being born, when (? where) do such 
 souls sin in the little ones, that they should need the remission of 
 sin imparted by the sacrament of Christ . . . ? or, if they sin not, 
 by what justice of the Creator are they so bound to another’s 
 sin, so soon as they are infused into their new-begotten members, 
 that damnation seizes upon them, unless help is brought to 
 them through the Church? especially in view of the fact that 
 it is not in their power to secure being helped by the grace of 
 baptism. So many thousands of souls which at the deaths of 
 infants depart from their bodies without the pardon bestowed 
 by the Christian sacrament—with what equity can they be 
 damned, if, newly created, by no previous sin of their own but 
 solely by the will of the Creator, all these individual souls were 
 infused into the individual bodies for the animation of which 
 He created and gave them ? ? 
 
 Jerome excused himself, on the ground of want of 
 leisure, from giving an answer to these questions, which 
 are indeed unanswerable. The fact that Augustine never- 
 theless maintained this inhuman theory down to the last 
 days of his life is a melancholy illustration of the way in 
 which the best of men may allow the kindly instincts of 
 
 1 The phrase is probably an inference from de civ. Det xix. 25: ‘proinde 
 virtutes, quas sibi habere videtur [sc. mens veri Dei nescia], per quas 
 imperat corpori et vitiis ad quodlibet adipiscendum vel tenendum, nisi ad 
 Deum retulerit, etiam ipsae vitia sunt potius quam virtutes.’ 
 
 2 ep. clxvi. Io. It will be noticed that in this passage Augustine 
 assumes ‘creationism’: but the difficulty is equally pressing on the 
 “traducianist ’ hypothesis. : 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 377 
 
 human nature to be overridden by the demands of a fanatical 
 logic. 
 
 The Augustinian doctrine on this point is vividly ex- 
 pressed in a woodcut which is prefixed to tom. x. of the 
 Benedictine edition of 1700, the volume containing the 
 anti-Pelagian treatises. This woodcut is meant to illustrate 
 the passage op. imperf. c. Iul. 1. 39. It depicts the interior 
 of a church in baroque style. On the right of the picture 
 is the baptistery, where a bishop is plunging a naked infant 
 into the font; this infant is evidently one of the elect, for 
 the Holy Spirit is represented as a dove descending upon 
 him in a stream of supernatural glory. Parents, sponsors, 
 acolytes stand around in various attitudes of edification. 
 On the left is the nave of the church ; here another christen- 
 ing party is seen, suddenly halted with expressions and 
 gestures of horror and dismay, just before the entrance to 
 the baptistery : in their midst, a nurse holds the corpse of 
 an infant, who was being brought to baptism, but has that 
 very moment unexpectedly died (of convulsions, or what 
 not) on the very verge of receiving the Sacrament of re- 
 generation, and whose soul must therefore be presumed 
 to have gone straight to hell, in virtue of original sin. The 
 picture is surmounted by a scroll, bearing the inscription 
 “Unus assumitur et alter relinquitur; Quia magna est 
 gratia Dei, et verax iustitia Dei’ (taken from the passage 
 in question: the context adds ‘sed quare ille potius quam 
 ille >—inscrutabilia sunt iudicia Dei’). When the whole 
 theory is so horrible, it is perhaps a small matter that it 
 appears to assume a purely mechanical view of the efficacy 
 of infant baptism. 
 
 Augustine must, indeed, be allowed whatever credit may 
 attach to the fact that at various times during the main 
 period of his theological activity he expresses the opinion 
 that the punishment of unbaptised babes, albeit eternal, 
 will be of the mildest kind.1 No hint of this qualification, 
 however, is shown by his last utterance on the subject, in 
 the unfinished work against Julian. Here he speaks of the 
 
 1 de pecc. merit, et vem, i. 21: enchirid. 23 (xcilil), with reference in 
 general to those who die in original sin only, without having committed 
 actual sin; c. Iulian. Pel. v. 44 (‘ damnatio omnium levissima’). 
 
378 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 ceremony of insufflation, or breathing on the face of the 
 catechumen, which still survives in the modern Roman 
 ritual of baptism; and he tells us that this ceremony is 
 performed in order that the devil, in whose power the little 
 one is born (as being ‘ guilty’ through the contagion of 
 original sin), may be cast forth, and the child transferred to 
 the power of Christ. But, he adds, if the little one is not 
 so delivered from the power of darkness, he remains under 
 it. Why (he naively enquires) should it be a matter of 
 wonder that the little one is doomed to eternal fire with 
 the devil, seeing that he is not permitted to enter the 
 kingdom of God ? 1 
 
 Before proceeding to the task of disentangling what 
 appear to be the permanently valuable elements in the 
 Augustinian doctrine of man and of sin from those which 
 are morbid or irrational, it will be well to indicate the 
 arguments upon which the doctrine was formally based. 
 (It is doubtless unnecessary to re-emphasise the distinction 
 between the psychological ground of Augustinianism, con- 
 sisting in its author’s ‘ twice-born’ temperament, and the 
 logical premises from which it was nominally deduced: and 
 it will be understood that to recognise Augustine’s theological 
 case for his doctrine as being ultimately an ex fost facto 
 “rationalisation ’ of a peculiarly vehement type of emotional 
 experience in no way reflects upon his personal sincerity 
 and good faith in putting it forward.) These arguments, 
 which recur again and again throughout the vast mass of 
 Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings, do not when collected 
 amount to very much. The ‘ appeal to Scripture ’ consists 
 in ringing the changes on the four or five proof-texts with 
 which we are already familiar—the Psalmist’s cry ‘ Behold, 
 I was shapen in wickedness’ 2; the Septuagintal mistrans- 
 lation of Job xiv. 4, 5 ‘ Who shall be free from defilement ? 
 not one, even though his life be but a day upon the earth’ 8; 
 the Johannine Christ’s affirmation of the necessity of a new 
 birth through water and the Spirit as a condition of entrance 
 
 1 op. imperf. c. Iulian, iii. 199. 
 wild Suc bad bigs 
 3 For the true text see Driver and Buchanan Gray, Job (ICC.), 1921, 
 
 Doel oye 
 
 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 379 
 
 into the kingdom of God?! ; the phrase ‘ children of wrath ’ 
 from Eph. ii. 3; and the text which Augustine believed to 
 be his trump card, the clause from Rom. v. 12 (lat.)—‘ in 
 quo omnes peccarunt,’ misinterpreted in accordance with 
 Ambrosiaster’s fatal blunder as ‘in whom (sc. Adam) all 
 have sinned.’2 The slenderness of the Biblical foundation 
 upon which Augustine’s terrific dogma is reared will be 
 realised when it is pointed out that of his five proof-texts 
 three are mistranslations. The ‘ appeal to tradition,’ in so 
 far as it is not a mere assertion, bases itself upon an alleged 
 consensus of the Fathers: but it is impossible not to observe 
 that the Fathers whom Augustine cites are for the most 
 part Western, and that the list of authorities which may be 
 compiled from his various references is a fairly exhaustive 
 catalogue of upholders of the specifically “‘ twice-born ’ view, 
 no account being taken of the Apologists or of the Alexand- 
 rines.2 This, however, does not prevent him from triumph- 
 antly exclaiming to Julian ‘ You are refuted on every side ! 
 so great testimonies of the Saints are clearer than daylight.’ 4 
 Thirdly, we have the argument which has played so great a 
 part in this discussion from the time of Origen downwards, 
 drawn from the actual practice of the Church in administer- 
 ing baptism to infants, with exsufflations, exorcisms, and 
 renunciations of Satan; all of which, it is contended, would 
 be futile if the newly born infant were not in some sense 
 guilty of Adam’s sin. Lastly, and more reasonably, 
 Augustine bases his theory upon the actual state of man, 
 
 1 St. John iii. 5. 
 
 2 For remarks upon Ambrosiaster’s misunderstanding of 7” quo, itself 
 a faulty rendering of 颒 @, see Lecture IV, p. 308f. Typical instances of 
 Augustine’s use of this mistake to support the idea of our ‘ seminal identity ’ 
 with Adam are serm. ccxciv. 15; c. 11. epp. Pel. iv. 7 (here he quotes 
 Ambrosiaster’s comment, ‘manifestum in Adam omnes peccasse quasi 
 in massa,’ as from ‘sanctus Hilarius’); de pecc. merit. et rem.i. 11. The 
 correct translation which the Pelagians gave of éd’ @, viz., propter quod, 
 was denounced by Augustine, despite his imperfect acquaintance with 
 Greek, as importing ‘sensum alium novum atque distortum et a vero 
 abhorrentem ’ (c. Lulian. Pel. vi. 75). 
 
 8 Augustine cites in favour of his general scheme of Fall-doctrine 
 Irenaeus, Cyprian, Hilary, Ambrose, Ambrosiaster, Reticius of Autun, 
 Jerome: amongst Eastern writers, Gregory. of Nazianzus, Basil, John 
 Chrysostom. 
 
 4c. Iulian. Pel. i. 30: ‘convinceris undique: luce clariora sunt 
 testimonia tanta sanctorum.’ 
 
380 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the immensity of misery, mental and physical, in which he 
 is overwhelmed. There are inexplicable catastrophes of 
 nature, earthquakes and eruptions, bringing pain and death 
 to thousands of innocent people, there are the sufferings 
 of little cnildren ; which even include, so he tells us, the 
 horrors of demoniacal possession. All this mass of apparently 
 meaningless and inexplicable woe points, according to our 
 author, to the presence of a profound hereditary guilt, 
 derived from the beginning of the race and prior to the 
 responsibility of any individual. 
 
 AN EVALUATION OF THE AUGUSTINIAN DOCTRINE 
 
 In view of the more shocking and repulsive aspects of 
 Augustine’s doctrine of original guilt, as set out above, 
 many will doubtless think it superfluous to subject his 
 system to any reasoned or detailed criticism at all. It is 
 nevertheless possible, within the compass of a few words, 
 to distinguish between the permanently valuable and the 
 worthless elements in his thought on this subject. The 
 doctrine which we have just sketched may be summed up 
 in three great conceptions, those of ‘ original righteousness,’ 
 ‘ original sin’ considered as vitium, and ‘ original sin’ con- 
 sidered as veatus (that is, ‘ original guilt’). I venture to 
 submit the judgment that the first and third of these con- 
 ceptions, in their strict Augustinian form, are worthless from 
 the point of view of modern thought, but that the second 
 contains large elements of permanent truth. We need not 
 spend much time upon Augustine’s conception of ‘ original 
 righteousness.’ Even if it were possible to treat Gen. Iii. 
 as being a literal record of historical facts, Augustine’s 
 idealised picture of the superhuman qualities of the first man 
 goes far beyond the language of the Scriptural text, and 
 beyond that conception of man’s first condition as one of 
 
 ‘infancy ’ which appears in the earliest Greek Fathers ; and 
 
 it will hardly be disputed in the light of what we now know 
 about the primitive history of man, that his picture of a 
 “Golden Age’ and of an earthly Paradise tenanted by a 
 saintly couple belongs to the realm of mythology. Nor is it 
 
 
 
 So Ne a eS Oe Re Eee 
 
 Pees ies ns se a Bs 
 
 — 
 

 
 
 
 AUGUSTINIANISM 381 
 
 necessary to do more than point out the absurdity of the 
 theory of ‘ original guilt,’ which asserts that human beings 
 are held responsible by an all-just Judge for an act which 
 they did not commit and for physiological and psychological 
 facts which they cannot help. At this time of day it is 
 hardly necessary to bestow the compliment of a serious 
 refutation upon the theory of ‘ seminal identity.’ Nor can 
 any verbal manipulation of the ‘ universal’ of human nature 
 make it just to punish a man for a sin alleged to have been 
 committed several millenniums previously by another man. 
 Those (if there are any such) who demand a formal disproof 
 of the belief that what is ex hypothesi an inherited psycho- 
 logical malady is regarded by God in the light of a volun- 
 tarily committed crime may be referred to the scathing 
 satire of Samuel Butler’s ‘ Erewhon.’ + 
 
 Augustine feels the force of such objections as these, 
 with which the Pelagians were not.slow to press him: and 
 hence he is fain to shelter himself behind the mystery which 
 shrouds all the operations of the Divine Being, availing 
 himself to the full of two convenient texts from the Epistle 
 to the Romans?2: ‘Nay but, O man, who art thou that 
 repliest against God?’ and ‘How unsearchable are his 
 judgments, and his ways past tracing out!’ and appealing 
 to the conception of an ‘ occult justice’ in God, which may 
 vindicate the apparent arbitrariness of His predestination, 
 and may differ as far from ordinary human justice as God 
 Himself differs from man. A _ typical expression of this 
 conception is to be found in the following passage : 
 
 By how much divine justice is loftier than human justice, 
 by so much is it more inscrutable, and by so much it differs from 
 human justice. . . . Think on these things, and forbear to set 
 God the Judge in comparison with human judges, that God 
 whom we must not doubt to be just even when He does what 
 seems to men unjust, or what, if it were done by a man, would 
 actually be unjust.* 
 
 1 T do not know whether Butler had ever read the treatise de correptione 
 et gratia, in which Augustine maintains that it is reasonable to rebuke men 
 for defects for the possession of which they are not responsible: but 
 Evewhon might have been written as a reply to it. 
 
 Ge 20 and ‘xi. 33: 
 
 3 op. imperf. c. Iulian. ili. 24. 
 
382 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Such a position lies open to the unanswerable retort made 
 by John Stuart Mill to a similar ‘appeal to mystery’ 
 advanced in this pulpit, in the Bampton Lectures of sixty- 
 six years ago: ‘I will call no being good [or just] who is 
 not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow- 
 creatures ; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for 
 not so calling him, to hell I will go.’1 On the other hand, 
 Augustine’s analysis of original sin, in the sense of the 
 vitium or inbred disease of human nature, would seem to be 
 marked by psychological acuteness and truth. We need 
 not go all the way with him in his practical denial of free- 
 will to recognise the subtlety of his analysis of the moral 
 struggle, and the aptness of his division of the rebellious 
 forces within the citadel of man’s soul into ‘ pride,’ the 
 hypertrophied instinct of self-assertion, and ‘ concupiscence,’ 
 representing mainly, though not exclusively, the ungovern- 
 able instinct of the race to perpetuate itself even at the 
 expense of a particular individual’s suffering? We have 
 seen that Augustine’s conception of the inherited infirmity, 
 merely as such, does not appear to go beyond the Pauline 
 conception, save in so far as his perverse view of sex is 
 concerned: and his borrowing from Platonism of the 
 anhypostatic notion of evil points ultimately to the idea of 
 original sin as a deprivatio rather than a depravatio, a defect 
 or absence of good rather than a positive evil substance,® 
 a weakness of will rather than a corruption of appetite. 
 
 No Christian thinker in his senses will maintain that 
 Augustinianism is a heresy. Yet a theological opinion may 
 be profoundly erroneous without being either formally or 
 materially heretical ; and, if the contention of these lectures 
 has been sound, at least two-thirds of the classical version 
 of the ‘ twice-born’ doctrine of man and of sin deserve the 
 former note. If Augustine’s doctrines of the Fall and of 
 
 1 J. 5S. Mill, An Examination of Sir Wiliam Hamilton’s Philosophy, 
 1865, p. 103, replying to H. L. Mansel’s Bampton Lectures, ‘ The Limits of 
 Religious Thought,’ 1858. A 
 
 2 See Harnack, History of Dogma, E. tr. 1898, v. p. 211: and cf. infra, 
 Lecture ViLip 481; 
 
 3 Augustine, very justly, claims this point as decisively differentiating 
 his conception of evil from the Manichean: op. imperf. c. Iulian. iii. 175. 
 
 4 Cf. Lecture VII, p. 483. 
 

 
 AUGUSTINIANISM Lee 
 
 original sin—with their mythological conception of the 
 physical, moral, and mental stature of the first man, with 
 their logically incoherent notion of original guilt, their 
 fanatical denial of the possibility of virtue outside the 
 Church, and their horrible corollary of the necessary damna-~ 
 tion of unbaptised infants—were really ‘ the ecclesiastical 
 doctrine,’ that is, the doctrine of the Church, as both friends 
 and opponents have, at least in Western Europe, hitherto 
 assumed it to be; if the whole fabric of orthodox dogma 
 were really based upon this one-sided theory of human 
 nature, seamed as it is with so large a vein of mythology 
 and split by a colossal self-contradiction ; we should be 
 obliged to conclude that the prospects of defending historical 
 Christianity in the coming generation were of a singularly 
 unpromising kind. Pelagius was right when he affirmed 
 that these questions were not, strictly speaking, parts of 
 the Faith! ; but Augustine was also right when he said 
 that they belonged to the foundations of the Faith? ; and 
 no structure can stand if the rock on which it is built is 
 reduced, by a process of attrition or molecular disintegration, 
 to a heap of dust. If Catholic Christianity presupposes 
 $tatements about human nature and about the origin of sin 
 which are intellectually indefensible and morally revolting, 
 then all is over with it) If its axioms have been refuted, 
 it is waste of time to investigate the conclusions which 
 follow from them. If the key position of the Christian 
 trenches has already been stormed, the endeavour to hold 
 the rest of the line is but useless effort. These considerations 
 have been our justification for the extended review to which 
 we have subjected the genetic history of these doctrines— 
 a review which has been designed for no other purpose 
 than to furnish us with the materials for returning an 
 answer to the question ‘Is ‘“‘ the ecclesiastical doctrine ”’ 
 identical with the Augustinian doctrine?’ or, in other 
 words, ‘Is the Christian Church, as such, committed to 
 Augustinianism ? ’ 
 
 In view of the gradual development of this doctrine, 
 side by side with the vaguer and less severe ‘ Hellenic ’ view 
 
 A USSUPIES Dy 335,114 3: 
 2 v. supra, Lecture IV, p. 314, n. 2. 
 
384 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 (which, as we have seen, is the more primitive, as being 
 traceable well back into the second century), it may appear 
 unnecessary even to raise this question: and, indeed, it 
 may now be claimed that whatever pretensions to satisfy 
 the central test of the Vincentian triad, that of acceptance 
 semper, were asserted by Augustinianism have now been 
 decisively dispelled Yet it is theoretically possible—and 
 it has sometimes been the case—that an idea which cannot 
 be discovered in the earliest epochs of Christian history 
 has nevertheless at a later date diffused itself so intimately 
 through the mind of the Great Church as to acquire at least 
 a plausible title to the honour of acceptance ubique et ab 
 omnibus. Such an idea could not, indeed, be affirmed to 
 be an integral part of the Faith: but, if its universal accep- 
 tance were extended over many centuries, it might be deemed 
 to have acquired a certain prerogative or auctoritas, which, 
 if the idea in question were reasonable, might well serve 
 to commend it to Christian thinkers, and, if it were absurd 
 or unreasonable, would correspondingly discredit the cor- — 
 porate judgment of the Christian society. It will therefore 
 be pertinent to conclude this lecture by enquiring ‘ Did 
 Augustine, either during his lifetime or after his death, 
 succeed in making his characteristic opinions an integral 
 part of orthodoxy, as orthodoxy was understood during 
 the remainder of the period of “ undivided ”’ Christendom, 
 down to the schism of A.D. 1054 2? Did he rivet the theories 
 of “original righteousness’’ ‘‘seminal identity’’ and 
 “ original guilt’ into the fabric of orthodoxy as firmly as 
 Athanasius had riveted the Homoousion ?’ These questions 
 may be answered in a few words. 
 
 1 A typical instance of such pretensions is to be found in c. Iulian. Pel. 
 vi. 39: ‘ nihil de hac re iam tunc sentiens . . . nisi quod antiquitus discit 
 et docet omnis ecclesia.’ Curiously enough, the original author of the 
 ‘Vincentian Canon’ (which, on our shewing, deprives the specifically 
 Augustinian doctrine of any claim to oecumenicity) thinks that it con- 
 firms the idea of ‘ original guilt’; he enquires rhetorically ‘ quis ante 
 prodigiosum discipulum eius (sc. Pelagii) Caelestium reatu praevari- 
 cationis Adae omne humanum genus denegavit obstrictum ?’ (S. Vine. 
 Lir. commonit. 62). The obvious retort is ‘quis ante Ambrosium et 
 Augustinum affirmavit ? 
 

 
 AUGUSTINIANISM 385 
 
 THE EXTENT TO WHICH THE AUGUSTINIAN DOCTRINE WAS 
 ACCEPTED BY THE WORLD-CHURCH 
 
 The assent of the Universal Church to a doctrinal 
 proposition may be manifested either by some formal and 
 official act or by tacit acquiescence and general though 
 informal adoption. The only. official acts which could 
 conceivably be construed as committing the Great Church 
 to the specifically Augustinian points of ‘ original righteous- 
 ness’ and ‘ original guilt’ are (a) the (alleged) world-wide 
 subscription, enforced by the sword of the Emperors, of the 
 Catholic episcopate to the ¢vactoria of Zosimus, and (0d) the 
 condemnation of ‘the partisans of Caelestius’ by the Council 
 of Ephesus. 
 
 (a) The few surviving fragments ? of the tvactorta contain 
 little of doctrinal import : it may, however, be assumed that 
 it was drafted in such a way as to enforce at least the main 
 points of the Augustinian position, including ‘ original 
 righteousness’ and ‘original guilt.’? Ecclesiastical his- 
 torians have hitherto taken for granted the assertion that 
 Julian of Eclanum and his eighteen associates stood alone in 
 refusing subscription to it.4 This statement appears, how- 
 ever, to be open to question. The sole testimony for a 
 literally universal acceptance of the ¢vactoria is found in the 
 writings of Marius Mercator,® an ecclesiastically minded 
 
 1 The confirmation of an unspecified synod of Carthage, which may or 
 may not be that of a.pD. 418, by can. 2 of the Council 7x Trulio (Hardouin 
 iii. 1660 C) can hardly be interpreted as signifying an official adoption of 
 Augustinianism by the Eastern Church. 
 
 2 These were collected by P. Coustant, epistolae Romanorum pontificum, 
 1721, tom. i, col. 994-998, and are reprinted in PL XX. 693 f. 
 
 3 It is possible that, as Coustant (op. cit. col. 996, reprinted in PL col. 
 694 B) suggests, Augustine may be referring to the tvactoria in the passage 
 de an. et eius orig. xii. 17: ‘novellos haereticos Pelagianos iustissime 
 conciliorum catholicorum et sedis apostolicae damnavit auctoritas, eo 
 quod ausi fuerint non baptizatis parvulis dare quietis et salutis locum 
 etiam praeter regnum coelorum.’ If this is so, the Pope followed the 
 Africans in their condemnation of limbo. 
 
 4 Duchesne, however (Hist. ancienne de I’ Eglise, iii. p. 264, n. 1), seems 
 to feel some doubt on the subject. 
 
 5 common. iii. 1: ‘illa beatae memoriae episcopi Zosimi epistola, 
 quae tractoria dicitur . . . quae et Constantinopolim et per totum orbem 
 missa subscriptionibus sanctorum patrum est roborata; cui Iulianus et 
 
 reliqui complices subscribere detrectantes . . . depositi . . .{sunt.’ 
 2c 
 
386 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 layman who made opposition to Pelagianism and Nestori- 
 anism the main business of his life. It is a prio not 
 at all inconceivable that Marius, in accordance with the 
 usual Western tendency to forget the existence of Eastern 
 Christendom, and the usual tendency of enthusiasts to 
 assume that the absence of any active protest against their 
 opinions is the equivalent of a positive approval of them, 
 may well have supposed that the ¢vactoria had been accepted 
 throughout the East merely because no Eastern had taken 
 the trouble to denounce it publicly. Zosimus, it would 
 seem, addressed his letter to the chief Patriarchal sees, 
 expecting their occupants to secure the signatures of their 
 subordinates: but we have no evidence (other than the 
 general assertion of Marius Mercator just mentioned) to 
 show how far this was actually done. Doubtless the tvactoria 
 was duly signed wherever the imperial government was in a 
 position to bring civil coercion into play: but the Syriac- 
 speaking Churches at least, which cherished a theological 
 tradition favourable to Pelagianism,! and which, moreover, 
 were rooted amidst a population seething with suppressed 
 nationalistic and anti-imperialist feeling, would hardly be 
 likely to welcome a document emanating from the Roman 
 Pope and enforced by the sword of the Roman Emperor. 
 It is difficult to believe that Theodore of Mopsuestia could 
 have signed the tvactoria, in view of the fact that only a few 
 years after its publication we find him taking the Pelagian 
 exiles under his personal protection. Nor is it likely that 
 the Churches of Asia Minor and Syria, which looked to 
 Theodore as their intellectual guide and teacher, would have 
 subscribed to a formulary which was destructive of their 
 own point of view. It is at least possible that Marius 
 Mercator’s assertion as to the universal acceptance of the 
 tractoria is an enthusiastic over-statement of the fact that it 
 was universally received in the West and in Egypt, and not 
 overtly denounced in Asia Minor, Syria, and the far Eastern 
 Churches. 
 
 (6) The encyclical of Zosimus, however, though it cannot 
 be proved to have secured strictly oecumenical acceptance, 
 represents the apogee and high-water-mark of the power 
 
 1 v, supra, p. 349 f. 
 

 
 AUGUSTINIANISM 387 
 
 and influence of the Augustinian ideas. But the studiously 
 vague and cautious condemnation of Caelestius pronounced 
 by the Council of Ephesus shows that thirteen years later 
 the Easterns, even those of Cyril’s party, were not by any 
 means willing to give their whole-hearted allegiance to the 
 theories which had triumphed in the West; nor can the 
 language of the letter addressed by the Council to Pope 
 Celestine, informing him that it had renewed the condem- 
 nation pronounced by his predecessors against Pelagianism, 
 be taken as more than a very general and complimentary 
 approval of the anti-Pelagian attitude of Rome; it would 
 not be reasonable to extract from it an explicit commenda- 
 tion of every detail of Zosimus’ letter, even if we knew what 
 this contained. The first and fourth Canons of this Council,1 
 which censure those who ‘ hold the opinions of’ or ‘ side 
 with ’ Caelestius, cannot be construed as an approval of the 
 characteristic positions of Augustine: they can hardly be 
 made to affirm more in the positive direction than that 
 there was a Fall, and that it had hereditary consequences 
 in the shape of a transmitted bias towards sin. 
 
 How far can the Augustinian Fall-doctrine be deemed 
 to have secured the tacit acquiescence, as distinct from the 
 credal or conciliar endorsement, of the undivided Church ? 
 In view of the overwhelming triumph of Augustinianism 
 in the West, this question is, in effect, an enquiry how far 
 Augustinianism succeeded in penetrating the East, and in 
 superseding or suppressing the vaguer, more liberal ‘ once- 
 born’ tendency which we have seen to be associated with 
 the Hellenic-Christian thought of the first four centuries. 
 It is difficult to give any very precise answer to this question, 
 for the reason that after the Council of Ephesus, and the 
 secession of the Syrian and Persian Churches which sym- 
 pathised with Nestorius and by consequence with Pelagius, 
 the remainder of Eastern Christendom seems to have lost 
 all interest in the matter. During the last five centuries 
 of the ‘ undivided’ period, the dominant doctrinal issues in 
 the East were the Christological question, the questions of 
 the two natures and the two wills, and that of the veneration 
 
 1 The text is given in Additional Note F, p. 537, ‘ Formularies, 
 I. Oecumenical’; and see above, p. 354. 
 
388 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of icons, not the Western disputes about Adam, sin, and 
 grace. In the scanty references made to the subject by 
 the Greek-Christian writers of this epoch, we note the 
 appearance of the term ‘ ancestral sin’ (ayapria mporaropurn *) 
 which is now used in the dogmatic theology and formularies 
 of the Eastern Orthodox Church as the equivalent of 
 ‘original sin’; but whether in the sixth and seventh 
 centuries it included the idea of ‘ original guilt’ or not it is 
 impossible to say. There is no doubt that the Monophysite 
 Christology tended to be associated with an Augustinian 
 type of Fall-doctrine,? just as Nestorianism had been logically 
 linked with Pelagianism 4; but it would be unsafe to dog- 
 matise with regard to the proportion borne by this tendency 
 to the other factors which went to make up the kaleidoscopic 
 picture of Byzantine theology. It is instructive in this 
 connexion to read through the treatise On the Orthodox Faith 
 written by the last of the great figures of Eastern theology, 
 St. John of Damascus (?680-?760). This work contains 
 much detailed exposition of the doctrines of the Trinity and 
 the Incarnation, and, indeed, of various cosmological and 
 physiographical theories which we should regard as having 
 nothing to do with the Faith at all; but the Damascene’s 
 language on the subject of the Fall and of its consequences 
 is rhetorical and vague to the last degree.® There is some 
 use of the traditional phrases regarding man’s ‘ servitude to 
 the devil,’ and the ‘ disintegration’ (f@opa) of his being ; 
 but it is impossible to extract from the Damascene’s pages 
 any doctrine more precise than that of St. Paul, and the 
 specifically Augustinian conceptions are nowhere to be found. 
 
 1 Cf. Olympiodorus (saec. vi), fragmenta in Ievemiam, in c. xxxi. 30 
 (PG XCIII. 689 D): % rot’ Adau auapria d1eAMobaa eis ro EOvoS Kat emt TOs 
 py) duaptnoavras HAGev ds elev 6 amdaTOA0s’ yxpioTod odv GuyYwpHaavros TaUTHY 
 dia Tob AovTpob THs adecews, ExalapicOyn ev %) mpoTraTopiKH dpaptia, Exacros dé 
 TOV olKelwv apapTnudrwy bméxet Adyov: Maximus Confessor (sa@ec. vii), ep. ad 
 Marinum (PG XCI. 136A): dtya Tov KUpiov elvar THs mMpoTaTopiKHs auaptias 
 ws dvOpwrov. 
 
 2 See Additional Note ‘ Formularies, III Eastern Orthodox’ (p. 542). 
 
 3 See A. Draguet, Julien @ Halicarnasse, mentioned above, p. 254, n. 5. 
 
 4 v. supra, Pp. 349. 
 
 5 The chief references to the subject are contained in lb. ii. cc. Io, 11, 
 12 (a reproduction of St. Greg. Naz., or. xlv, quoted above, Lecture IV, 
 p. 283), 30: lib. iii. r: lib. iv. 13 (in Michael Lequien’s edition, Paris, 1712, 
 tom. li. p. 267 E). 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 AUGUSTINIANISM 389 
 
 So far as this writer is concerned, Augustine, Pelagius, 
 Caelestius, and Julian might never have existed at all. 
 
 In view of such facts as these, we shall be safe in formu- 
 lating the statement that from the Council of Ephesus down 
 to the Great Schism of A.D. 1054 a modified Augustinianism + 
 was dominant in the West, and a state of complete vague- 
 ness and confusion with regard to the Fall-doctrine prevailed 
 in the East. Augustinianism, though the most widely 
 spread version of the doctrine, never enjoyed an exclusive 
 dominance: it cannot be said to have ever attained to 
 acceptance in a literal sense ubigue et ab omnibus. Not 
 even in a modified and secondary sense of the term, there- 
 fore, can it claim to. be ‘the ecclesiastical doctrine’ par 
 excellence. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the 
 original perfection and righteousness of Adam were taken 
 for granted by practically all Christians between the fifth 
 and the nineteenth century: though Gregory of Nyssa’s 
 re-interpretation of the subject of ‘ original righteousness ’ 
 as the ideal or archetypal man, not the concrete individuals 
 Adam and Eve, stood on record as indicating a possible 
 solution of the coming clash between the monotheistic 
 religious consciousness, which demands that the works of 
 an infinitely good God must themselves have been good as 
 originally created by Him, and the scientific understanding, 
 which can find no crevice in the smooth continuity of man’s 
 evolution from the brute into which an epoch of Paradisal 
 perfection could be interpolated.? 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 Meanwhile, the fact that we must needs reject the ideas 
 of ‘ original righteousness ’ and ‘ original guilt ’ as Augustine 
 formulated them involves no disparagement of the spiritual 
 greatness of this heroic saint and doctor, nor does it imply 
 
 1 From A.D. 529 onwards, the canons of the second Council of Orange, 
 with the statement which concludes them (Hardouin, ii. 1098 A sqq. ; 
 Denzinger-Bannwart, Enchiridion, §§ 174-200) may be taken as represent- 
 ing the norm of this ‘ modified Augustinianism ’; see Lecture VI, p. 397, 
 and Additional Note ‘ Formularies, 11. Western and Roman,’ p. 537. 
 
 2 v. supra, Lecture IV, p. 271; and infra, Lecture VIII, p. 526, n. 1. 
 
390 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 any contempt for the highly specialised type of experience 
 in which these ideas were rooted. In the history of Christian 
 thought we have at every turn to distinguish between the 
 kernel and the husk, between the permanent facts of the life 
 of the soul and the intellectual form which in a given epoch 
 is used to body them forth. Augustine’s belief in the 
 Golden Age, in the unalloyed bliss of Paradise, in the super- 
 natural glories of unfallen human nature, has been banished 
 by modern knowledge from the domain of historic possi- 
 bility. Butitisstilla splendid symbol of the ideal of human 
 nature as God meant it to be and as it exists in the treasure- 
 house of the divine ideas, a symbol cast in a gorgeous pic- 
 torial form and projected upon the misty background of the 
 primeval past. The idea of original guilt, of the inheritance 
 of responsibility for the first sin, is one which is inconsistent 
 with our notion of justice; and the affirmation that there 
 is a mysterious kind of divine justice, which has little in 
 common with what. we understand by the term ‘ justice,’ 
 has now ceased to have any meaning for us. Yet as the 
 husk of ‘inherited racial guilt’ splits asunder, it reveals 
 the infinitely true and precious—though humbling and not 
 easily comprehensible—idea of that voluntary and sym- 
 pathetic self-identification with the sins of the community 
 which was attributed by the Jewish scriptures to Nehemiah 4 
 and Daniel,? and was achieved in fullest measure by our 
 Lord Himself upon the Cross. These are ideas which cannot 
 be neglected in future speculations on this mysterious sub- 
 ject. The mighty structure of Augustinianism has in great 
 part collapsed; but it contains precious materials which 
 may well be used for the new fabric which is to replace it. 
 As the marble columns which had served to rear the pedi- 
 ments of the ancient temples were utilised by the men of 
 Augustine’s day to adorn the glittering naves of the new 
 Christian basilicas: so the characteristic doctrines of Man 
 and of Sin evolved through storms of controversy by the 
 “twice-born ’ type of religious genius, though rejected as 
 theological truths, may none the less survive as devotional 
 values, enriching and fertilising the common life of the 
 
 * Nehem, 1,6, °7; 
 2 Daniel ix. 20. 
 
AUGUSTINIANISM 391 
 
 Church, which must in the main reflect the experience of 
 the ordinary and ‘ once-born’ man, with the tears and the 
 penitence of the Saints. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE B 
 
 Canons of the Carthaginian Council of a.p. 418, dealing with 
 the Fall and Original Sin (Hardouin, i. 926, 927; Denzinger- 
 Bannwart, Enchiridion Symbolorum etc., 1913, p. 47, §§ IOI, 102). 
 
 can. I. placuit omnibus episcopis . . . in sancta synodo 
 Carthaginiensi constitutis : ut quicunque dixerit, Adam primum 
 hominem mortalem factum, ita ut sive peccaret sive non peccaret 
 moreretur in corpore, hoc est de corpore exiret non peccati 
 merito, sed necessitate naturae, anathema sit. 
 
 can. 2. item placuit, ut quicunque parvulos recentes ab 
 uteris matrum baptizandos negat, aut dicit in remissionem 
 quidem peccatorum eos baptizari, sed nihil ex Adam trahere 
 originalis peccati, quod lavacro regenerationis expietur, unde sit 
 consequens, ut in eis forma baptismatis in remissionem pecca- 
 torum non vera sed falsa intelligatur, anathema sit. quoniam 
 non aliter intelligendum est quod ait apostolus: fer unum 
 hominem peccatum intravit in mundum, et per peccatum mors, et 
 ita in omnes homines pertransiit, in quo omnes peccaverunt, nisi 
 quemadmodum ecclesia catholica ubique diffusa semper intel- 
 lexit. propter hanc enim regulam fidei etiam parvuli, qui nihil 
 peccatorum in se ipsis adhuc committere potuerunt, ideo in 
 peccatorum remissionem veraciter baptizantur, ut in eis 
 regeneratione mundetur, quod generatione traxerunt. 
 
 can. 3. [This is the canon, which, as Duchesne notes 
 (v. supra, p. 348, n. 2), has been suppressed in most collections 
 of canons, presumably because it condemns the idea of limbo.] 
 item placuit, ut si quis dicit, ideo dixisse Dominum, im domo 
 patris met mansiones muliae sunt, ut intelligatur, quia in regno 
 coelorum erit aliquis medius aut ullus alicubi locus, ubi beati 
 vivant parvuli, qui sine baptismo ex hac vita migrarunt, sine 
 quo in regnum coelorum, quod est vita aeterna, intrare non 
 possunt, anathema sit. nam cum Dominus dicat, mist quis 
 venatus fuerit ex aqua et spiritu Sancto, non intrabit in regnum 
 coelorum, quis catholicus dubitet participem fore diaboli eum, 
 qui coheres esse non meruit Christi? qui enim dextra caret, 
 sinistram procul dubio partem incurret. [On the authorities 
 for this canon, see Hardouin’s note, 1. 927 B.] 
 
hi aul 
 
 OE 
 
 it ade 
 iS she be, 1 
 
 Atal 
 
 
 
VE. 
 
 THE TRIUMPH AND DECLINE OF THE 
 AUGUSTINIAN DOCTRINE 
 
God made this whole world in such an uniformity, such 
 a correspondency, such a concinnity of parts, as that it was 
 an Instrument, perfectly in tune: we may say, the trebles, the 
 highest strings were disordered first ; the best understandings, 
 Angels and Men, put this instrument out of tune. God rectified 
 all again, by putting in a new string, semen mulieris, the seed 
 of the woman, the Messias: And onely by sounding that string 
 in your ears, become we musicum carmen, true musick, true 
 harmony, true peace to you. If we shall say, that Gods first 
 string in this instrument, was Reprobation, that Gods first 
 intention was for his glory to damn man; and that then he put 
 in another string, of creating Man, that so he might have some 
 body to damn; and then another of enforcing him to sin, that 
 so he might have a just cause to damne him ; and then another, 
 of disabling him to lay hold upon any means of recovery: there’s 
 no musick in all this, no harmony, no peace in such preaching. 
 
 JOHN DONNE. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 THE TRIUMPH AND DECLINE OF 
 THE AUGUSTINIAN DOCTRINE 
 
 Rom. ix. 18. ‘So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he 
 will be hardeneth.’ 
 
 It was shown in our last lecture that the sombre and 
 pessimistic version of the Fall-theory, which springs from 
 the characteristic experience of the ‘sick soul’ or the 
 ‘twice-born’ type of religious man, which received its chief 
 development in the stern and fanatical atmosphere of the 
 North African Church, and which was wrought into a 
 rounded, coherent, and classical doctrine by the genius of 
 St. Augustine, though victorious all along the line in the 
 field of Western Christendom, yet exercised only a super- 
 ficial influence on the mind of the Christian East; which, 
 on the whole, remained faithful (at least until the seven- 
 teenth century) to that milder view of the presuppositions 
 of Redemption which we found in the writings of the earlier 
 Greek Fathers, more particularly in those of Irenaeus, 
 Origen, and the Cappadocians. It follows that, for those 
 who recognise a palmary and normative authority as residing 
 in the mind of the primitive undivided Church, the question 
 “What is “‘ the ecclesiastical doctrine ’’—the doctrine accepted 
 by the Christian Church as such—in regard to the origin 
 and nature of the inherited tendency to sin?’ has been 
 conclusively answered. The doctrine of the Undivided 
 Church as a whole can only be taken to be the highest 
 common factor of the maximising and minimising versions 
 of the Fall-doctrine held by its Western and Eastern areas 
 respectively ; and this highest common factor is evidently 
 identical with the lesser of these quantities, that is, with 
 

 
 396 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the minimising theory. If, then, we were at liberty to 
 assume without question the validity of that appeal to the 
 witness of Christian antiquity as a whole which is implied 
 in a literal interpretation of the word semper, as it occurs 
 in the Vincentian formula, and which is in many quarters 
 assumed to be the corner-stone of the specifically Anglican 
 position, the purely historical part of our enquiry might 
 well end at this point. But it will be remembered that, 
 in our first lecture, at the very outset of our review of the 
 development of the Fall-doctrine, we deliberately renounced 
 this liberty, and undertook to employ the Vincentian Canon 
 solely as a scientific, and not as an authoritarian test, in 
 order that our conclusions as to the amount, or the kind, 
 of Fall-doctrine which is necessarily pre-supposed by the 
 Christian religion as such might be invested with as much 
 objectivity and breadth of appeal as possible. Given this 
 method of employing the formula ubique, semper, et ab 
 omnibus, it might very plausibly be urged that the term 
 omnes should not be interpreted in a grossly literal, mechani- 
 cal and numerical sense, so as to include all Christians 
 without exception, no matter how ignorant and unpro- 
 gressive many of them may be: but that it should rather 
 be restricted to designating the intellectually vital and fruit- 
 ful areas of Christendom, which until recently were con- 
 fined to Western Christendom, Catholic and Reformed. It 
 would follow from such a contention that the non-accept- 
 ance of the Augustinian teaching by the primitive and 
 mediaeval East did not necessarily invalidate the claim of 
 this teaching to be ‘ the Christian doctrine,’ inasmuch as 
 the intellectual life of the Eastern Church was (not ex- 
 clusively through its own fault) comparatively stationary . 
 from the time of the Great Schism down to the seventeenth 
 century ; and that it would be unfair to dismiss a theory 
 which has so deeply affected the religious life of the Western 
 nations, including our own, without having considered the 
 forms which it assumed in the thought of some of the 
 greatest Christian teachers who have flourished since the 
 Patristic age, both Schoolmen and Reformers. It would 
 be irrelevant to our purpose, and would confuse the develop- 
 ment of our argument, if we allowed ourselves to be drawn 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 397 
 
 into a discussion of the true meaning of ubzque and omnes ; 
 and an enquiry which aspires to scientific impartiality can- 
 not afford to expose itself to the suspicion of having neglected 
 fields of thought which are of the highest interest in them- 
 selves, and might conceivably yield considerations of such 
 a nature as to induce us to revise or modify the adverse 
 verdict which in our last lecture was passed upon the classical 
 expression of the ‘ twice-born’ theory. The present lecture 
 will, therefore, be devoted to an examination of the post- 
 Augustinian history of the Fall-doctrine in Western Europe, 
 designed with the object of deciding whether or not, within 
 this restricted sphere, the ‘ twice-born’ theory can reason- 
 ably claim acceptance ‘ by all,’ in the sense of all, or nearly 
 all, intellectually alert and progressive Christians. 
 
 Our historical review need not pause to consider the 
 Semi-Pelagian controversy, which, though the direct sequel 
 of the great duel between Augustine and Pelagius noticed 
 in our last lecture, was concerned rather with the opera- 
 tions of ‘ grace’ than with the nature and results of the 
 Fall: we may note, however, that the Second Council of 
 Orange, which brought this controversy to an end, contents 
 itself with affirming a modified Augustinianism, which only 
 predicates ‘integrity’ of unfallen man, abstains from 
 affirming ‘ Original Guilt,’ and makes the important 
 assertion that whilst free-will was weakened by the Fall it 
 was not destroyed.! Little of interest is to be gleaned from 
 the so-called ‘ Dark Ages’ ; of the four great writers whom — 
 the Western Church produced during this period, Gregory 
 the Great, Bede, Alcuin, and Scotus Erigena,? the first three 
 were largely absorbed in pastoral, historical, juristic, and 
 liturgical interests, and made few original contributions to 
 the progress of thought, whilst the last named did little 
 more than emphasise that Platonic aspect of patristic 
 thought for which evil is mere non-entity. The Doctor of 
 Hippo continued to dominate the West down to the begin- 
 ning of the thirteenth century, though Anselm in discussing 
 original sin lays all the stress upon our lack of Adam’s 
 
 1 For the relevant Canons of Orange, see Additional Note F, 
 ‘ Formularies, (II) Western and Roman,’ p. 537 f. 
 2 See H. Bett, Johannes Scotus Evigena, 1925, pp. 65-70. 
 
398 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 original righteousness,! and Abaelard repudiates ‘ original 
 guilt.’2 It is not until the rise of Scholasticism that signs 
 of an onward movement can be detected in the some- 
 what stagnant waters of Western-Catholic anthropological 
 thought. 
 
 The development of Scholasticism is intimately bound 
 up with the history of the great mendicant Orders of the 
 thirteenth century, notably with that of the Friars Preachers, 
 founded by Dominic Guzman, and that of the Friars Minor, 
 which owes its origin to the life and personality of Francis 
 of Assisi. In regard to the doctrines of man and of sin, 
 the theologies characteristic of these two illustrious Orders 
 exhibit differences which may without undue fancifulness 
 be traced to the differing circumstances of their origins. In 
 the previous lectures of this course, we have had more than 
 once occasion to emphasise the fact that the doctrines of 
 the Fall and of original sin were evolved in the first instance 
 by that ethical monotheism which is the heart both of 
 Judaism and of Christianity, as an intellectual self-defence 
 against the attacks of Oriental dualism ; and this character, 
 that of being in essence a protest against dualism, has clung 
 to them all through their history. They were first shaped 
 in the minds of the Maccabean Jews by the desire to save 
 the unique sovereignty and holiness of Jehovah as against 
 the evil God of Mazdeism. St. Paul and St. Irenaeus re- 
 affirmed them as against the second historic wave of West- 
 ward-surging dualism, that which we know as Gnosticism. 
 Augustine perfected his scheme as a bulwark against the 
 third invasion of dualism in the form of Manicheism. And 
 it may be suggested that the strongly Augustinian tone of 
 Dominican thought on these subjects is due to the fact 
 
 1 de conceptu virginalt, 22, 27 (see also Thomasius, DG. ii, pp. 152, 153, 
 
 163-5). 
 ~ 2 in ep. ad Rom. (Opera, ed. Victor Cousin, 1859, ii. pp. 238 ff.). 
 
 8 An excellent summary account of the evolution of the Fall-doctrine 
 during the scholastic period may be found in Gustav Ljunggren, Det 
 Kristina Syndmedvetandet intill Luther, Uppsala, 1924, pp. 236-265. This 
 book is written in Swedish, and there appears to be no English, French, or 
 German translation : I have only been able to use it through the kindness 
 of the Rev. G. C. Richards, D.D., Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and 
 Vicar of the University Church, who has been good enough to supply me 
 with a translation of the pages referred to. 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 399 
 
 that the Order of Preachers was founded by a saint of 
 stern if heroic character, in Languedoc, in the very midst 
 of a life-and-death struggle between Catholic Christianity, 
 as it then existed, and a fourth invasion of Eastern dualism, 
 that which is known as the ‘ Albigensian’ or ‘ Catharist’ 
 movement, which was in great part based upon a recrude- 
 scence of the doctrines of Mani.! But the Order of Friars 
 Minor was born, not from the crisis of a fierce battle with 
 semi-heathen heresy, but rather from the pure impulses of 
 love towards God and man which flowed forth from the 
 humble and gentle nature of the foverello himself, the 
 “minstrel of the Lord,’ and spouse of the Lady Poverty, 
 ‘Sweet Saint Francis of Assisi,’ as Tennyson calls him : 
 
 He that in his Catholic wholeness used to call the very flowers 
 Sisters, brothers—and the beasts—whose pains are hardly less 
 than ours.? 
 
 Given a founder whose character was marked by an almost 
 feminine tenderness towards the sufferings of mankind and 
 by that intuitive sympathy with sub-human nature which 
 hitherto we have noted in St. Paul alone of Christian saints, 
 it is not a matter of surprise that the theologians of this 
 Order should have championed a comparatively anti- 
 Augustinian and all but Semi-Pelagian anthropology, in 
 which the sharpness of the distinction between ‘ nature’ and 
 ‘grace’ tends at least to be blunted, and the human will is 
 restored to its dignity as essentially free, though weakened 
 by the Fall. It will conduce to clearness if we first of all 
 survey briefly the modifications introduced by St. Thomas 
 Aquinas, the “ Angel of the Schools’ and the typical repre- 
 sentative of the Dominican theology, into the hitherto 
 dominant Augustinian scheme, and then set side by side 
 with the Thomist doctrine a brief sketch of the Franciscan 
 point of view, as depicted in the works of one of the most 
 famous sons both of St. Francis and of Oxford, the ‘ subtle 
 Doctor’ Duns Scotus. 
 
 1H. J. Warner, however (The Albigensian Heresy, 1922), denies the 
 historical derivation of Catharism from Manicheism. 
 2 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. 
 
400 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 THE THOMIST POSITION 
 
 The results of an analysis of the specifically Augustinian 
 Fall-doctrine may be summarised by the statement that it 
 can be reduced to seven fundamental ideas. These are 
 (1) an exalted conception of Adam’s original righteousness 
 and perfection ; and the ideas (2) of the infinite malice of 
 the first sin, as being the ethical suicide of a saint; (3) of 
 ‘original sin’ as a vitvwm, consisting in the tyranny of con- 
 cupiscence ; (4) of ‘ original sin’ as guilt (veatus), inhering 
 in each and every member of the human race in virtue of 
 the race’s seminal identity with Adam; (5) of the trans- 
 mission of original sin, considered as a disease, in and 
 through the act of generation, which is itself intrinsically 
 sinful, owing to the concupiscence which accompanies it, 
 though it is condoned by God in the case of the baptised ; 
 (6) of the practical abolition of free-will which thus results, 
 though, as we have pointed out, Augustine strenuously 
 maintains freedom—at least in name; and (7) of the 
 necessary and rightful damnation of the whole of Adam’s 
 posterity, including infants, with the exception of those 
 who are arbitrarily predestined to be recipients of baptism, 
 justification, and the ‘ gift of final perseverance.’ We will 
 take these points one by one, and note the modifications 
 introduced by the Angelic Doctor. 
 
 (1) In essence the Augustinian conception of man’s 
 original state is left unchanged. It is, however, to be noted 
 that the category which Augustine had employed to define . 
 this conception is subjected to a certain measure of recon- 
 struction. This leading category of Augustinianism is the 
 antithesis between ‘nature’ and ‘ grace,” which, in the 
 thought of St. Thomas, is made necessary instead of con- 
 tingent, becomes logical rather than ethical, and instead of 
 being restricted to the domain of human nature is made to 
 apply to the whole realm of created being. It thus appears 
 as the celebrated scholastic distinction between the natural 
 and the supernatural orders or planes of being, or, in modern 
 phrase, between ‘ nature’ and ‘ supernature.’ This distinc- 
 tion has the effect of sharpening the difference between the 
 qualities of human nature considered in itself—the qualities 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM ~ = 4or 
 
 ‘known in scholastic terminology as Adam’s pura naturalia, 
 which God, so to speak, was under the necessity of conferring 
 upon him if He was going to make a ‘ man’ at all—and the 
 supernatural splendours of ‘ original perfection,’ with its 
 perfect sanctity and its mighty intellectual powers,! which 
 God was under no necessity, logical or otherwise, to bestow 
 upon man, but which represents a donum indebitum—a 
 purely gratuitous piece of munificence on the part of the 
 Almighty. Even if man had remained endowed solely with 
 the pura naturalia, and had never received the splendid 
 present of ‘ original justice,’ he might, St. Thomas tells us, 
 have attained to a certain natural knowledge of God by 
 speculating upon His works. With infinite generosity, 
 however, the Creator destined His creature to a much 
 more wonderful destiny. He raised him at the first moment 
 of his creation to the supernatural plane, and designed to 
 lead him upward, along an ever-ascending pathway, to the 
 supernatural knowledge and possession of Himself in the 
 Beatific Vision. If Adam had stood firm under the tests 
 imposed upon him, his spiritual and physical evolution 
 would have progressed so rapidly that he would have been 
 enabled to transcend death and to ascend to his eternal 
 abode without the necessity of physical dissolution. We 
 need not now discuss the ingenious refinements with which 
 this revised Augustinianism was decorated, or follow out 
 the chain of syllogisms by which Aquinas determines, to 
 his own satisfaction, what would have been the moral, 
 social, physical and economic condition of mankind if Adam 
 had never fallen.2 It is enough to note that St. Thomas 
 takes an essentially optimistic view of human nature in 
 itself, even apart from the added splendours of the super- 
 natural endowments enjoyed by Adam. Man in himself 
 is not a mere animal, but a citizen of the divine kingdom, 
 who, by the special favour of his Almighty Sovereign, was 
 created a prince at his birth. 
 
 (2) The infinite malice of the first sin is assumed, without 
 much argument, on the authority of St. Augustine ; and its 
 prime effect is conceived of as being the instantaneous fall 
 of man, fvom the supernatural plane to which he had been 
 
 1 Summ. theol. i. qq. xCiv, xcv. 2 ibid. i. qq. xcvii-ci. 
 20 
 
402 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 raised, to the natural plane on which he would have lived 
 but for the gratuitous exaltation involved in the bestowal of 
 the donum supernaturvale. To continue the metaphor indi- 
 cated above, the prince who has offended his sovereign is 
 punished indeed, but not by outlawry or execution; he 
 merely forfeits his princely rank and privileges and reverts 
 to the status of a bourgeois. This has an important bearing 
 upon (3) the nature of original sin considered as a psychologi- 
 cal flaw, or disease of the soul. It means that ‘ original sin,’ 
 viewed under the ‘ medical’ or ‘ therapeutic’ category, is to 
 be formally defined as the ‘ lack of original righteousness’ 
 (defectus originalis iustitiae), but not of any of the pura 
 naturalia, a definition which makes it a mere negation, and 
 as such not, apparently, a very tragic matter; the inheritor 
 of modest means, who, having been presented with a colossal 
 fortune by a munificent benefactor, then loses the fortune by 
 misconduct, without forfeiting his original patrimony, would 
 appear prima facie to be at least no worse off than he would 
 have been if he had never received the fortune. At this 
 point, however, the influence of Augustine makes itself felt, 
 and St. Thomas feels compelled to affirm that although 
 original righteousness is no part of the endowment of man 
 as man, yet the loss of it, when it has once been possessed, 
 introduces a certain disorder into the faculties of human 
 nature. The pura naturalia are not destroyed; but their 
 due harmony and proportion are disturbed and disarranged. 
 This thought leads St. Thomas back into the Augustinian 
 conception of original sin, psychologically considered, as 
 consisting in ‘ inordinate concupiscence’ ; and he produces 
 what does not appear to be more than a verbal reconciliation 
 of his own position with that of his master by asserting that 
 the material element in original sin is concupiscence, but 
 that its formal element is the defect of original justice 1— 
 
 1 St. Thom. Aq. de malo, q. iv. a. 2: ‘ et ideo cum carentia originalis 
 iustitiae se habeat ex parte voluntatis, ex parte autem inferiorum virium a 
 voluntate motarum sit pronitas ad inordinate appetendum, quae con- 
 cupiscentia dici potest, sequitur quod peccatum originale in hoc homine 
 vel in illo, nihil est aliud quam concupiscentia cum carentia originalis 
 iustitiae, ita tamen quod carentia originalis iustitiae est quasi formale 
 in peccato originali, concupiscentia autem quasi materiale’; cf. also 
 in I Sent., dist. xxx. q.i. a. I. 
 

 
 DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 403 
 
 a position which appears to be an apt illustration of the 
 scholastic method of using and illustrating traditional ideas 
 as though they were hard metallic counters or symbols which 
 can be grouped together in an infinite number of permutations 
 and combinations, but may not be subjected to the acid of 
 logical criticism or analysis. St. Thomas is thus enabled to 
 show that original sin is a corruption of human nature, not 
 merely a lack or deprivation of gifts or graces which it 
 formerly possessed. 
 
 (4) and (5). In loyalty to the dominant tradition of the 
 West he maintains that original sin involves guilt ; but the 
 Augustinian conception of seminal identity is modified by 
 him in a curious manner, by being clothed with a dynamic, 
 as opposed to a static, form. Instead of saying that Adam 
 was the sum of his descendants, or that the whole human 
 race 7s Adam, he invokes the conception of motion, and 
 asserts that Adam ‘ moves’ all his descendants by begetting 
 them.1 Adam thus becomes a kind of ethical frimum mobile, 
 having initiated the process of sinful motion consisting in 
 concupiscence and subsequent generation,? a process which 
 goes on, as though in accordance with a kind of Newtonian 
 moral law, for ever, until brought to a standstill by an 
 opposing force. This opposing force is sanctifying grace, 
 communicated through baptism, which abolishes the guilt of 
 original sin, but leaves concupiscence still in existence, no 
 longer as sin but as the fomes peccati—a pregnant phrase— 
 the ‘ tinder of sin,’ the raw material of emotion, impulse, and 
 instinct, which in the baptised is fer se morally neutral, but 
 which may be worked up into forms which constitute sin.* 
 Formally, this position does not go beyond the Augustinian 
 statement that baptism annuls the veatus of concupiscence 
 but leaves the actus still in existence +: but the phrase fomes 
 peccatt was the herald of a coming revolution in thought with 
 
 1 Summa theol. i. iae. q. xxxi.a.3: ‘ unde et culpa originalis traducitur 
 ad omnes illos qui moventur ab Adam motione generationis.’ 
 
 2 St.Thomas adheres to the Augustinian position that the concupiscence 
 which accompanies the act of generation has the effect of staining the resul- 
 tant offspring with original sin; cf. de malo, q.iv.a.2: ‘vis generativa per 
 decisionem corporalis seminis operatur ad traductionem peccati originalis 
 simul cum natura humana.’ 
 
 3 But see the preceding note. # Lecture V, p. 367. 
 
404 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 regard to bodily appetite and its relation to sin, a revolution 
 which, when completely accomplished, will have swept away 
 the last relics of the ultra-ascetic view of human nature 
 imposed upon the Western Church by the ‘ twice-born’ 
 temperament of the Doctor of Hippo. The admission that 
 concupiscence, in itself, and apart from the consent of the 
 will, is not sin in the baptised, must, on any other than a 
 grossly mechanical theory of the efficacy of baptism, ulti- 
 mately involve the admission that it is not sin in the 
 unbaptised, in other words, that in itself it is not ‘ sin’ at all. 
 
 (6) It remains to consider St. Thomas’ view of the present 
 state of fallen human nature, with the accompanying question 
 of free-will. Here again his position is fundamentally 
 Augustinian. God is the prime cause of all motions, without 
 exception, and therefore of the motions of the human soul— 
 even those which we call free. St. Thomas is, therefore, 
 like St. Augustine, a metaphysical determinist. From this 
 point of view no change was introduced by the Fall—man 
 Was just as much a puppet in the hands of God after as 
 before the primeval catastrophe.t Nevertheless, psycho- 
 logical freedom is maintained, so far as words go, though it 
 is difficult to see how this can be reconciled with what is said 
 about the unchecked domination of concupiscence in unre- 
 generate human nature. We are told that it is impossible 
 for an adult who dies in original sin, that is without having 
 been baptised, not to have committed actual sins of a mortal 
 quality as well. And after, as before, the Fall, man is solely 
 and exclusively dependent on grace in order to be able to 
 perform any good action; the only difference made by the 
 Fall was a difference in the divine distribution of grace. 
 Before the Fall grace, both ‘ habitual’ and ‘ actual,’ was 
 given in full measure to all mankind, that is, to Adam and 
 Eve, who were then the only representatives of mankind. 
 After the Fall we get the paradoxical position that the 
 reprobates receive what is called ‘ sufficient ’’ grace, of which 
 
 1 Summa theol.i. q.1xxxili.a.2: ‘Deus . . . est prima causa movens et 
 naturales causas et voluntarias. etsic.t naturalibus causis, movendo eas, 
 non aufert quin actus earum sint naturales, ita movendo causas voluntarias, 
 non aufert quin actiones earum sint voluntariae, sed potius hoc in eis 
 
 facit ; operatur enim in unoquoque secundum eius proprietatem ’ ; and ¢f. 
 ibid, i. iilae. q. X. a. 4, quoted below. 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 408 
 
 they never avail themselves, whilst the predestined receive 
 “ efficacious’ grace, which they never resist. Yet, despite 
 its imprisonment in the iron framework of an all-pervasive 
 divine causality, the will remains ‘ free’ ; in other words 
 St. Thomas asserts that psychological freedom can subsist 
 simultaneously with metaphysical necessity. If he is asked 
 how this can be, he takes refuge in mystery. He tells us 
 ‘ As it behoves divine Providence to preserve, not to pervert, 
 the natures of things, God will move everything according 
 to the requirements of its nature . . . So God moves the 
 human will in such a manner that its motion remains con- 
 tingent and not necessary,’1 and with this prima facie 
 contradiction in terms he leaves the question. When pressed 
 by the objection that this universal divine causality inevit- 
 ably makes God the author of sin, he escapes by means of 
 the time-honoured verbal device of asserting that sin is a 
 defectus, a mere vacuity or privation which as such cannot 
 be due to the operation of the first and supreme Being.? 
 
 (7) The last point which demands consideration in treat- 
 ing of the Thomist republication of Augustinianism is the 
 eschatological issue. What is the destiny reserved in the 
 next world for those who die in original sin only, without 
 having committed actual sin? For St. Thomas this means, 
 What will be the fate of unbaptised children ? because, as 
 already pointed out, he cannot conceive of a non-baptised 
 adult who is free from actual mortal sin. The humanity of 
 Aquinas shrank from the ruthless severity of Augustine, who 
 condemned unbaptised infants to eternal punishment (even 
 though of the ‘ mildest kind’)*: hence he takes refuge in 
 the Pelagian conception of a limbus puerorum. For the 
 purpose of justifying this conception, original sin is regarded 
 solely on its negative side as being the lack of original 
 righteousness. This lack of man’s Paradisal sanctity has as 
 its corollary in the next life lack of the Beatific Vision. But 
 this is not in the strict sense of the term punishment. The 
 inhabitants of Limbo, which for other mediaeval thinkers 
 includes both the limbus puerorum, the eternal home of 
 
 1 Summa theol. i, iiae. q. X. a. 4. 
 2 1bid. i. iiae. q. Ixxix. a. 2. 
 3 v. supra, Lecture V, p. 327. 
 
406 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 unbaptised infants, and the limbus patrum, in which the 
 saints of the Old Testament dwelt before the descent of 
 Christ into Hades, and in which the souls of virtuous pagans 
 still are confined, never having received through Baptism the 
 capacity for the Beatific Vision, do not feel the lack of it as 
 in any way painful; and consequently their state may well 
 be one of natural happiness. They may even know God 
 through His works as intimately as Adam might have done 
 if he had never received the endowment of original righteous- 
 ness. They would no more complain, or consider it a 
 grievance that they do not possess the Beatific Vision, than a 
 horse or a dog complains that it is not a highly educated or 
 cultured man. In fact, they may very well remain in blissful 
 ignorance that there is such a thing as the Beatific Vision at 
 all. It is true that a more sombre conception of this state 
 has received a poetic consecration in the immortal verse 
 of Dante, who identifies Limbo with the first circle that 
 surrounds the abyss of Hell, but paints it as a realm of 
 pensive melancholy rather than of agonising pain : 
 
 Here, as mine ear could note, no plaint was heard 
 Except of sighs, that made the eternal air 
 Tremble, not caused by tortures, but from grief 
 Felt by those multitudes, many and vast, 
 
 Of men, women, and infants. Then to me 
 
 The gentle guide: ‘ Inquirest thou not what spirits 
 Are these which thou beholdest ? Ere thou pass 
 Farther, I would thou know, that these of sin 
 Were blameless ; and if aught they merited, 
 
 It profits not, since baptism was not theirs, 
 
 The portal to thy faith. If they before 
 
 The Gospel lived, they served not God aright ; 
 And among such am I. For these defects, 
 
 And for no other evil, we are lost ; 
 
 Only so far afflicted, that we live 
 
 Desiring without hope.’ 4 
 
 1 Inferno, iv. 25-42: 
 
 ‘ Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, 
 non avea pianto, ma’che di sospiri, 
 che l’aura eterna facevan tremare : 
 e€ cio avvenia di duol senza martiri, 
 ch’avean le turbe, ch’eran molte e grandi, 
 d’infanti e di femmine e di viri. 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 407 
 
 Yet even this dun region contains an enclave of passion- 
 less tranquillity, approximating to happiness, which is ten- 
 anted by the poets, sages, and heroes of pagan antiquity. 
 Dante and Vergil are led through the dreary wood, by the 
 spirits of Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, to a place 
 depicted as: | 
 
 . . . a mead with lively verdure fresh. 
 There dwelt a race, who slow their eyes around 
 Majestically moved, and in their port 
 Bore eminent, authority : they spake 
 Seldom, but all their words were tuneful sweet .. . 
 There on the green enamel of the plain 
 Were shown me the great spirits, by whose sight 
 I am exalted in my own esteem... . 
 . . . [he master of the sapient throng, 
 Seated amid the philosophic train. 
 Him all admire, all pay him reverence due. 
 There Socrates and Plato both I mark’d 
 Nearest to him in rank, Democritus, 
 Who sets the world at chance, Diogenes, 
 With Heraclitus and Empedocles, 
 And Anaxagoras, and Thales sage, 
 Zeno, and Dioscorides well read 
 In nature’s secret lore.? 
 
 Lo buon maestro a me: “ Tu non dimandi 
 che spiriti son questi, che tu vedi ? 
 Or vo’ che sappi, innanzi che pit: andi, 
 Ch’ei non peccaro; e s’egli hanno mercedi, 
 non basta, perché non ebber battesmo, 
 ch’é porte della fede che tu credi ; 
 e se furon dinanzi al Cristianesmo, 
 non adorar debitamente Dio ; 
 e di questi cotai son io medesmo. 
 Per tai difetti, non per altro rio, 
 semo perduti, e sol di tanto offesi, 
 che senza speme vivemo in disio.”’ ’ 
 (The translations given in the text are taken from Cary’s version, first 
 published in 1814.) 
 1 Inferno, iv. 111: 
 ‘ ... prato di fresca verdura. 
 Genti v’eran con occhi tardi e gravi, 
 di grande autorita ne’ lor sembianti ; 
 parlavan rado, con vocisoavi... 
 Cola diritto, sopra il verde smalto, 
 mi fur mostrati gli spiriti magni, 
 che del vederli in me stesso n’esalto ... 
 Vidi il maestro di color che sanno 
 seder tra filosofica famiglia. 
 
408 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 We shall have occasion again to treat of the conception 
 of Limbo as the eschatological corollary of Original Sin 
 apart from Actual Sin, and need not devote more time to the 
 examination of its specifically Thomist form: it will suffice 
 for our present purpose to point out that its adoption by 
 St. Thomas, after its stern rejection by St. Augustine, is the 
 most striking instance of the fact that, even in the minds of 
 the African Doctor’s most loyal disciples, the rigidly ‘ twice- 
 born’ anthropology had to be perceptibly softened in order 
 to be preserved at all.? 
 
 THE SCOTIST POSITION 
 
 The Franciscan version of the Fall-doctrine represents a 
 more definite and decided revolt against Augustinanism and 
 shows distinct affinities with what we have designated as the 
 primitive, ‘ once-born,’ and ‘ Hellenic’ view. In accordance 
 with the method previously explained, we take the opinions 
 of John Duns Scotus as typical of his school.? 
 
 Tutti lo miran, tutti onor gli fanno; 
 quivi vid’ io Socrate e Platone, 
 che innanzi agli altri piu presso gli stanno ; 
 Democrito, che il mondo a Caso pone, 
 Diogenes, Anassagora e Tale, 
 Empedocles, Eraclito e Zenone ; 
 e vidi il buono accoglitor del quale, 
 Dioscoride dico.’ 
 
 1 The full Augustinian doctrine was, however, embodied in the great 
 text-book of mediaeval canon law, the Decretum of Gratian: Pars iii, 
 dist. 4, c. 3: ‘ firmissime tene, et nullatenus dubites, omnem hominem qui 
 per concubitum viri et mulieris concipitur cum originali peccato nasci, 
 inpietati subditum mortique subiectum . . . firmissime tene, non solum 
 homines ratione utentes, verum etiam parvulos, qui sive in uteris matrum 
 vivere incipiunt et ibi moriuntur, sive iam de matribus nati sine baptis- 
 matis sacramento ... de hocseculo transeunt, sempiterno igne puniendos ; 
 quia etsi peccatum propriae actionis nullum habent, originalis tamen 
 peccati dampnationem carnali conceptione ex nativitate traxerunt.’ 
 
 2 Scotus’ interpretation of the doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin 
 is expounded at length in qguaestiones in ii. lib. sentent., distinct. xvii.— 
 xxxill. (Paris edition, 1893, tom. xiii. pp. 61-332). It will be understood 
 that the sketch given in the text only endeavours to pick out some of his 
 more characteristic points, and does not attempt to review the whole 
 discussion. Except where otherwise indicated, the reference ‘ dist,’ 
 denotes one of these distinctiones. 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 409 
 
 So far as words go, the exalted Augustinian conception 
 of ‘ original righteousness ’ is preserved in this scheme; the 
 idea of the Paradisal perfection of man was at this date too 
 deeply rooted in Christian thought to be frankly discarded. 
 It is, nevertheless, modified to a certain extent. ‘ Original 
 justice’ is asserted to have been a donum supernaturale, 
 which had the effect of producing a perfect harmony and 
 balance between the various faculties and functions of the 
 human soul, a harmony involving the due subordination 
 of appetite to reason. This harmony, however, was not 
 absolutely stable, even in Paradise; for the experience of 
 successful resistance to temptation was needed in order that 
 human nature might be confirmed in grace. Until he had 
 been tempted once, Adam’s blissful condition bore a pro- 
 visional character. If he had triumphed on the first occasion 
 when he was tested, he would have acquired a more solid and 
 permanent habit of virtue ?; and the same rule would have 
 applied, if he had not fallen, to each of his descendants. 
 Each member of the human race subsequently born would 
 have been tested once, and, if triumphant, would have been 
 confirmed in grace. It may be suggested that Scotus shows 
 signs of a desire to return, so far as was possible within the 
 bounds of mediaeval Western orthodoxy, to the primitive, 
 second-century conception of man’s unfallen state as being 
 one of ‘infancy’ (vymorys), though including a ‘ starting- 
 point for progress’ (adopux mpokomfs). Congruous with 
 this is the affirmation that the ‘immortality’ enjoyed by 
 
 1 dist, xxix. (Paris edn. tom. xiii. p. 272): ‘ potest dici ergo quod si 
 originalis iustitia habuit illum effectum, facere scilicet perfectam tran- 
 quillitatem in anima, quantum ad omnes potentias, ita quod natura 
 inferior non inclinaretur contra iudicium superioris, aut si inclinaretur 
 quantum est ex se, posset tamen a superiori regulari et ordinari sine diffi- 
 cultate superioris et sine tristitia inferioris, cum hoc non habuerit potentia 
 facta in puris naturalibus, necesse est ipsam ponere donum supernaturale, 
 quo sit ista tranquillitas perfecta in anima.’ 
 
 Bydtshi xx qu T(opmett ip WEL) a0.) .. pater ‘primus’ inisset’ con; 
 firmatus, si primae tentationi restitisset, in ista iustitia,’ etc. 
 
 8 dist, xx. q. I (pp. 115 ff.). This ‘confirmation in grace’ would, 
 however, not have conferred the state known as non posse peccare, which is 
 only possible for comprehensores (i.e. the blessed who possess the Beatific 
 Vision), but only the privilege quod non peccat vel peccabit, which alone is 
 appropriate to viatores (i.e. those still living on this earth in a state of 
 probation). 
 
410 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 unfallen Adam consisted, not in the impossibility of dying, 
 but in the possibility of not dying.t 
 
 Corresponding to this somewhat modified conception 
 of original righteousness we have a milder estimate of the 
 degree of wickedness involved in the Fall. The root of 
 Adam’s sin, according to Scotus, was not (as in Augustine’s 
 view) an incomprehensible, unmotived impulse to defy his 
 Creator, but the very natural, and, as it were, pardonable 
 defect of ‘immoderate desire for the affection of his wife ’ 
 (‘mmoderatus amor amicitiae uxoris), and the wish not to be 
 separated from her even after her sin, a wish that under 
 the circumstances almost inevitably transformed itself into 
 the will to do that which was not lawful (voluntas explendi 
 illud quod non licuit).2 As the primal sin sprang from so 
 human and genial a source, it is a gross exaggeration to 
 describe its ‘malice’ as ‘infinite’?; and the foundation 
 has been removed, on which the Augustinian conception of 
 fallen mankind as corporately constituting a massa damna- 
 tionts is built. The same tendency to soften the harsh 
 outlines of the Augustinian system appears most noticeably 
 in the discussion of original sin in its character of vitium, 
 that is, of a psychological disease. For Scotus, the essence 
 of original sin consists only in the ‘ lack of original justice ’ 
 (carentia originalis wustitiae), and does not consist in con- 
 
 1 dist, xxix,,5 (p. 274) cf. dist. xix, 2-(p. 103)., This, howeverj is 
 precisely St. Augustine’s position : v. supra, Lecture V, p. 361, n. 2. 
 
 2 dist. xxi. q. 2 (p. 139): “primum autem peccatum Adae non fuit ex 
 immoderato amore sui, sicut fuit primum peccatum Angeli. . . primum 
 ergo peccatum hominis non potuit esse immoderatus amor sui, sed... 
 immoderatus amor amicitiae uxoris. nam dicit Augustinus quod noluit 
 contristave eam, quam credebat sine suo solatio contabescere, et a se alienatam 
 omnino interive, ut habetur in littera. c. illo: ex quo manifeste. patet ergo 
 quod non fuit amor concupiscentiae vel libidinis, quia ille nondum fuerat ; 
 ex isto autem amore inordinato peccatum gravius sequebatur, scilicet 
 voluntas explendi illud quod non licuit, puta praeceptum de esu pomi 
 violare.’ 
 
 8 ibid. (p. 141) : Adam’s sin arose from an excess of love for his neigh- 
 bour (i.e. Eve); ‘ergo sequitur quod peccatum hominis primi non fuit 
 quantum ad hoc gravissimum, imo dico quod multa peccata fiunt modo a 
 multis quae sunt graviora, ita quod si Adam debuisset fuisse damnatus 
 pro illo, multo minorem poenam sustinuisset.’ On p. 143 will be found an 
 apportionment of the guilt of the Fall, such as it was, between Adam and 
 Eve: ‘ Adae peccatum accidentaliter fuit gravius peceato Evae : formaliter 
 tamen, per se mere, et praecise in se, peccatum Evae fuit gravius.’ 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM AII 
 
 cupiscence at all?; this is one of his capital divergences 
 from St. Thomas. Concupiscence, indeed, is said to be 
 ‘natural,’ as being merely the necessary reaction of the 
 sensitive part of the soul to intrinsically desirable objects.? 
 It would seem probable that the Subtle Doctor is here using 
 the word in its etymological sense, as signifying merely 
 ‘desire as such,’ not ‘inordinate desire’?; and we may 
 fairly set the name of Duns Scotus by the side of Julian of 
 Eclanum, as the name of one of the few Christian thinkers 
 who have firmly grasped the idea of the moral neutrality 
 of physical appetite. 
 
 It might have seemed that the affirmation of the 
 innocence of concupiscence would naturally bring in its 
 train the further consequence of a denial of original guilt 
 or veatus, at any rate of the guilt which on Augustinian 
 principles attaches to a nature infected with concupiscence. 
 Here, however, the courage of the Franciscans would seem 
 to have failed them. Frankly to throw over the conception 
 of original guilt would have seemed to the thought of the 
 Middle Ages to involve the condemnation of the practice of 
 
 1 dist. xxx. q. 2 (p. 293): ‘ peccatum originale non potest esse aliud 
 quam ista privatio (sc. originalis iustitiae) ; non enim est concupiscentia, 
 tum quia illa est naturalis ev dist. 29, tum quia ipsa est in parte sensitiva, 
 ubi non est peccatum secundum Anselmum,’ etc. 
 
 2 He draws this very distinction between these two senses of the word 
 in dist. xxxii. 7 (p. 311), and admits that in the latter sense ‘ concupis- 
 centia est materiale peccati originalis,’ thus coming verbally into accord 
 with St. Thomas. It is, however, not unreasonable to regard this admis- 
 sion as a mere passing act of lip-homage to Augustinianism, and to hold 
 that Scotus’ real mind is expressed by a significant silence in dist. xxxi. q. 
 unica. Here he is commenting on Sent. i1., in which the Lombard quotes 
 and endorses a passage from St. Augustine, expressing in its crudest form 
 the theory that original sin is transmitted from parent to child through the 
 concupiscence accompanying the act of generation. This passage deserves 
 to be quoted in full: it runs: ‘quia, dum sibi invicem vir mulierque 
 miscentur, sine libidine non est parentum concubitus; ob hoc filiorum 
 ex eorum carne nascentium non potest sine peccato esse conceptus, ubi 
 peccatum in parvulos non transmittit propagatio, sed libido; nec 
 foecunditas humanae naturae facit, homines cum peccato nasci, sed 
 foeditas libidinis, quam homines habent ex illius primi iustissima con- 
 demnatione peccati. ideo beatus David, propter originale peccatum quo 
 naturaliter obstricti sunt filii irae, dicit ‘‘ in iniquitatibus conceptus sum, 
 et in peccatis concepit me mater mea’’’ (de fide ad Petrum, 2). Scotus 
 passes this unpleasant citation over without a word, evidently dissenting 
 from it, though the combined authority of St. Augustine and of the Master 
 of the Sentences is too great to be explicitly repudiated. 
 
A412 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 infant baptism. Once more the actual practice of the 
 Church, as in the fifth century, exercised an irresistible 
 influence over the development of thought. The Church 
 actually does baptise newly born infants, and we cannot 
 suppose that the Church has acted wrongly or without good 
 reason ; therefore infants, even of a day old, stand in urgent 
 need of baptism. But, in the ‘ Nicene’ Creed, we profess 
 our belief in ‘ one baptism,’ which is ‘ for the remission of 
 sins.’ There are not two different kinds of baptism, one of 
 adults conveying remission of sins, and the other of infants 
 conveying no remission of sins ; therefore, infants are baptised 
 ‘ for the remission of sins,’ and must accordingly be supposed 
 to have some real sin, in the sense of guilt, which can be 
 remitted. Adequate historical knowledge regarding the 
 growth of the custom of paedo-baptism, and regarding the 
 relation of the Constantinopolitan (the so-called ‘ Nicene ’) 
 Creed to the original ‘ Nicaenum’ might have made this 
 chain of reasoning seem very much less than cogent.t Such 
 knowledge, however, was not at Scotus’ disposal: and hence 
 he endeavours to explain original guilt under the some- 
 what unsatisfactory category of ‘ debt.’ God entrusted man 
 in Paradise with the gift of original righteousness, and 
 man has lost it; hence man, collectively considered, is in 
 a condition of ‘indebtedness’ to God, because he has lost 
 the treasure with which his Father had endowed him. It 
 is this condition of indebtedness which descends from genera- 
 tion to generation, and is forensically regarded as involving 
 ‘guilt’ in the sight of God.2 The possibility of such 
 inheritance appears to be based upon a theory of ‘ seminal 
 
 1 See Additional Note G ‘ Infant Baptism’ (p. 550). 
 
 2 dist, xxxii. 7 (p. 311): ‘peccatum originale est . . . formaliter 
 carentia iustitiae originalis debitae, et non qualitercumque debitae, quia 
 acceptae in primo parente et in ipso amissae, cui correspondet poena 
 damni dumtaxat ex praemissa criminis transgressione proveniens’ ; 
 9 (p. 312): ‘ ex illa collatione (sc. originalis iustitiae) facta patri, filius est 
 debitor iustitiae sic datae’; but see the whole distinctio. The ‘ debt’ of 
 original justice is remitted (or, in other words, the inherited guilt of having 
 lost the supernatural endowments of unfallen human nature is pardoned) 
 by God through baptism, and for it is substituted the obligation to possess 
 the ordinary Christian virtues: ibid. 13: ‘ideo in baptismo cum redditur 
 gratia, simpliciter dimittitur illud peccatum (sc. originale) . . . solvitur 
 enim debitum habendi istud donum (sc. originalem iustitiam), et 
 commutatur in debitum habendi aliud donum.’ 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 413 
 
 identity,’ which, however, only has reference to man’s 
 body; for Scotus’ ‘creationism’ forbids him to assume 
 that Adam’s soul included all subsequent human souls at 
 the moment when he fell. } 
 
 It has been suggested before that the theory of a material 
 identity of the human race with Adam can hardly be held 
 by a philosophically trained mind except in the form of the 
 theory of logical or metaphysical identity ; and, as Scotus 
 himself was a logical Realist, the idea that we, or at any 
 rate our bodies, were ‘in Adam’ is not difficult for him. 
 But the Nominalism which was characteristic of other 
 Franciscan thinkers, by denying the real objective existence 
 of universals, implicitly denied that Adam was the universal 
 of humanity, and thereby cut at the root of the idea of 
 original guilt, in so far as this implies the pre-natal acqui- 
 sition of responsibility for Adam’s sin. The antinomies 
 in which later Franciscan schoolmen found themselves 
 involved by the attempt to justify some sort of defecated 
 Augustinianism on a purely Nominalist basis were such as 
 could only be solved by the application of the sceptical 
 principle, which, by a singular irony, was the final intellectual 
 product of the Ages of Faith—that propositions may be 
 true in theology which are false in philosophy, and vice versa.? 
 
 1 dist. xxxi. 2 (p. 299): ‘contraximus istud peccatum in quantum 
 fuimus in Adam secundum rationem seminalem ... hoc autem fuit 
 secundum corpus, non secundum animam; anima enim non est ex 
 traduce.’ 
 
 2 Cf. the following observations on Occam’s Fall-doctrine: ‘As a 
 church-theologian, Occam was obliged to maintain this conception [that 
 of original sin], and likewise also the traditional definition of it as the defect 
 of original righteousness. But from the standpoint of the possible . . . it 
 in no way appears, according to Occam, that man is under obligation to 
 possess a supernatural gift in addition to his natural equipment. Original 
 Sin is no real loss in man’s nature: it is the ideal imputation of Adam’s sin 
 with regard to all his descendants. It simply means that the race of man, 
 by virtue of God’s potentia ordinata and by reason of another’s trespass, 
 has been included in a sentence of condemnation. There is no question 
 here of a man’s own sin. It is axiomatic with the Nominalists that there is 
 no veal connexion between Adam and the vest of humanity. These theses 
 show with the greatest plainness what a tremendous gulf separates this 
 doctrine of original sin from the motives which led to its first formulation 
 by Augustine. In effect we have only the empty formulae left, now that 
 that which formerly gave them life is gone. The doctrine is a locus 
 theologicus, which is without any other raison d@étve than that which is 
 imposed upon it by ecclesiastical tradition. How little understanding 
 
4I4 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 We pass to the consideration of the present state of fallen 
 man according to the Scotist conception. The Franciscan 
 doctrine is naturally determined by the fundamental 
 position that the essence of original sin consists in no positive 
 corruption of human nature, but merely in the lack of certain 
 splendid endowments which human nature once possessed. 
 Hence the Franciscans are able to maintain a real and not 
 merely nominal freedom of the will. For Scotus the will 
 is free, both in the psychological sense of freedom from 
 exclusive determination by habit and character, and also 
 in the metaphysical sense of freedom from exclusive 
 determination by an all-embracing divine causality. Both 
 these positions have interesting consequences, which may 
 be pointed out without straying too far from the main path 
 of our enquiry. The concession of psychological freedom 
 to fallen man necessitates the admission that he can perform 
 morally good works of a natural order, even prior to the 
 reception of grace. These works of merely natural virtue 
 must, it is explained, be sharply distinguished from super- 
 natural actions, for which grace is necessary ; but they are 
 nevertheless truly moral, and so far are pleasing to God. 
 They may even merit the bestowal of grace de congruo or 
 de condigno, that is, as a congruous or as a deserved reward 
 —a position which is naturally distasteful to the severe 
 Augustinianism of the compilers of our Thirty-Nine Articles 1; 
 and Scotus emphatically repudiates the idea that the 
 virtues of the heathen are no more than ‘ splendid vices.’ 
 The metaphysical freedom which Scotus attributes to the 
 human soul is reconciled with the universality of divine 
 causation by the supposition of a pre-established harmony 
 
 
 
 
 
 Occam has of the original import of the doctrine is shown in his mode of 
 treating concupiscence . . . Concupiscence or fomes is to him entirely of 
 sensual nature, a merely bodily defect. It is simply to be compared with 
 bodily diseases, and like them must be supposed to rest on an unequal 
 distribution of the ““humours”’ in man. To fomes he assigns also the 
 whole circle of the vegetative life ; hunger, thirst, sleep, etc., are results of 
 the same, inasmuch as it is not possible to controlthem. In this last sense 
 neither Christ nor the Virgin Mary was free from concupiscence. [Thus 
 Occam returns to the position of Julian, which once roused Augustine’s 
 vehement indignation].’ G. Ljunggren, op. cit. p. 248f. (tr. G.C. Richards). 
 1 It.is strongly condemned in Art. xiii. 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 415 
 
 between the eternal decrees of God and the results of human 
 choice. I have, here and now, perfect freedom to choose 
 between two alternatives, A and B. If I decide for B, 
 I am perfectly free in so doing, and bear the full responsi- 
 bility for my choice : nevertheless, in eternity God foresaw 
 that I should choose B, and ratified my decision by 
 anticipation in His divine counsels, designing the rest of 
 human history on the assumption that B would actually 
 be my choice; hence the Franciscans are able to approxi- 
 mate very closely to semi-Pelagianism in regard to the 
 function of prevenient grace. 
 
 This modified version of the traditional Western presenta- 
 tion of Christian anthropology naturally culminates in an 
 exceptionally mild view of its eschatological corollaries, 
 that is, in a view of Limbo even gentler than that of 
 St. Thomas. Scotus is compelled by tradition to describe 
 those in Limbo as ‘damned’ !; but their damnation is, it 
 would seem, of an exceedingly pleasurable and soothing 
 kind. Those who are lost merely because of the original sin 
 of their nature, and are free from actual or personal sin, 
 have no pain or sadness of any kind; they are exempt both 
 from the poena sensus, the torments of unending flames, 
 and from the poena damnz, the penalty of the loss of God.? 
 Though they will not have the Beatific Vision of God in 
 His intimate essence, it is probable that they will know 
 God through His works, perhaps as perfectly as He can 
 be so known; and this knowledge will give them a certain 
 positive pleasure. Scotus quotes Bonaventura as saying 
 that Augustine spoke excessive— with exaggeration ’—in 
 denying the intermediate state postulated by the Pelagians 
 in the case of the virtuous or sinless non-baptised.4 So far 
 as the conception of Limbo is concerned the Franciscan theory 
 won all along the line in the Middle Ages. The few rigid 
 Augustinians, like Gregory of Rimini (d. 1358), who clung 
 
 1 dist. Xxxili. 2 (p. 328) : ‘ damnati pro solo peccato originali.’ 
 
 2 1hid. 2 (p. 329). 
 
 8 ibid. 3 (p. 330): ‘ videtur probabile concedere quod omnium 
 naturaliter cognoscibilium possunt naturaliter cognitionem habere excel- 
 lentius quam aliqui habuerunt pro statu isto, et ita aliqualem beatitudinem 
 naturalem de Deo cognito in universali poterunt attingere.’ 
 
 * dist. xxxiii. 4 (p. 331). 
 
416 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 to the idea of positive torments to be inflicted on unbaptised 
 infants, were scoffingly nicknamed tortores infantium. It 
 was reserved for Calvin to revive this part of the Augustinian 
 teaching in its full horror. 
 
 Two further consequences of the Scotist doctrine should 
 be mentioned for the sake of completeness—one which has 
 reference to the person of the Redeemer, and the other to 
 that of His Mother. It is naturally difficult for those who 
 minimise the seriousness of the Fall to suppose that such 
 a tremendous event as the Incarnation was contingent 
 upon it. Franciscan thought on this subject is funda- 
 mentally out of sympathy with the idea expressed in the 
 famous phrase of the Exultet: ‘O certe necessarium Adae 
 peccatum! O felix culpa, quae talem et tantum meruit 
 habere redemptorem!’ Hence comes the characteristically 
 Scotist view that the Incarnation would in any case have 
 taken place, even if there had been no Fall, and that it was 
 purposed by God from all eternity as the crowning moment 
 of human history.t And the purely negative or depriva- 
 tional notion of original sin, as consisting solely in the 
 absence of certain supernatural graces, made it easier to 
 believe that those graces were as a special privilege conferred 
 upon the Mother of Christ in order to make her body and 
 soul a fitting habitation for the Divine Word.? Harnack’s 
 dictum, however, that it is easy for Roman Catholics to 
 affirm the immunity of Mary from original sin, because 
 original sin means nothing to them, is an obvious exag- 
 geration,? which ignores the fact that the post-Tridentine 
 
 1 A classical presentation of the theory of the absolute purpose of the 
 Incarnation is found in Westcott’s essay ‘ The Gospel of Creation ’ (Epistles 
 of St. John, 1883, pp. 273-315). 
 
 2 j. Turmel (ERE vii. p. 166, art. ‘ Immaculate Conception’) 
 reverses the relation of cause and effect suggested in the text, and thinks 
 that popular enthusiasm for the feast and the idea of the Immaculate 
 Conception compelled official theology to mitigate its conception of 
 original sin, and in particular to drop the belief in the inherent sinfulness 
 of concupiscence. On strict Augustinian principles, the Immaculate 
 Conception is ruled out, as the soul of Mary would have been automatically 
 infected with original sin by the concupiscence which ex hypothesi must 
 have attended her generation by Joachim and Anne. St. Bernard, as is 
 well known, had strenuously opposed the introduction of the feast (ep. 
 ClorxtV PEC ILNe X L Lig ao ne 
 
 3 History of Dogma (E. tr., 1899), vil. p. 100, n. I. 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 417 
 
 Latin doctrine of the inherited wound of human nature is 
 more stringent than the Scotist, though not so severe as the 
 Thomist or the Augustinian teaching.t And it is also fair 
 to point out that the difference between St. Thomas and 
 Duns Scotus in regard to the privilege of Mary turned, not 
 upon the question whether Mary after her birth was exempt 
 from original sin—for both admitted this—but upon the 
 question whether this exemption was conferred on her at 
 some unknown moment during her intra-uterine life, as the 
 Angelic Doctor affirmed,? or in the very first instant of her 
 existence, that is, at the moment of her conception, as the 
 Subtle Doctor maintained. 
 
 The foregoing summaries of the anthropological thought 
 
 1 It will be appropriate to append here a few words with regard to 
 the bearing of our discussion upon the Roman doctrine of the Immaculate 
 Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Bull Ineffabilis Deus, dated 
 Dec. 8, 1854, affirms that ‘ the doctrine which holds, that the most blessed 
 Virgin Mary was in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace 
 and privilege of Almighty God, in view of the merits of Christ Jesus, the 
 Saviour of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin 
 (ab omni originalis culpae labe praeservatam tmmunem) has been revealed by 
 God and is therefore by all the faithful to be firmly and constantly believed ’ 
 (Denzinger-Bannwart, Enchiridion, § 1641). As the definition is promul- 
 gated by Roman authority, it presumably presupposes the present Roman 
 conception of original sin, which (as pointed out in the text) is somewhat 
 severer than the Scotist doctrine, inasmuch as it includes not merely the 
 guilt of being devoid of original righteousness, but also the guilt of having 
 sinned ‘in Adam.’ Immunity ‘from all stain of original sin’ must 
 therefore mean, inter alia, immunity from original guilt. From the stand- 
 point of the thesis developed in these lectures, it follows that the main 
 objection to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is—not so much 
 the fact that no trace of any such belief can be found in the New Testament 
 or in the Christian writers of the first four centuries, but rather—the 
 fact that (if our contentions have been sound) the idea of responsibility for 
 pre-natal participation in Adam’s sin is both mythological and irrational. 
 If, as we have argued, ‘ original guilt’ is merely an Augustinian nightmare, 
 it is meaningless to assert that Mary was ‘ immune’ from it. 
 
 2 The doctrine of St. Thomas on this subject is contained in summa 
 theol. iii. q. xxvii, ‘ de beatae Mariae virginis sanctificatione.’ This doctrine 
 is (a) ‘ rationabiliter creditur quod beata Virgo sanctificata fuerit antequam 
 ex utero nasceretur’ (a. 1); (bd) ‘sanctificatio beatae Virginis <fuit> post 
 eius animationem’ (a. 2); (c) ‘per sanctificationem in utero non <fuit> 
 sublatus beatae Virgini fomes secundum essentiam, sed <remansit> 
 ligatus’ (the ‘fomes’ is, of course, concupiscence) ‘postmodum vero in 
 ipsa conceptione carnis Christi, in quo primo debuit refulgere peccati 
 immunitas, credendum est quod ex prole redundaverit <? gratia> in 
 matrem, totaliter fomite subtracto’ (a. 3). 
 
 2E 
 
418 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of the two leading doctors of the Middle Ages will, it may be 
 hoped, have made it clear that the history of our subject 
 during the scholastic period is the history of the gradual 
 decline of rigid Augustinianism. In the eleventh century 
 the first blows were struck at its supremacy by Anselm, 
 who introduced the conception of the ‘lack of original 
 righteousness ’ as a prime constituent of original sin, thereby 
 paving the way for the substitution of the idea of hereditary 
 weakness for that of hereditary wickedness, and by Abaelard, 
 who was the first to challenge the idea of original guilt. 
 St. Thomas and the Dominicans stood for a modified type 
 of Augustinianism, in which the lack of original righteous- 
 ness is described as the ‘ form,’ and concupiscence as the 
 ‘matter’ of original sin. Scotus and the Franciscans 
 developed a still further modified version of Augustinianism 
 (if such it can be called) in which original sin for all practical 
 purposes comes to consist solely in the lack of original 
 righteousness, and concupiscence ceases to be in any real 
 sense sinful. Naturally such a highly artificialand abstract 
 notion as that of the mere non-possession of certain splendid 
 endowments, which were believed to have for a brief space 
 belonged to the remote ancestor of human kind, had little 
 power to weigh upon men’s consciences or even to excite 
 their intellectual interest: and if the Franciscan and 
 Nominalist tendency to whittle the Fall-doctrine down to 
 nothing had continued, the whole of Augustine’s work in 
 regard to these ideas might have been undone, even within 
 the sphere and period of mediaeval Catholicism. It is 
 a striking fact that the comprehensive commentary on the 
 ‘Sentences’ written by Pierre d’Ailly1 ignores the whole 
 subject of originalsin. The short-lived Augustinian reaction 
 associated with the names of Bradwardine and Wycliffe had 
 comparatively little effect on the general thought of Europe. 
 What really gave Augustinianism a new lease of life was the 
 Reformation. It will, however, conduce to clearness if for 
 
 1 Pierre d’Ailly (1350-1420) was successively chancellor of Notre 
 Dame de Paris, bishop of Cambrai, bishop of Orange, and cardinal. He 
 played a leading part in the ‘ Conciliar ’ movement at the beginning of the 
 fifteenth century. For a study of his life and writings, see P. Tschackert, 
 Peter von Ailli, Gotha, 1877. The statement in the text is made on the 
 authority of Ljunggren, op. cit., p. 249. 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 419 
 
 the moment we ignore this cataclysmic event, and continue 
 the story of the gradual decadence of Augustinianism within 
 Latin Christianity down to modern times. 
 
 THE COUNCIL OF TRENT 
 
 The discussion of these doctrines between the theologians 
 of the two great mendicant Orders was largely an affair of 
 the study and the schools. The questions involved did not 
 affect practical life in any way,! nor were they of interest to 
 the laity or to such of the clergy as were not theological 
 experts. They belonged to the same world of discourse 
 as the interminable controversies with regard to angels, 
 whether they occupy space or not, whether one angel can 
 occupy the same space as another, whether the thought of 
 angels is discursive or intuitive. But the Reformation, 
 challenging as it did the whole fabric of mediaeval Church 
 life and thought, had the remarkable effect of dragging the 
 doctrines of the Fall and of original sin out from the cloister 
 and the lecture-room into the market-place, and of making 
 them issues of the greatest interest and importance for the 
 religious life of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.? 
 Hence, when the Latin Church, after the defection of the 
 Northern nations, took stock of itself, and proceeded to 
 reorganise itself on a military basis, like a besieged city, with 
 
 1G. G. Coulton, however (Five Centuries of Religion, vol. 1, 1923, 
 p- 145), thinks that the gloom of the severe Augustinian doctrine helped to 
 stimulate the growth of the cultus of the Blessed Virgin, the thought of 
 whose intercessory powers provided men with some mental relief from the 
 prospect of probable damnation. 
 
 * This popularisation of the Fall-doctrine is illustrated by the liturgical 
 confessions of sin embodied in many Protestant Church Orders, which 
 require the congregation to accuse itself of original as well as of actual sin : 
 for a collection of such confessions, see Additional Note C, ‘ Congregational 
 Confessions of Original Sin in the Churches of the Reformation’ (p. 443). 
 The enormous growth of interest in original sin which these formulae 
 manifest can be gauged if they are compared with their mediaeval pre- 
 decessor, the Catholic ‘ confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper 
 virgini, omnibus sanctis . . . quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo, et 
 opere, mea culpa’ which is a confession of actual sin only. It may be 
 noted that the Confessions contained in the daily Offices and Communion 
 Service of the Church of England, though showing literary relationship 
 with the Continental confessions, abstain from mentioning original sin. 
 
420 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 a stern discipline designed to safeguard its life against the 
 attacks of its enemies, it was necessary that these doctrines 
 also should be reduced to a stiff, defined form, in order to 
 keep the reforming influence at a safe distance. Conse- 
 quently what is still the official doctrine of the Roman Church 
 on these subjects was formulated at the Council of Trent, 
 despite the nervousness of the Emperor Charles V, who 
 would much have preferred that the Council should have 
 left such thorny topics alone. The Dominicans were repre- 
 sented at the Council by Catterino and de Soto, two of the 
 most learned theologians of their order ; but it is remarkable 
 that we hear very little of the Franciscans. The Order of 
 Friars Minor had fallen upon evil days, having produced no 
 great theologian since William Occam. It was at this period 
 distracted by the schisms between the Capuchins and the 
 Conventuals; and the mantle of Duns Scotus, as the 
 upholder of the anti-Augustinian position, had fallen upon 
 the newly founded Society of Jesus. The decisions of the 
 -Souncil were contained in the Decree concerning original sin, 
 (Cession 5, affirmed on June 17, 1546, and the Decree con- 
 cerning Justification, Session 6, affirmed on January 13, 
 1547.1 The former consists of five canons verbally repeating 
 the first two canons of the second Council of Orange, and 
 containing also a long passage taken from the second canon 
 of the second Council of Carthage, which had condemned 
 Pelagius and Caelestius in A.p. 418. These facts sound as 
 though the Tridentine decision ought to have been a triumph 
 for Augustinianism. Actually, the result was a compromise 
 which cannot have satisfied either party completely, as a 
 brief analysis of it will show. We will take the cardinal 
 points at issue seviatim. (1) ‘ Original righteousness.’ 
 Adam is said to have been ‘constituted’ in holiness and 
 righteousness. The Council is silent on the subject of his 
 supposed intellectual attainments. (The word ‘consti- 
 tuted’ is obviously meant to avoid raising the question 
 whether Adam was created in original righteousness, as the 
 Dominicans asserted, or created in a state of pure nature 
 and subsequently endowed with supernatural holiness, as 
 
 1 For the text of the relevant portions of these documents, see 
 Additional Note F, ‘ Formularies (Il), Western and Roman,’ p. 538. 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 421 
 
 the Franciscans maintained.) (2) Original sin considered 
 as vitium. Here the Council is studiously vague, contenting 
 itself with repeating the indefinite affirmation of the second 
 Council of Orange, to the effect that by the Fall Adam was 
 changed for the worse, in both body and soul, and that he 
 injured his posterity and not merely himself. (3) Original 
 sin considered as veatus, that is, ‘ original guilt.’ This is 
 emphatically affirmed. Canon 3 (of the Decree concerning 
 original sin) seems to imply the theory of ‘ seminal identity,’ 
 though its language is very vague. Canon 4 asserts that 
 infants have sin, which must be expiated in the laver of 
 regeneration. Canon 5 usesthe actual phrase vreatus 
 pbeccatt originalis, and asserts that something undefined, 
 which has the true and proper nature of sin, is abolished 
 by baptism. (4) With regard to the state of human nature 
 which has resulted from the Fall, the Council affirms that 
 concupiscence is not sin but merely the fomes or tinder of 
 sin and that it is left in the regenerate ad agonem, for them 
 to struggle against. It is declared also that man’s free-will 
 was by no means extinguished, but rather attenuated and 
 warped so that apart from grace men cannot rise and free 
 themselves from the chains of sinful desire. It will be seen 
 at once that these positions represent a compromise between 
 the Dominican and the Jesuit points of view, in which, on 
 the whole, the Jesuits get very much the best of the bargain. 
 The Dominicans secure the affirmation of original guilt in 
 terms which go a long way beyond the debt theory of Scotus. 
 The anti-Augustinian party, on the other hand, secures a 
 strong affirmation of the reality of human free-will, the 
 denial of concupiscence as in any real sense sin, the exemp- 
 tion of the Blessed Virgin Mary from the scope of the decree 
 affirming the universality of original sin, and the denial of 
 the Augustinian position that the good works of non- 
 Christians are sins. It may therefore be said that Triden- 
 tine orthodoxy on this subject is, on the whole, Scotist, with 
 one unassimilated fragment of pure Augustinianism, namely, 
 the conception of original guilt, adhering awkwardly to it. 
 The subsequent history of these doctrines in the Latin 
 Church may be passed over in a few words. The main 
 controversy between the Dominicans and the Jesuits tended 
 
422 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 to veer away from anthropology and to become more and 
 more entangled in the question of ‘ grace,’ with which, as 
 was pointed out in Lecture V,! we are not immediately con- 
 cerned. Mention must be made, however, of one attempt 
 to revive the full Augustinian scheme within the Roman 
 communion—an attempt which by its failure and suppression 
 had the indirect effect of accentuating the Scotist and anti- 
 Augustinian character of Latin orthodoxy on these points. 
 This is associated with the name of Michael de Bay, or 
 Baius.2 Baius, a professor at the University of Louvain, 
 who had attended the Council of Trent as a theological 
 expert, denied the scholastic distinction between the donum 
 supernaturale of original righteousness and the pura naturalia 
 (thereby asserting that Adam’s splendid gifts of mind and 
 soul belonged to the essence of human nature, and so 
 increasing the guilt of his fall), and also reaffirmed the 
 Augustinian position that the mere presence of potential 
 concupiscence in a newly born infant is in itself a deadly 
 sin.? The condemnation of these two propositions,* amongst 
 many others gathered from the works of Baius, exerted, so 
 to speak, a reflex influence on the current teaching of Roman 
 theologians. The distinction between mere human nature 
 and the ‘ supernatural gifts ’ was sharpened and stereotyped ; 
 and in practice the idea of original sin came to be interpreted 
 in the Scotist manner, as a mere deprivation of these super- 
 natural gifts, with only some slight deordination of the 
 proper relations of reason and appetite as its result. The 
 idea of original guilt is still retained in words, but it is 
 explained in such a way as to evacuate the term ‘ guilt,’ and 
 the forensic terminology which naturally coheres with this 
 conception, of all real meaning. To illustrate this, we need 
 
 * Pp. 337: 
 
 * Born 1513, died 1589: the forerunner of the more celebrated 
 Cornelius Jansen. 
 
 8’ These two positions, as will be explained below, constituted the 
 differentia of the version of the Fall-doctrine characteristic of the Reforma- 
 tion. Baius was, in effect, endeavouring to naturalise the Protestant 
 anthropology within the sphere of post-Tridentine Latin Catholicism. 
 See Vacant-Mangénot, DTC., art. ‘ Baius.’ 
 
 4 By the Bull of Pius V, Ex omnibus afflictionibus (1567). For the 
 principal propositions condemned, see Denzinger-Bannwart, Enchiridion, 
 §§ roo1 ff.; notice especially 1021, 1023, 1025-27, 1047, IO5I. 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 423 
 
 only quote a recent authoritative statement of the Roman 
 Catholic point of view, contained in the volume of essays 
 called ‘ God and the Supernatural.’1 Speaking of the term 
 “uncleanness ’ as applied to original sin, the writer on ‘ The 
 Problem of Evil’ says: 
 
 No physical defilement nor uncleanness of nature as such 
 does the Church intend by such language, but simply and solely 
 birth into a nature-self deprived of the supernature which should 
 have completed it. Thus is the personal innocence of the new- 
 born babe, its innocence in the natural order, compatible with 
 a guilt of its nature in relation to the supernatural order. Thus 
 also is it dear to God because substantially united to Him as 
 its natural ground and end, yet ‘a child of wrath’ in its 
 
 separation from Him and aversion from Him as its supernatural 
 end.? 
 
 He adds in a footnote: ‘ Yet surely such language as “ child 
 of wrath” or “hateful to God” should not be used of 
 naturally and personally innocent children without careful 
 explanation of its highly technical and non-natural sense.’ 
 In this part of our enquiry we are concerned rather to record 
 the movement of ideas than to criticise them. It is impos- 
 sible, however, to refrain from observing that if the term 
 ‘guilt ’ can only be applied to original sin in a non-natural 
 sense it would seem much better that it should not be so 
 applied at all. 
 
 AUGUSTINIANISM AND THE REFORMATION 
 
 It will thus be seen that within Latin Catholicism, which 
 still constitutes the greater part of Western Christendom, 
 the influence of St. Augustine’s characteristic Fall-doctrine 
 has steadily declined during that whole period of its history 
 which may be regarded as beginning with the rise of Scholas- 
 ticism and as ending with the definition of the doctrine of 
 the Immaculate Conception by Pius IX. If the fluctuations 
 in the degree of power exercised at different epochs by a 
 given doctrine over the minds of men could be represented 
 
 1 Ed. Fr. Cuthbert, O.S.F.C. (1920). 
 a Pil 5O: 
 
424 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 under the form of a mathematical graph, we should see the 
 index-point of Augustinian dominance rising to its zenith 
 shortly after the death of St. Augustine himself, continuing 
 at this exalted level across an area denoting some six cen- 
 turies, beginning to fall at the point corresponding to the 
 teaching activity of St. Anselm, and descending in a gradual 
 and elongated curve down to the period of the Reformation. 
 Here our chart would have to be doubled, in order to con- 
 form to the religious partition of Europe effected by that 
 event ; and we should notice the remarkable fact that, 
 whereas in the Latin section of the chart the line of Augus- 
 tinian influence continues to sink, until it reaches its nadir at 
 the canonisation of Alfonso Liguori, in the Reformed section 
 it rushes steeply and suddenly upwards, like the edge of the 
 Matterhorn’s silhouette, and for more than two centuries 
 preserves an elevation equal to that which it maintained 
 within those divisions of the single chart which we suppose 
 to symbolise the period known as the “ Dark Ages.’ In other 
 words, we are at this stage of our enquiry brought face to 
 face with a colossal recrudescence of the rigidly ‘ twice-born ’ 
 anthropology, combined with a remorseless accentuation of 
 all its sternest lineaments—a process which has given birth 
 to that puritan doctrine of original sin still so largely believed 
 to be the primitive, Christian, and Biblical doctrine. The 
 details of this process, and the merits of its results, now 
 demand examination. 
 
 It is natural in the first instance to raise the question, 
 why the Reformers should have felt it necessary to draw 
 up an elaborate system of doctrines with regard to these 
 abstruse and mysterious subjects at all? The Reformation 
 proclaimed itself to be a return to Gospel simplicity, a revolt 
 against the subtleties and quiddities of the Schoolmen, 
 a rediscovery and republication of the pure and undefiled 
 Christianity of the New Testament: why, then, could its 
 leaders not have been content with the very general, loose, 
 and undefined teaching of St. Paul? Why did they feel 
 it necessary to bequeath to posterity the interminable 
 definitions with regard to predestination, the Fall, original 
 sin, grace, and free-will, which crowd the pages of the 
 innumerable formularies produced in the sixteenth and 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 425 
 
 seventeenth centuries ? What constrained them to impose 
 upon their followers anthropological schemes, no less com- 
 plicated and far more gloomy than anything that appears 
 in the pages of St. Thomas or St. Bonaventura? The 
 answer to these questions is partly historical, partly psycho- 
 logical. The Fall-doctrine of the Reformation grew from 
 a double root, of which one fibre was embedded in (a) the 
 hitherto dominant Augustinian dogma, whilst the other 
 sprang from (0) the personal idiosyncrasy of the revolting 
 leaders, Luther and Calvin themselves. 
 
 (a) In our last lecture it was pointed out that the thought 
 of St. Augustine, considered as a whole, is permeated by 
 two dominant elements which have never been finally fused 
 or synthesised, the predestinarian element, which regards 
 salvation as the direct work of God upon the individual soul, 
 a work to which the saved man contributes little or nothing, 
 and the institutional or hierarchical element, according to 
 which the Christian works out his own salvation through 
 the devout use of the Sacraments, within the warmth and 
 shelter provided by a great and august society.1_ During the 
 Middle Ages it was the ecclesiastical and sacramental element 
 in Augustine’s teaching which, as embodied in the mighty 
 theocratic fabric of the Western Catholic Church, exercised 
 the most powerful influence over the lives of ordinary men, 
 and his predestinarianism was little heard of outside the 
 lecture-room and the cloister. But the mystical craving for 
 immediate, personal, unhampered access to the Divine— 
 the longing which impels the solitary soul to overleap all 
 external, ecclesiastical, and liturgical forms, and to wing 
 her way in a flash to the arms of her solitary God—was 
 still working underground, in the dim subconsciousness of 
 the Teutonic nations: and in the Reformation it found a 
 volcanic and earth-shattering expression. Hence it was, 
 humanly speaking, inevitable that the Reformers, nourished 
 as they had been on the thought of St. Augustine, and repre- 
 senting as they did that individualistic method of envisaging 
 the Godward impulse which had determined his predesti- 
 narian teaching, should, in their revolt against his institu- 
 tionalism, have revived, with unbalanced enthusiasm, his 
 
 1 vu. supra, p. 321f. 
 
426 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 “twice-born’ anthropology ; that their declaration of war 
 upon the Mass, penance, the cultus of the saints, pilgrimages, 
 monasticism, and other external works and forms, should 
 have been accompanied by the promulgation of a theory of 
 man and of sin which was designed to rule out human merit, 
 and to make salvation exclusively God’s work, and which 
 therefore was obliged to presuppose the lowest possible 
 view of unredeemed human nature. 
 
 (5) To these considerations we must add the fact that 
 both Luther and Calvin appear to have possessed that 
 ‘twice-born’ religious temperament indicated by the 
 experience of instantaneous conversion, whether complete 
 or incomplete, or by experiences analogous thereto. There 
 seems no reason for discrediting the story of the voice 
 which sounded in Luther’s ears, pronouncing the words 
 ‘The just shall live by faith, when as a young Austin 
 Friar he had ascended half of the Scala Sancta at Rome on 
 his knees!; and, though this phenomenon took years to 
 work its full effect in Luther’s mind, it would seem not 
 unjustifiable, from the standpoint of human psychology, 
 to class it with the ‘ Saul, Saul’ of the Damascus road or 
 the ‘ Tolle, lege’ of the Milanese garden. Calvin, too, was 
 visited by a similar experience in his youth, though of this 
 no details are known.? It is not too much to claim that 
 temperament alone would have guided the great Reformers 
 into the paths of a severe and gloomy anthropology, even 
 had they not been intellectual heirs of mediaeval theology, 
 with its overwhelming tradition of the African Doctor’s 
 immemorial authority. 
 
 1 This incident occurred during Luther’s stay in Rome, Dec. 1510- 
 Jan. 1511. The version of the story assumed in the text is that given by 
 Luther’s son Paul, who says that he had it from his father. The Reformer 
 himself, however, in a sermon of Sept. 15, 1545, alludes to the incident, 
 merely describing his experience as a sudden feeling of doubt whether 
 the system of indulgences was true. Dr. J. Mackinnon (Luther and the 
 Reformation, 1925, i. p. 144, n. 78) thinks that the two versions of the story 
 are incompatible, and that Luther’s own account must be accepted in 
 preference to his son’s; it appears to me, however, that there is no real 
 incompatibility, and that the Reformer may well have preferred in the 
 pulpit to employ an indefinite mode of allusion to his experience, whilst 
 feeling free to narrate it in detail in the privacy of his family. 
 
 2 Calvin, in librum psalm. comment., praefatio (ed. A. Tholuck, Berlin, 
 1836, 1. p. ix). 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 427 
 
 The differences between Lutheranism and Calvinism in 
 regard to the doctrines of man and of sin are inconsiderable, 
 so that it is possible to state the Fall-theory characteristic 
 of the Reformation as a single dogmatic scheme. This 
 scheme was based upon a position which seems curiously 
 dry, abstract, and unreal to us to-day, but which was in 
 the sixteenth century defended by the Reforming leaders 
 with the most passionate fervour: it consists in the denial 
 of the scholastic distinction between the donum supernaturale 
 of Original Righteousness assumed to have been received 
 from his Creator by unfallen man and his pura naturaha, 
 that is, the qualities belonging to him merely in right of 
 his human nature.4 It will be remembered that this dis- 
 tinction made possible a comparatively mild view of the 
 Fall, at any rate for the Franciscan Schoolmen: a citizen 
 who is elevated to princely rank and then deposed from it 
 is not necessarily worse off than he was before his elevation. 
 But, for the reasons just mentioned, the Reformers were 
 determined to paint the present condition of fallen human 
 nature in colours as gloomy as possible. Hence the mag- 
 nificent endowments supposed to have been possessed by 
 the first man are affirmed to have been, not superadded 
 adornments, but essential constituents of human nature 
 as God originally created it; and their loss means, not 
 merely that human nature has been stripped of some 
 adventitious splendours, but that it has been wrecked 
 and confounded in its inmost being. The Fall was not 
 
 1 Cf. the position of Baius, mentioned above, p. 422. Though this 
 dispute between Latin Catholic and Protestant theologians (whether 
 the splendours of ‘ original righteousness’ were a donum indebitum, 1.e. a 
 separable accident of the protoplast’s nature, as the Catholics maintained, 
 or an essential quality thereof, as the Protestants contended) may seem to 
 us mow purely academic, yet (as Ritschl, Rechtfertigung u. Versdhnung?, 
 lii. p. 308, acutely points out) it was vividly symptomatic of the divergence 
 between the mediaeval Catholic and the Protestant Weltanschauungen. 
 For the Protestant view implies that the idea of Christian perfection was 
 included in the idea of human nature itself as conceived in the Divine mind : 
 from which it follows that man should seek his perfection along strictly 
 human lines (as a citizen, husband, father, etc.). Whereas the Latin 
 Catholic opinion, that ‘ original righteousness ’ was a donum supernaturale, 
 catastrophically imposed upon man’s pura naturvalia, involves a super- 
 naturalism according to which human perfection can ultimately be found 
 only in the vita angelica of monasticism. 
 
428 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 a fall from supernature to mere nature, as the Schoolmen 
 had taught, but from mere nature to sub-nature. Man is 
 not a citizen, who, after receiving a princedom from the 
 generosity of his sovereign and forfeiting it by his own 
 fault, has reverted to his former bourgeois condition; he 
 is a citizen who has degraded himself by his own act to the 
 status of an outlaw or a felon. 
 
 This view of the nature of original righteousness, with its 
 corollary as to the infinite ruin wrought by the Fall, gives 
 rise, by a logic which we might regard as inexorable if we 
 did not know that the conclusion has really determined the 
 premises, to the doctrine of human nature generally known 
 as that of ‘total depravity.’ Though the essence of this 
 doctrine is common to both the great schools of Reformation 
 thought, certain differences manifest themselves in the 
 expositions which Luther and Calvin give of it. It may be 
 said at once that the Lutheran doctrine on this point is by 
 far the more pessimistic and severe. According to the 
 strict Lutheran conception, human nature by the Fall was 
 deprived of one of its essential faculties—the faculty of 
 knowing, loving, and serving God. The God-apprehending 
 powers of the human soul were totally extirpated. The 
 so-called ‘ Synergist’ Lutherans, under the leadership of 
 Victorinus Strigel, endeavoured to mitigate the harshness 
 of this doctrine by maintaining that the moral and religious 
 faculties were not so much permanently destroyed as tem- 
 porarily paralysed. This view was, however, hailed by the 
 majority of Luther’s followers with shouts of vituperation, 
 as being grossly Pelagian, and was condemned by the 
 ‘Formulary of Concord,’ one of the official documents of 
 the Lutheran Church, which says ‘ They also are likewise 
 repudiated and rejected, who teach that our nature has 
 indeed been greatly weakened and corrupted because of 
 the Fall of the human race, but nevertheless has not alto- 
 gether lost all goodness relating to divine and spiritual 
 things. . . . For they say that from his natural birth man 
 still has remaining somewhat of good, however little, minute, 
 scanty and attenuated this may be.’2 It is true that the 
 
 1 J. A. Mohler, Symbolism (E. tr., 1847), pp. 79, 80. 
 2 solid. declar. i. de pecc. orig. § 23. 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 429 
 
 Confession of Augsburg leaves man some little power of 
 fulfilling what it calls ‘ civil justice,’ that is, duties enjoined 
 by purely political or secular morality; but this power 
 has no reference to spiritual or supernatural virtue, of which 
 fallen man is totally and absolutely bereft. To quote once 
 more the emphatic language of the Formulary of Concord, 
 fallen man as such possesses no more power of loving God 
 or turning towards Him than a stone, a tree-trunk, or a piece 
 of mud.? From this position, in the thought of Luther 
 himself an even more startling consequence follows. It 
 seemed self-evident to him that original justice and original 
 sin must be exactly equal and parallel. He seems, by 
 a curious piece of confused thinking, to infer from this 
 premise the consequence that the annihilation of the moral 
 and religious faculties of the soul must have been followed 
 by the substitution in their place of similar, but contrarily 
 orientated powers—what might be called immoral and 
 irreligious faculties? Hence we are led to the idea of 
 original sin as a substantive thing or hypostasis—an idea 
 which the Reformer expresses in crude phrases, such as 
 these: ‘It is the essence of man to sin,’ ‘ original sin is 
 that very thing which is born of a father and a mother,’ 
 “Man, as he is born of father and mother, is with his whole 
 nature and essence not merely a sinner but sin itself.’ * 
 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Luther has plunged 
 headlong into the abyss of Manicheism, on the verge of which 
 Augustinianism had always trembled but into which it had 
 never, up to this moment, actually fallen.° His followers 
 did not indeed go so far ; but the conception of original sin 
 as a positive malignant power, and not a mere deprivation, 
 
 1 conf. August., art. xviii.: ‘ de libero arbitrio docent quod humana 
 
 voluntas habeat aliquam libertatem ad efficiendam civilem iustitiam, et 
 diligendas res rationi subiectas.’ 
 —~ * solid. declar. ii. de lib. arb. § 24: ‘ antequam homo per Spiritum 
 Sanctum illuminatur . . . ex sese et propriis naturalibus suis viribus, in 
 rebus spiritualibus nihil inchoare, operari, aut cooperari potest, non plus 
 quam lapis truncus aut limus.’ 
 
 8 Mohler, op. cit., i. p. 85. 
 
 4 These expressions were collected by J. A. Quenstedt (Theologia 
 didactico-polemica, Wittenberg, 1601, ii. pp. 134 f.). 
 
 5 The Formulary of Concord, however, expressly condemns the 
 Manichean theory that evil is a substance (solid. declar. 1. § 27). 
 
430 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 is unequivocally expressed by the Formulary of Concord 
 in words which may be quoted here : 
 
 Moreover, it is affirmed that original sin in human nature is 
 not merely that total lack or defect of virtuous powers in spiritual 
 things which pertain unto God; but also that into the place of 
 the image of God which has been lost there has succeeded an 
 intimate, grievous, most profound and abyss-like, inscrutable 
 _and indescribable corruption of the whole nature and of all the 
 powers of man, most chiefly of the superior and principal 
 faculties of the soul, a corruption which infects the mind, intellect, 
 heart, and will. Wherefore after the Fall man receives from his 
 parents by heredity a congenitally depraved impulse, filthiness 
 of heart, depraved concupiscences and depraved inclinations.4 — 
 
 This sweeping condemnation of human nature as it 
 stands previously to the operations of divine grace raised 
 once more the old enigma of the apparent virtues and 
 good works of non-Christians. Generally speaking, the 
 theology of the Reformation, in regard to this point as to 
 others, obediently follows the lines laid down by its master, 
 Augustine. The supposed ‘ good deeds’ of Jews or pagans 
 are really sins: for, given the doctrine of “ total depravity,’ 
 all that issues from unregenerate human nature is necessarily 
 sinful.2 So the Apology for the Confession of Augsburg 
 asserts : ‘it is both false and an insult to Christ, to assert 
 that men do not sin when they fulfil the commandments 
 of God, apart from grace ’ ® (and grace ex hypothest is only 
 bestowed upon members of the Christian Church). This 
 position is developed, and based upon the familiar proof- 
 text discovered in the Epistle to the Romans by the 
 
 1 solid. declay. i. 11 : ‘ praeterea, quod peccatum originale in humana 
 natura non tantummodo sit eiusmodi totalis carentia seu defectus omnium 
 bonorum in rebus spiritualibus ad Deum pertinentibus, sed quod sit 
 etiam, loco imaginis Dei amissae in homine, intima, pessima, profundissima 
 instar cuiusdam abyssi, inscrutabilis et ineffabilis corruptio totius naturae 
 et omnium virium, inprimis vero superiorum et principalium animae 
 facultatum in mente, intellectu, corde, et voluntate. itaque iam post 
 lapsum homo haereditario a parentibus accipit congenitam pravam 
 vim, internam immunditiam cordis, pravas concupiscentias et pravas 
 inclinationes.’ 
 
 2 Cf. Calvin, instit. christ. vel. li. 3, title: ‘ ex corrupta hominis natura 
 nihil nisi damnabile prodire.’ 
 
 3 apol. conf. Aug. li. § 29: ‘ falsum est et hoc et contumeliosum in 
 Christum, quod non peccent homines facientes praecepta Dei sine gratia.’ 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 431 
 
 ingenuity of Augustine,? in the following sentence of the 
 same formulary: ‘Seeing that contempt of God and doubt 
 concerning His word, His threats, and His promises are 
 rooted in the nature of man, men truly sin even when they 
 perform good works apart from the Holy Spirit: for they 
 perform such works with an impious heart, as it is written, 
 _ whatsoever 1s not of faith 1s sin.’ 2 Thus the whole of human 
 nature and the sum of man’s moral aspirations and efforts, 
 apart from Christianity, are stigmatised as corrupt and 
 worthless in the sight of Almighty God. 
 
 Compared with this crude and violent version of the 
 dogma of ‘ total depravity,’ Calvin’s doctrine on the same 
 subject assumes from time to time a comparatively humane 
 and reasonable form. There is one sentence of the Institutio 
 which in words denies the idea of total depravity, in con- 
 nexion with this vexed question of the virtues of pagans, 
 which, he tells us, have been ordained by God ne hominis 
 naturam in totum vitiosam putemus, lest we should think 
 that the nature of man is altogether depraved.? And the 
 psychological analysis of the various faculties of human 
 nature which occurs in the second book of the Institutes 
 contains a singularly generous tribute to triumphs won by 
 the human intellect, even apart from the grace of Christianity, 
 in the spheres of secular ethics, of philosophy, of political 
 and social science, of the liberal and mechanical arts. He 
 exclaims, with patent sincerity, “How many good things 
 the Lord hath left to human nature, even after it had been 
 despoiled of the one true good!’® Yet against this liberal 
 and enlightened view we have to set many passages which 
 merely repeat the gloomy doctrine of Luther. Even in 
 
 Ay ROM. xiv. 23°; see Lecture!V )p.'374 f- 
 
 2 abol. conf. Aug. uu. § 38: ‘cum igitur haereant in natura hominis 
 contemptus Dei, dubitatio de verbo Dei, de minis et promissionibus, vere 
 peccant homines etiam cum honesta opera faciunt sine Spiritu Sancto, 
 quia faciunt ea impio corde, iuxta illud, guicquid non est ex fide peccatum 
 est.’ 
 
 2 instit i. 3; 3- 
 
 4 ibid. ii. 2, 13-16. 
 
 5 ibtd. ii. 2,15: ‘ergocum homines istos, quos scriptura yuyiKxods vocat, 
 usque eo fuisse pateat in rerum inferiorum investigatione acutos et per- 
 spicaces, talibus exemplis discamus quot naturae humanae bona Dominus 
 reliquerit, postquam vero bono spoliata est.’ 
 
432 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the case of the virtuous pagans, such as Camillus, who 
 appears to have been a stock example of non-Christian 
 virtue, he suggests that their apparently good deeds must 
 have been due to one of two causes—either to hypocrisy, 
 or merely to the sovereign will of God, mechanically im- 
 pinging upon them ad extra and restraining them from acts of 
 external vice without healing the interior corruption of their 
 souls... Many passages can be quoted which in fact affirm 
 the idea of total depravity, despite the verbal denial of it 
 which we observed just now. The whole of human nature 
 is saturated with ‘ concupiscence,’ which is in itself mortally 
 sinful, even before and apart from the consent of the will.? 
 Man is covered from head to foot with sin as with a flood.® 
 Infants bring their own damnation with them from their 
 mothers’ wombs ; the moment they are born their natures 
 are odious and abominable to God.‘ 
 
 It is not necessary to devote many words to the question 
 of original guilt, because, as will have been seen, this idea is 
 implicit in the Augustinian theory, whole-heartedly accepted 
 by both of the great Reformers, of the intrinsic sinfulness of 
 concupiscence, that is, of any kind of appetitive movement - 
 or impulse towards action forbidden by the law of God, 
 even though such movement be not endorsed and even 
 though it may be resisted by the conscious will. This is 
 fortified by its connexion with the theory of ‘seminal 
 identity ’ or of the physical solidarity of the race with Adam, 
 which appears explicitly at any rate in Calvin,® and seems 
 
 ae 
 
 1 instit. ii. 3, 3: ‘ita sua providentia Deus naturae perversitatem 
 refraenat, ne in actum erumpat: sed non purgat intus.’ 
 
 2 ibid. ii. 1, 8: ‘ qui dixerunt esse concupiscentiam, non nimis alieno 
 verbo usi sunt, si modo adderetur . . . quicquid in homine est, ab 
 intellectu ad voluntatem, ab anima ad carnem usque, hac concupiscentia 
 inquinatum refertumque esse, aut, ut brevius absolvatur, totum hominem 
 non aliud ex se ipso esse quam concupiscentiam.’ 
 
 3 ibid. li. 1, 9: ‘ totum hominem quasi diluvio a capite ad pedes sic 
 fuisse obrutum, ut nulla pars a peccato sit immunis.’ 
 
 4 gbid. il. 1, 8: ‘ atque ideo infantes quoque ipsi, dum suam secum 
 damnationem a matris utero afferunt, non alieno, sed suo ipsorum vitio sunt 
 obstricti. nam tametsi suae iniquitatis fructus nondum protulerint, habent 
 tamen in se inclusum semen : imo tota eorum natura quoddam est peccati 
 semen: ideo non odiosa et abominabilis Deo esse non potest.’ 
 
 5 ibid. ii. 1,6: ‘ certe habendum est, fuisse Adamum humanae naturae 
 non progenitorem modo, sed quasi radicem, atque ideo in illius corruptione 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 433 
 
 to underlie a position which is common to both the great 
 schools of Reformation divines, namely, that in the last 
 analysis original sin—the sin of universal human nature as 
 such, apart from the actual sins of individuals—is the only 
 real sin that exists. Actual sin is regarded as being merely 
 an epiphenomenon—a loathsome efflorescence of which the 
 foul root is the inherent sinfulness of humanity. The sin 
 of Adam, which is the sin of mankind, is regarded as 
 a perennial fountain of filth and uncleanness which is 
 perpetually bubbling up in black streams of perverted and 
 degraded impulse, manifesting itself not merely in those 
 acts which the moral law stigmatises as sinful but in all 
 the daily, hourly, momentary acts, even though in appear- 
 ance innocent or virtuous, performed by the unconverted 
 man—a doctrine which, if seriously accepted, would make 
 this life indeed a prison-house, a penitentiary, and a vale 
 of tears. On this showing, it would seem to be criminal in 
 the sight of Heaven to be a human being at all. The 
 prolegomena to the Gospel would appear to have been well 
 summed up in the gloomy aphorism of the Spanish dramatist 
 Calderon: ‘ The greatest crime of man is that ever he was 
 born.’ 
 
 The last department of the Reformation doctrine which 
 claims consideration, a department which is closely con- 
 nected with the belief in the ‘ total depravity’ of man, is 
 that concerned with the freedom of the will. It may be 
 briefly stated that both great schools of Reformers carried 
 the speculations of Augustine to their logical conclusion 
 in the shape of a_relentless..and_iron determinism. In 
 regard to this matter, again, the Lutherans are more 
 emphatic and more violent even than Calvin and his 
 followers. The title of Luther’s treatise against Erasmus, 
 de servo arbitrio, leaves room for no mistake as to his con- 
 clusions. Two quotations from this work will be sufficient : 
 ‘Accordingly this doctrine is most chiefly needed and 
 
 merito vitiatum fuisse hominum genus’: ‘ ipse (sc. Adam) peccando non 
 sibi tantum cladem ac ruinam ascivit, sed naturam quoque nostram in 
 simile praecipitavit exitium. neque id suo unius vitio, quod nihil ad nos 
 pertineat : sed quoniam universum suum semen ea in quam lapsus erat 
 witiositate infecit.’ 
 
 2¥ 
 
ae 
 We 
 
 434 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 salutary for the Christian to know that’God foresees nothing 
 contingently, but that He both foresees, determines, and 
 actually does all things, by His unchangeable, eternal and 
 infallible will. By this thunderbolt the whole idea of free- 
 will is smitten down and ground to powder’ (hoc fulmine 
 sternitur et conteritur pemtus lberum arbitrum). ‘ All 
 things which we do, even though they may seem to us to 
 be done mutably and contingently . . . in reality are done 
 under the stress of immutable necessity (necessario et 
 ammutabiliter) if regard be had to the will of God.’ 2 It is 
 to be noted that the Formulary of Concord gives express 
 sanction to this treatise. Calvin’s doctrine is identical 
 with this, though he attributes real freedom of the psycho- 
 logical order to Adam before the Fall. Yet even this 
 psychological freedom conceded to unfallen Adam is not 
 metaphysical freedom—a conception which is strictly im- 
 possible for Calvin, as it had been for St. Thomas and 
 St. Augustine, in virtue of the irresistible, all-embracing, 
 ineluctable omnipresence of the divine causality. For him, 
 as for his great predecessors, the will of God is the direct 
 and immediate cause of suffering or unhappiness in the 
 world ; there is no room for secondary or contingent causes. 
 Though it is not our purpose to enter into the deeper and 
 vaster problems of predestination, it will be seen how 
 inevitable was the consequence which made the arbitrary, 
 inscrutable will of God the ground of an absolute double 
 predestination—of the elect to eternal life and of the 
 reprobate to eternal loss—a grim conclusion from which the 
 Lutherans always shrank. This overwhelming, almost 
 suffocating doctrine of the absoluteness of God, which can 
 find room for not the faintest motion of spontaneity on the 
 part of His creatures, has been summed up by one who will 
 not be suspected of any prejudice against Calvinism, the 
 late Dr. Fairbairn, in the sentence: ‘Calvin was as pure, 
 though not as conscientious or consistent, a Pantheist as 
 Spinoza.’ 4 
 
 1 ob. cit., parsi, § 10 (opera lat. D.M. Luth., ed. Ien., 1567, i. fol. 165). 
 
 2 ibid. (op. lat. ed. Ien. i. fol. 165 verso). 
 
 3 solid. declar. il. § 44. 
 
 4 A.M. Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 1893, p. 164. 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 435 
 
 The denial of human freedom and the reference of all 
 effective causality to the will of God naturally raised for 
 the Reformers, as it had raised for the Schoolmen, the 
 question of the extva-human origin of evil. It will be seen 
 at once that any system of rigid determinism possessing 
 a theistic basis can only escape from making God the direct 
 author of evil by the unsatisfactory device of asserting that 
 God cannot have originated that which does not exist.1 
 Hampered, doubtless, by the tendency already noted in 
 Luther, to conceive evil as a positive hypostatic substance, 
 the Reformers were slow to avail themselves of this way 
 out, and hence, strange though it may seem, one or two 
 of them do not hesitate to attribute evil to the direct 
 causality of God. Melancthon, in the edition of his com- 
 mentary on the Epistle to the Romans published in the 
 year 1525,2 makes the following assertion: ‘ Not merely 
 does God permit His creatures to act, but He Himself is 
 the proper agent in all things that happen; so that as men 
 confess that the conversion of Paul was God’s proper work, 
 so they ought to confess both that morally indifferent 
 actions, such as when men eat, are God’s works, and also 
 actions which are bad, like David’s adultery’; he goes on 
 in the same strain to assert that the treachery of Judas 
 was just as much an act of God as the conversion of 
 St. Paul. These conclusions were, however, so revolting 
 to the general mass of Lutherans that they found no 
 support, and the responsibility for the origin of evil was 
 transferred to Satan, with whom it was left—no attempt 
 
 1 Cf. supra, Lecture IV, p. 260. 
 
 2 The passage has disappeared from later editions, and is known to us 
 only through its preservation by Melancthon’s pupil, Martin Chemnitz 
 (loc. theol., ed. Leyser, 1610, pars i, p. 173): the original is ‘ nos dicimus, 
 non solum permittere creaturis ut operentur, sed ipsum omnia proprie 
 agere, ut sicut fatentur proprium Dei opus fuisse Pauli vocationem, ita 
 fateantur opera Dei propria esse, sive quae media vocantur, ut comedere, 
 sive quae mala sunt, ut Davidis adulterium: constat enim Deum omnia 
 facere, non permissive, sed potenter, id est, ut sit eius proprium opus Iudae 
 proditio, sicut Pauli vocatio.’ Chemnitz excuses this audacious dictum on 
 the ground that the extreme libertarianism which then prevailed (doubt- 
 less under Franciscan influence) in the Schools was calculated to provoke 
 equally extreme utterances on the other side. Can. 6 of the Tridentine 
 decretum de tustificatione is directed against this utterance of Melancthon : 
 see Additional Note F, ‘ Formularies,’ p. 540. 
 
436 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 being made to investigate the question how Satan became 
 evil. The Calvinists, however, were dominated by a 
 more rigorous logic, and possessed to a greater extent the 
 courage of their convictions.1 If the origin of evil, as it 
 exists at present, be traced to the Fall, the question arises 
 ‘What was the cause of the Fall?’ and for Calvin there , 
 could be only one answer—the will of God. Calvin’s pre-» 
 destinarianism is, therefore, of what is called the ‘ supra- 
 lapsarian’ kind; that is, it assumes that the decree which 
 arbitrarily destined certain elect souls to salvation and con- 
 demned the rest of mankind to perdition, was made by 
 God in eternity, before the Fall, and that the Fall itself was 
 preordained as the means of procuring the infection with 
 sin of those destined to be damned. Calvin leaves us in 
 no doubt as to his tremendous meaning. Such a dictum as 
 the following speaks for itself: ‘ Man falls, the providence 
 of God so ordaining’?; and, alluding to the sovereign, 
 pre-temporal decree of God which he regards as the direct 
 cause of the Fall of man, with all its consequent misery and 
 horror, ending in the eternal ruin of the greater portion of 
 the human race, he observes: ‘It was in truth a horrible 
 decree, I confess: but none can deny that God foreknew 
 the final fate of man before He created him, and that He 
 foreknew it precisely because it was appointed by His own 
 ordinance.’ *® How this terrible doctrine can be reconciled 
 with the love of God Calvin nowhere explains; it is 
 harmonised with His justice by the familiar Augustinian 
 expedient of postulating a peculiar, mysterious and ‘ occult ’ 
 kind of Divine ‘justice’ which has little or nothing in 
 common with what we know as human justice.* Critics 
 
 1 For quotations from Zwingli appearing to make God the author of 
 sin, see Mohler, op. cit. i. p. 54 ff. ; for the opinions of Beza, zbid. i. p. 60 fff. 
 
 2 instit. lili. 23, 8: “ cadit igitur homo, Dei providentia sic ordinante, 
 sed suo vitio cadit.’ 
 
 8 ibid. iii. 23, 7: ‘decretum quidem horribile, fateor: infitiari 
 tamen nemo poterit quin praesciverit Deus quem exitum esset habiturus 
 homo antequam ipsum conderet, et ideo praesciverit quia decreto suo sic 
 ordinarat.’ 
 
 4 Cf. ibid. iil. 23, 8: ‘si enim praedestinatio nihil aliud est quam 
 divinae iustitiae, occuliae quidem, sed inculpatae, dispensatio . . . iustis- 
 simum quoque esse interitum quem ex praedestinatione subeunt aeque 
 certum est.’ 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 437 
 
 who are not satisfied with this arbitrary device are silenced 
 by a convenient quotation from St. Paul—‘ Nay, but, 
 O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall 
 the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou 
 made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, 
 of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and 
 another unto dishonour?’! It is conceivable that the 
 Apostle might have expressed himself in less absolute terms 
 had he foreseen the use to which his words were destined to 
 be put; but that is a question which cannot be discussed 
 now. Meanwhile, it is not unfair to conclude this summary 
 of the Augustinian anthropology, as republished and 
 developed by the leaders of the Reformation, with the 
 remark that in the hands of Melancthon and Calvin, at least, 
 who make God the ultimate author of evil, it would seem 
 to have transformed itself into precisely that unmoral 
 Hindu monism—that belief in a God, or an Absolute, who 
 transcends the distinction between good and evil—which, 
 as we saw at the beginning of this enquiry, is one of the 
 Fall-doctrine’s two traditional foes: a curious revolution 
 of the wheel of thought.? 
 
 THE ANGLICAN DOCTRINE 
 
 We have now reviewed the history of the Augustinian 
 Fall-doctrine between the fifth and the sixteenth centuries, 
 and have failed to discover any considerations calculated to 
 induce us to revise the unfavourable judgment which was 
 passed upon it in our last lecture. Neither the Schoolmen nor 
 the Reformers seem to have succeeded in placing the ideas 
 of Original Righteousness, “ seminal identity,’ Original Guilt, 
 and the intrinsic sinfulness of ‘ concupiscence’ in a more 
 
 Rom: ix. 20, 21. 
 
 2 It should be added, however, that the chief Protestant Confessions 
 explicitly and strongly condemn the view that God is in any sense the 
 author of sin: the more extreme oditey dicta of individual Reformers 
 quoted in the text are meant to illustrate the subconscious tendencies and 
 the logical implications of their thought, and are not cited as representing 
 the official mind of the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches, for which see 
 Additional Note F, ‘ Formularies’ IV and V, pp. 543-548. 
 
438 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 favourable light ; on the contrary, the former proved able 
 to defend these conceptions only by modifying them or by 
 taking refuge in mystery, whilst the latter appear to have 
 achieved nothing beyond bringing out into fuller relief all 
 their more irrational and horrifying features. As for the 
 suggestion in which this Lecture’s argument found its 
 starting-point, that the ‘ twice-born’ doctrine has a prima 
 facie claim to be considered as having fulfilled the Vincentian 
 test, inasmuch as it has been accepted by all the intellectual 
 vital and progressive areas of Western Christendom, that 
 has been sufficiently refuted by the gradual decline of 
 Augustinianism within the Latin communion, and by its 
 almost complete disappearance, consummated within the last 
 hundred years, from the thought of Continental Protestan- 
 tism. In a rapid and summary review such as the present 
 (which is all that the vastness of the period to be covered and 
 the necessity of compressing our discussion within the limits 
 of a single lecture permit), it is impossible to do more than 
 allude to the great break-up of traditional evangelical 
 orthodoxy in the Continental homes of the Reformation, due 
 to the collapse of the belief in the literal inerrancy of the 
 Bible—a break-up in which the ultra-Augustinian Fall- 
 doctrine of the Reformers, based as it was believed to be upon 
 the historicity of Gen. iii, was swept away with the rest of 
 the Protestant scholastic system. The philosophic attempts 
 of Kant and Hegel to restate what they considered to be the 
 permanent essence of the doctrine must be reserved for con- 
 sideration in our final lecture. Only the barest mention can 
 be made of Schleiermacher’s attempt to save the form of the 
 idea of original sin whilst abandoning its content, by explain- 
 ing ‘hereditary sin’ (Evbsiinde) in terms of ‘social,’ as 
 opposed to biological, heredity ?: or of the explicit sub- 
 stitution of a communal sinfulness (gemeinsame Sinde, 
 Gesammisiinde) handed on by example and tradition for the 
 idea of a weakness innate in the individual, by Albrecht 
 Ritschl,? whose recasting of the whole dogmatic system of 
 Christianity presents the latest and the clearest illustration 
 
 1 pp. 497-500. 
 2 Der christliche Glaube*, §§ 66-67 (Berlin, 1842, pp. 361-436). 
 3 Rechtfertigung und Verséhnung?, iii. 5 (Bonn, 1883, pp. 304-357). 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 439 
 
 of the mutual co-inherence and interdependence of the 
 Pelagian doctrine of man, the Adoptionist or Antiochene 
 doctrines of Christ, and the merely ‘ exemplarist ’ doctrine 
 of redemption. 
 
 The circumstances, however, under which we are gathered 
 together demand that a few concluding words should be 
 devoted to a particular version of the Western Fall-doctrine 
 which has hardly been mentioned hitherto, namely, the 
 doctrine of the Church of England. This is contained in the 
 IXth Article of Religion ‘ Of Original, or Birth-Sin,’ in the 
 Xth ‘ Of Free will, and in the XIIIth, ‘ Of works before 
 justification.’ These were all included in the original 42 
 Articles drawn up in 1553 by Cranmer at the instigation of 
 the Council of Edward VI, at a period when the influence of 
 the Swiss Reformers was at its height. The Tridentine 
 doctrines of Sin and Justification which have been considered 
 in this lecture were promulgated in the year 1546. It follows 
 that Cranmer and his collaborators must have been well 
 acquainted with them, and that the ultra-Augustinian 
 affirmations contained in the Articles were meant to be direct 
 contradictions of the doctrine put forward at the Council of 
 Trent. It is, therefore, not surprising that a superficial 
 perusal of these formularies should seem to Justify the 
 celebrated dictum of William Pitt, that the Church of 
 England possessed a Popish liturgy and Calvinistic Articles. 
 A closer study, however, will disclose the fact that whilst 
 these Articles would seem to have been drafted in such a 
 way as to be patient of a Calvinistic interpretation, they 
 cannot be said of necessity to contain more than a fairly 
 strong affirmation of those Augustinian conceptions with 
 which our historical survey has made us familiar. So much 
 is indeed certain. In Article IX we find at least one side of 
 the characteristically Augustinian conception of original 
 guilt, namely, the idea that we are in some inexplicable way 
 responsible for being born with disordered natures ; and it 
 is asserted that this hereditary corruption and fault of human 
 nature, which ex hypothesi we cannot help, as found in every 
 person born into this world deserves God’s ‘ wrath and 
 
 1 Cf. Lecture V, p. 349 f. 
 
440 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 damnation.’1 There can be little doubt that in the original 
 intention of the compilers these tremendous words carried 
 with them the terrible consequences of the necessary damna- 
 tion of the heathen and of unbaptised infants? ; and the 
 gloss with which Dean Church attempts to soften their 
 formidable import—a gloss which in effect amounts to this, 
 that original sin itself may be said in the abstract to deserve 
 God’s wrath and damnation, but that its individual posses- 
 sors do not necessarily deserve anything but His compassion 3 
 —whilst no doubt practically convenient, as making it easier 
 for men of the twentieth century to consent to a formulary 
 drawn up in the sixteenth, seems to be rather an evacuation 
 than an explanation of the ‘ literal and grammatical’ sense 
 of the Article. The same Article contains the statement 
 (attributed to ‘the Apostle’) that concupiscence and lust 
 hath of itself the nature of sin ; which, if it means anything 
 at all, would seem to be a re-affirmation of the Augustinian 
 doctrine of the intrinsical sinfulness of one of the elementary 
 
 1 Cf. the formula prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer for the 
 reception of a privately baptised child into the congregation (‘ The Ministra- 
 tion of Private Baptism of Children in Houses’), in which the infant is 
 described as ‘ born in original sin, and in the wrath of God.’ 
 
 2 It may be noted, however, that Hooker (Eccl. Pol. V. 1x. 6) is inclined 
 to think that the unbaptised children of Christian parents may possibly be 
 saved. 
 
 8 The reference is to a letter, in Life and Letters, p. 248: ‘ The fact of 
 what is meant by original sin is as mysterious and inexplicable as the 
 origin of evil, but it is obviously just as mucha fact. There is a fault and 
 vice in the vace, which, given time, as surely develops into actual sin as our 
 physical constitution, given at birth, does into sickness and physical death. 
 It is of this inherited sin in our nature, looked upon in the abstract and 
 without reference to concrete cases, that I suppose the Article speaks. 
 How can we suppose that such a nature looks in God’s eyes according to the 
 standard of perfect righteousness which we also suppose to be God’s 
 standard and law? Does it satisfy that standard ? Can He look with 
 neutrality on its divergence from His perfect standard ? What is His 
 moral judgment of it as a subject for moral judgment ? What He may do 
 to cure it, to pardon it, to make allowances for it in known or unknown 
 ways, is another matter, about which His known attributes of mercy alone 
 may reassure us ; but the question is, How does He look on this fact of our 
 nature in itself, that without exception it has this strong efficacious germ 
 of evil within it, of which He sees all the possibilities and all the conse- 
 quences ? Can He look on it, even in germ, with complacency or indiffer- 
 ence? Must He not judge it and condemn it, as in itself, because evil, 
 deserving condemnation? I cannot see what other answer can be given but 
 one, and this is what the Article says.’ 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 441 
 
 instincts of mankind, though a loophole is left for those who 
 cannot accept this Manichean opinion in its full rigour by 
 the use of the ambiguous phrase ‘ the nature of sin,’ ratio 
 peccati.1 Article XIII contains another, somewhat hesitating, 
 re-affirmation of a position common to both St. Augustine 
 and the Reformers, namely, that works done before justifica- 
 tion, which ‘spring not of faith in Jesus Christ,’ are not 
 pleasing to God and, in fact, ‘ have the nature of sin.’ There 
 can be no doubt that this Article was meant to traverse the 
 teaching of the Council of Trent that the virtuous actions of 
 pagans are not sins; but on this point, at any rate, there are 
 very few modern Christians who in their heart of hearts do 
 not agree with Trent. We have already pointed out the 
 intellectual and moral antinomies which these propositions, 
 taken at their face value, necessarily involve. In an age, 
 however, of passionate feeling and of unquestioning accept- 
 ance of St. Augustine’s authority these difficulties were not 
 likely to occur to anyone ; and circumstances with which we 
 are all familiar have brought it about that these obsolete 
 positions are still embedded in the doctrinal standards of the 
 English Church. Nevertheless, even before the publication 
 of Tract 90, with its exposition of a benignior interpretatio, 
 which may be employed as a kind of intellectual shoe-horn 
 for accommodating the stiff formularies of the past to the 
 living religious experience of the present, protests had been 
 raised both in the seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries 
 against the severity of these doctrines. The idea of original 
 guilt, which, as we have suggested, is both the most charac- 
 teristic and the least defensible element in the whole 
 Augustinian scheme, involving as it does the assertion that 
 a newly born infant deserves eternal damnation on the mere 
 ground of the fact that it is a human being, was manfully 
 combated by the illustrious Jeremy Taylor; a single quota- 
 tion will make his position clear : 
 
 And truly, My Lord, to say that for Adam’s sin it is just in 
 God to condemn infants to the eternal flames of Hell, and to say 
 that concupiscence or natural inclinations before they pass into 
 
 1 The Augustinian view of sex finds a striking expression in the opening 
 exhortation of the Marriage Service, as contained in the Prayer Book of 
 1662. 
 
442 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 any act would bring eternal damnation from God’s presence into 
 the eternal portion of devils, are two such horrid propositions 
 that if any Church in the world should expressly affirm them, 
 I, for my part, should think it unlawful to communicate with 
 her in the defence or provision of either, and to think it would 
 be the greatest temptation in the world to make men not to 
 love God, of Whom men so easily speak such horrid things. 
 
 Considerations of this nature prompted the application 
 addressed by Dr. Porteus, subsequently Bishop of London, 
 together with several other distinguished divines, in the 
 year 1772 to Archbishop Cornwallis, asking him to consult 
 with the episcopate whether a revision of the Articles could 
 not be carried out, with the object of eliminating what 
 appeared prima facie to be their more Calvinistic features. 
 The Archbishop replied that he and his brethren, having 
 considered the matter, were unanimously of the opinion that 
 nothing could be done—a conclusion which was dictated 
 in all probability rather by practical caution than by 
 theological conviction. The relaxation, however, of the 
 terms of clerical subscription to the Articles, which was 
 effected by the combined authority of Convocation and 
 Parliament in the year 1865, has had what is in practice the 
 same effect as a revision of their text, and it is safe to say 
 that no minister of the national Church at the present day 
 conceives himself as being committed to the statements that 
 newly born infants deserve damnation, that those impulses 
 which subserve the perpetuation of the race are inherently 
 sinful, and that the virtuous acts of non-Christians are all 
 crimes. Nevertheless, although practical difficulties in 
 connexion with subscription have solved themselves, it is not 
 a good thing that any branch of the Universal Church should 
 continue to be cumbered with obsolete formularies inherited 
 from the past which are in practice repudiated by the thought 
 and conscience of the present ; and it may, therefore, not 
 be presumptuous to suggest that it would be well if the 
 
 1 Works (London, 1822), ix. p. 373. From ‘ An Answer to a letter 
 written by the Rt. Rev. the Lord Bishop of Rochester, concerning the 
 chapter of Original Sin in the ‘“‘ Unum Necessarium.’”’’ Taylor’s own 
 views about original sin, which approximate to the Scotist position, are 
 developed in the Unum Necessarium, or The Doctrine and Practice of 
 Repentance, cc. vi. vil. (Works, ix.). 
 
DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 443 
 
 Doctrinal Commission, which has been entrusted by the two 
 Primates of England with the task of endeavouring to secure 
 a greater unity of fundamental belief amongst members of 
 the Church of England, would turn its attention to this 
 particular area of Christian doctrine, and endeavour to 
 arrive at formulations which might ultimately be substituted 
 for the crude assertions which have come down to us out of 
 the passions and conflicts of the sixteenth century. Revision 
 of the Liturgy, as Porteus saw a century and a half ago, 
 must involve as its logical corollary revision of the Articles, 
 and in some ways the latter is the more important task of the 
 two. If and when it is undertaken by ecclesiastical authority, 
 it must surely include the task of presenting Christendom 
 with a carefully balanced statement of Christian anthropology 
 which does not go beyond the positive contents of Revelation 
 and is free from all contradiction with the teachings of 
 modern science and the deliveries of a tolerant and 
 enlightened conscience. By her unique position in Christen- 
 dom, seated as she is in the West, and heiress to the treasures 
 of both Latin and Teutonic thought, yet united by ever- 
 growing bonds of sympathy and mutual knowledge with the 
 Christian and Hellenic East, by her splendid intellectual 
 tradition, which combines unswerving loyalty to the historic 
 revelation of God in Christ with the most tremulous 
 sensitiveness to new light, through whatever windows it may 
 pour in—the English Church possesses both the power and 
 the opportunity to wrestle with this ancient problem anew, 
 and to win one of those triumphs in the world of thought 
 which are only less glorious than her invisible achievements 
 in the sphere of grace. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE C 
 
 CONGREGATIONAL CONFESSIONS OF ORIGINAL SIN IN THE 
 CHURCHES OF THE REFORMATION 
 I. Origins. 
 Strassburg, 1537 (F. Hubert, Die Strassburger liturgischen 
 Ordnungen, im Zeitalter der Reformation, Gottingen, Ig00, 
 p. 92): Almechtiger, ewiger got vnd vatter, wir bekennen 
 
444 
 
 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 vnd veriehen, das wir leyder inn siinden empfangen vnd 
 geporen seind wnd daher geneygt zu allem argen vnd treg 
 Zuvaliem Suten.. 4. 
 
 Calvin, La maniére de faive priéres, 1542 (Alfred Erichson, 
 Die Calvinische und die altstrassburgische Gottesdienstordnung, 
 Strassburg, 1894, p. 16): Seigneur dieu pere eternel et 
 toutpuissant nous confessons sans feintise deuent ta saincte 
 majesté, que nous sommes pouures pecheurs, conceuz et nez 
 en iniquitez et corruption, enclins a mal faire, inutiles a tout 
 Dich yen: 
 
 II. Development. 
 
 III. 
 
 (x) Calvin, Precum ecclestasticarum formula (B. J. Kidd, 
 Documents of Cont. Reform, p. 615): Domine Deus Pater 
 aeterne et omnipotens, agnoscimus et ingenue profitemur 
 apud sanctam majestatem tuam, nos miseros peccatores 
 esse, conceptos, et natos in iniquitate et pravitate, ad 
 nequitiam proclives, ad omne autem bonum opus inutiles ... 
 
 (2) Valerand Pullain, Liturgia sacra seu Ritus Ministerw 
 an ecclesia peregrinorum Francofordiae ad Moenum (A. L. 
 Richter, Die evangelische Kirchenordnungen des 16. Jahrhun- 
 derts, 1. p. 150) : Domine Deus Pater aeterne et omnipotens 
 agnoscimus et fatemur ingenue apud sanctam majestatem 
 tuam peccatores esse nos miseros, adeoque a prima origine, 
 qua concepti et nati sumus, tam ad omne malum esse pronos 
 quam ab omni bono alienos. .. . 
 
 (3) Laski (Jo. a Lasco) Forma ac ratio tota Ecclesiastict 
 Mimistertt, in peregrinorum, potissimum uero Germanorum, 
 Ecclesia instituta London in Anglia, 1551, p. 66: Omni- 
 potens aeterne Deus misericors Pater . . . Etenim praeter- 
 quam quod in peccato concepti ac nati, omnis boni prorsus 
 expertes, pleni omni iniquitate sumus. .. . 
 
 In English Puritanism. 
 
 (1) English exiles at Geneva (Calvin’s Common-Prayer 
 Book, or the Service, Discipline and Form of the Common 
 Prayers, & Adminstration of the Sacraments us’d in the 
 English Church of Geneva, in The Phenix, Vol. i. p. 214), 
 and J. Knox, Book of Common Order, 1564 (The Liturgy of 
 the Ch. of Scotland, or John Knox’s Book of Common Order, 
 London, 1840, p. 1): O Eternal God and most merciful 
 Father, we confess and acknowledge here before thy divine 
 Majesty, that we are miserable Sinners, conceiv’d and born 
 in Sin & Iniquity, so that in us there is no Goodness ; for 
 the Flesh evermore rebelleth against the Spirit, whereby we 
 continually transgress thine holy Precepts and Command- 
 ments, and so purchase to ourselves, through thy just 
 Judgment, Death and Damnation. 
 
IV. 
 
 DECLINE OF AUGUSTINIANISM 448 
 
 And Book of Common Order, p. 6. If thou shouldst 
 begin to reckon with us even from our first conception in 
 our mother’s womb, thou canst find nothing at all in us but 
 occasion of death and eternal condemnation ; for truth it is 
 that first we were conceived in sin, and in iniquity was 
 every one of us born of our mother. . . 
 
 (2) A booke of the forme of common prayer, 1584 (‘ The 
 Puritan Liturgy ’; in P. Hall, Fragmenta liturgica, 1. p. 25): 
 O eternal God, and most merciful Father, we confess and 
 acknowledge here before thy divine majesty, that we are 
 miserable sinners, conceived and born in sin and iniquity, 
 so that in us there is no goodness. 
 
 (3) Disciplina Ecclesiae sacra, c. 1588 (in F. Paget, 
 Introd. to the Fifth Book of Hooker's Eccl. Pol., p. 301): sequatur 
 precatio continens confessionem generalem reatus peccati 
 originalis et actualis : et poenae ob utrumque ex lege debitae. 
 
 (4) A Directory for the Publike VV orship of God T hrough- 
 out the Three Kingdoms, London, 1644 (P. Hall, Rekquiae 
 hiurgicae, iil. p. 25): the minister . . . is to endeavour to 
 get his own and his hearers’ hearts to be rightly affected 
 with their sins, that they may all mourn . . . by proceeding 
 to a more full confession of sin... to this effect :—To 
 acknowledge our great sinfulness: First, by reason of original 
 sin ; which (beside the guilt that makes us liable to everlasting 
 damnation) is the seed of all other sins, hath depraved and 
 poisoned all the faculties of soul and body, doth defile our 
 best actions, and (were it not restrained, or our hearts renewed 
 by grace) would break forth into innumerable transgressions, 
 and greatest rebellions against the Lord, that ever were 
 committed by the vilest sons of men. 
 
 (5) Exceptions of the Ministers, 1661 (Cardwell, Con- 
 ferences, 309): The Confession is very defective, not clearly 
 expressing original sin. 
 
 (6) The Reformation of the Liturgy, 1661 (‘ The Savoy 
 Liturgy,’ by Baxter; in P. Hall, Reliquiae liturgicae, iv. 
 p- 15): .. . we confess that we are vile and miserable 
 sinners, being conceived in sin; by nature children of wrath, 
 and transgressors from the womb. 
 
 (7) Evyodoywov: a Book of Common Order (Scottish 
 Church Service Soc.), 1877, p. 48: O Lord our God, eternal 
 andj almighty Father, we acknowledge and confess before 
 thy holy majesty, that we are miserable sinners; born in 
 iniquity, prone to evil; unable by ourselves to do that 
 which is good... . 
 
 At Cologne. 
 
 Hermann von Wied of Cologne, fia ac simplex deliberatio, 
 1545 (the italicised words are added in the Latin to the 
 
446 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 German of 1543), p. xciv: Omnipotens aeterne Deus, Pater 
 Domini nostvt Iesu. Christt, Creator rerum omnium, tudex 
 cunctorum hominum, agnoscimus et deploramus nos in 
 peccatis conceptos et natos ideoque ad quaevis mala pronos 
 et abhorrentes a wevis bonis. . . . 
 
 V. In Sweden. 
 
 E. Yelverton, The Mass in Sweden (Henry Bradshaw Soc., 
 1920). 
 
 1531: Mass of Olarus Petri, p. 33: I, poor sinful man, who 
 am both conceived and born in sin, and ever 
 afterwards. ... 
 
 1576: Mass of John III, p. 85: Confiteor tibi Deo Patri 
 omnipotenti, me miserum peccatorem in peccatis 
 conceptum et natum nimis peccasse in vita mea... 
 
 1602: Communion Office of Charles IX, p. 131, as 1531 
 above. 
 
 1917: Modern Mass, p. 157: I, poor sinful man, who was 
 born in sin, and ever afterwards &c. 
 
VII. 
 ‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 
 
To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various 
 history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, 
 their mutual alienation, their conflicts; their ways, habits, 
 governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless 
 courses, their random achievements and acquirements . . . the 
 greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short 
 duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments 
 of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, 
 mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading 
 idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that 
 condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in 
 the Apostle’s words, ‘ having no hope and without God in the 
 world ’—all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts 
 upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is 
 absolutely beyond human solution. 
 
 What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering 
 fact? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this 
 living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His 
 presence ...I argue about the world; 7zf there be a God, 
 since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible 
 aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its 
 Creator. Thisisa fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence ; 
 and thus the doctrine of what is technically called original sin 
 becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as 
 the existence of God. 
 
 JoHN HENRY NEwMAN: Apologia pro Vita Sua, c. V. 
 
LECIURE VIL: 
 “ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 
 
 Matt. xiii. 52: ‘ Therefore every scribe who hath been made a disciple 
 to the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that isa 
 householder, which bringeth forth out of his treasure 
 things new and old.’ 
 
 IT is natural for the traveller who has slowly climbed a 
 long and precipitous ascent, to pause on reaching the 
 mountain crest, and look back upon the road by which he 
 has come; and it is no less appropriate that, at the end of 
 our historical survey, which has led us through twenty-five 
 centuries of Jewish and Christian history, we should sum 
 up in retrospect the results which our enquiry has yielded, 
 before pushing on into the almost untrodden region of 
 abstract speculation and construction. We have seen that 
 the doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin were born in 
 the minds of the Maccabean saints as the fruit of the experi- 
 ence of penitence, and that they were designed to safeguard 
 this experience against interpretations which were ultimately 
 destructive of ethical monotheism, especially against the 
 Iranian explanation of evil as the work of a second and 
 malevolent God, and the Hindu theory of evil as a necessary 
 moment in the finite self-expression of an impersonal and 
 non-moral Absolute. Thus a vague and wavering con- 
 ception of a primitive moral catastrophe and of a train of 
 disastrous hereditary consequences flowing from it slowly 
 arose in later Judaism, clothed itself with the Paradise- 
 story of Gen. ill. as its supposedly historical integument, 
 passed on into Christianity with, it would seem, the tacit 
 permission of the Master Himself, and was stereotyped by 
 St. Paul as the official Christian explanation of the origin 
 of evil in Nature and in man. The impact of successive 
 
 waves of Oriental dualism stimulated the Christian Church 
 2G 
 
450 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 to clarify and articulate the ideas which it had adopted as 
 the presuppositions of its redemptive scheme. But, as this 
 development advanced, two distinct versions of the Fall- 
 doctrine began to define themselves, corresponding to the 
 two differing emotional forms which penitence assumes in 
 the experience of the ‘ once-born’ and ‘ twice-born’ types 
 of religious man. The former of these versions wears a 
 milder character, appropriate to the sunny genius of 
 Christian Hellenism, recognising as it does the good that 
 survives even in fallen man; the latter, elaborated into 
 rigid severity by the fanaticism of Northern Africa, and 
 condemning human nature as largely or entirely depraved, 
 was riveted on Western Christendom by the genius of St. 
 Augustine, exaggerated into fantastic and repulsive forms 
 by Luther and Calvin, and until recently was generally 
 believed by Englishmen to be the only traditional Fall- 
 theory. But the Augustinian theory never took captive 
 the mind of the Christian East, and even in the West its 
 millennial domination has now passed away. The right of 
 the highly specialised ‘twice-born’ dévot to force his 
 despairing estimate of human nature upon the sober 
 majority of ‘once-born’ Christians is now universally 
 denied; and the primitive, Hellenic, ‘ once-born’ version 
 of the Fall-doctrine now stands clearly revealed as the 
 basic or residual Christian belief, the only scheme of ideas 
 regarding human nature and sin which commits its adher- _ 
 ents to nothing that cannot truly claim to be Scriptural, 
 Oecumenical, and accepted ‘ everywhere, always, and by all.’ 
 
 We now turn, in conformity with the plan set forth at 
 the beginning of this enquiry, to the constructive task of 
 verifying and elucidating these ideas, and of correlating 
 them, so far as is in our power, with the modern universe of 
 philosophic thought. It has been frequently pointed out 
 during the course of this discussion that the belief in the 
 Fall as a historical event, though for long believed to rest 
 upon the testimony of an inspired and inerrant record, 
 is in reality an inference, a logical construction based upon 
 the observed fact, or what was believed to be such, of 
 ‘ original sin,’ together with the revealed fact of the infinite 
 power and goodness of the Creator ; in the order of thought, 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 451 
 
 therefore, as distinct from the order of time, original sin 
 comes first, and the Fall last. It will conduce to lucidity 
 if we follow the order of thought, devoting the present 
 discourse to a consideration of the validity of the idea of 
 original sin as a psychological hypothesis, reserving the idea 
 of the Fall, with its deeper theological and metaphysical 
 implications, for our final lecture. 
 
 There is, however, one task which must necessarily be 
 dealt with at the outset, if the argument of our two con- 
 cluding lectures is to be presented with the highest degree 
 of perspicuity ; and that is the task of formulating, with 
 greater precision than has been possible hitherto, the 
 traditional theory which is now to be put to the test. 
 
 Before we can verify in the facts of human psychology 
 that which on the basis of the Vincentian Canon we have 
 found to be the most truly ‘ catholic’ or universal doctrine 
 of human nature, it will be necessary first of all to state it 
 in extenso, as a single coherent theory, collecting together 
 into an ordered whole various fragments and aspects of it 
 which have from time to time emerged in the course of our 
 historical review. As this minimising, ‘ once-born’ Fall- 
 doctrine has never been officially formulated, but merely 
 exists, as it were, in solution, or like radium, diffused as a 
 common element through a heterogeneous series of chemical 
 compounds, but nowhere discoverable in isolation, it will 
 be understood that this formulation does not lay claim to 
 more than approximate accuracy. We must, therefore, 
 occasionally assume the liberty to supply a few minor links 
 or logical connexions which the structure of the theory 
 seems to demand, but for which no specific patristic or con- 
 ciliar texts can be quoted. In the light of what has been 
 already said with regard to the real basis of the Fall-doctrine 
 in spiritual experience, and its relatively accidental con- 
 nexion with the Paradise story of Gen. ili., we shall confine 
 ourselves to a formulation of the intellectual essence of these 
 ideas, carefully avoiding the use of pictorial terminology 
 drawn from the Adam-story, so as to avoid exposing our- 
 selves to the suspicion of substituting legend for logic. It 
 will be convenient to include in this summary a statement 
 of the doctrine of the Fall, that is of the origin of human 
 
452 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 evil, which, as already explained, is reserved for exhaustive 
 consideration in our final lecture, as well as the statement 
 of that with which we are immediately concerned in this 
 lecture, namely, the doctrine of original sin, so that we may 
 have before our minds a synoptic view of the whole intel- 
 lectual fabric constituted by these ideas. The full signifi- 
 cance borne by the substitution of the milder for the more 
 gloomy version of Christian anthropology will be brought 
 out with greater clearness, if in the course of this formulation 
 we indicate once more the chief Augustinian or ‘ twice- 
 born’ positions which, if our argument so far has been 
 well founded, must now be decisively repudiated, both on 
 the ground of their lack of genuinely universal acceptance, 
 and also on that of their incompatibility with the facts of 
 modern historical knowledge and with a real belief in the 
 infinite goodness and justice of God. 
 
 This basic essence of Fall-doctrine, which may be 
 regarded as the highest common factor of the various 
 competing versions of that doctrine which have from time 
 to time been current within the orthodox Christian world, 
 can be conveniently summarised in the form of seven 
 distinct propositions, of which the first five taken together 
 constitute the doctrine of the ‘ Fall,’ in the strict sense, 
 and the remaining two that of ‘ original sin,’ so called. 
 These propositions are the following : 
 
 (1) God is infinite, not merely in power but in love and 
 goodness, and therefore the world of created being as He made 
 ut must have been purely good, including no element of evil at 
 all. (We note in passing, though it is impossible now to 
 go into the subject at length, that the idea of the Fall 
 necessarily presupposes the idea of Creation, and would be 
 quite incapable of harmonisation with any theory implying 
 that the universe of finite being is an eternal or necessary 
 mode of God’s self-expression. ) 
 
 (2) The origin of evil ts therefore to be sought 1n the voluntary 
 rebellion of created and finite wills, such rebellion—and here 
 we touch upon a point of considerable importance—having 
 taken place prior to the appearance of the human species on 
 ths planet. In other words, the ultimate Fall, which is 
 postulated in order to avoid an infinite regress, is conceived 
 
“ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 453 
 
 as being extra-terrestrial ; and this extra-terrestrial char- 
 acter of the primal catastrophe may be imagined either 
 in accordance with the view, hinted at by Origen, of an 
 extra-temporal Fall of the race-soul from a transcendental 
 Paradise, or in accordance with the more popular theory 
 of a ‘fall of the angels,—not that which has hitherto 
 claimed our attention, the descent of the lustful ‘ Watchers ’ 
 to earth, as narrated in Gen. vi., but a much more ancient, 
 pre-human revolt of spiritual beings against their Almighty 
 Lord, such as was imagined at the beginning of our era 
 by the author of the Slavonic Enoch,? was read by Christian 
 imagination into the Apocalyptic vision of the celestial 
 conflict between Michael and the dragon,? and is familiar 
 to English readers in the magnificent Homeric vesture 
 which the genius of Milton has imposed upon it.* 
 
 (3) Man, at his first appearance on this planet, was im 
 moral and intellectual stature a babe, created frail, imperfect, 
 ignorant and non-moral, but endowed with self-consciousness 
 and the power of self-determination, which constituted, in the 
 penetrating and memorable words of Theophilus, an adoppr 
 mpokomys, a starting-point for progress and upward evolution. 
 
 Here, for the first time, the theory decisively joins issue 
 with Augustinianism. It involves the complete abandon- 
 ment of the belief in the view technically known as the 
 “original righteousness’ or ‘ perfection’ of the first men. 
 The Talmudic theory of the “ protoplast,’ as endowed with 
 Olympian strength and beauty, with all the gifts of philoso- 
 phical subtlety and scientific and theological erudition, and 
 with a character of settled virtue and sanctity—a theory 
 which does not possess the slightest foundation in Scripture 
 —is frankly relegated to the limbo of discarded fables. 
 We cannot stay to enlarge upon this point; but it is 
 permissible to point out how enormously the repudiation 
 of ‘ original righteousness’ as an alleged phase of human 
 history ° eases the strain of the prima facie discordance 
 
 A 
 
 mtv. supra, Lecture IV, ps 225. 2 v. supra, Lecture III, p. 161. 
 Pekev: xii: 7, 8. 4 Paradise Lost, v., Vi. 
 5 For a discussion of the question whether the conception of ‘ original 
 righteousness’ might not be re-used in an extra- or pre-human connexion, 
 see the next Lecture, p. 526. 
 
454 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 between traditional theology and modern science as to the 
 origins and primal condition of man. With an avowed 
 return on the part of theology to such a picture of primitive 
 man as was sketched by Irenaeus,! the conflict between the 
 Fall-doctrine and the evolutionary view of human history 
 would largely disappear, and the atheist lecturer of Hyde 
 Park would find one of his favourite dialectical weapons 
 smitten from his hand. 
 
 (4) The growth of man’s moral ideas brought in its train 
 some action, or system of actions, whereby man aligned himself 
 with the rebellious power, showed that he had partially thrown 
 in his lot with the forces of evil which were already at work 
 in the universe, and entered on a path largely divergent from 
 that upward career of spiritual evolution which God had meant 
 him to follow. 
 
 Here again we note a significant divergence from the 
 Augustinian and traditional Western view. Augustinianism, 
 positing the doctrine of ‘ original righteousness,’ assumes 
 that man was placed at his creation on the summit of the 
 mountain of perfection, and that the first sin was tantamount 
 to an instantaneous, headlong “ Fall,’ over a sheer precipice, 
 into the abyss of sin and damnation. The view, however, 
 which we are now endeavouring to articulate, represents 
 primitive man as born at the bottom of the mountain, as 
 refusing to follow that path which led most directly to its 
 summit, and as preferring to follow a tortuous route of his 
 own devising, which, whilst leading generally upwards, has 
 plunged him into many bogs and crevasses, and involved 
 him in many unnecessary hardships and miseries. A fully 
 developed systematic theology might continue the metaphor 
 by pointing out that the road of man’s own choice has, so 
 far, not led him much higher than the foothills or lower 
 slopes of the peak which he would fain ascend, that a Guide 
 has come to meet him and restore his footsteps to the right 
 track, but that the only short cut from the lower to the 
 higher path must of necessity now lead through ‘ the grave, 
 and gate of death,’ on the further side of which alone 
 complete perfection is to be attained. 
 
 Such a theory does not deny that the record of human 
 
 1 uv. supra, Lecture IV, p. 193 f. 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 455 
 
 history has, on the whole, been that of a slow millennial 
 ascent from low and brutish beginnings to our present 
 state ; its upholders are only committed to the proposition 
 that the direction of this progress has not been so direct and 
 unswerving as it might have been, and was meant by God 
 to be—that the graph of man’s moral and intellectual 
 development, slowly climbing through half a million years 
 at an almost imperceptible angle to the horizontal, with 
 sierra-like undulations of advance and set-back, like those 
 which mark the temperature chart of a feverish patient, 
 stands in the strongest possible contrast to the steep, 
 upward-rushing line of intellectual, spiritual, and moral 
 growth which represented God’s original design for His 
 creature. Given this point of view, it would seem very | 
 desirable that the word ‘ Fall,’ which occurs nowhere in the — 
 Bible, which does not appear to be older than Hippolytus | 
 or Methodius,! and which is almost inextricably bound up— 
 in the popular mind with the idea of ‘ original perfection,’ 
 should be used as little as possible in connexion with the sin 
 of man. (In our next lecture? we shall consider the 
 question whether it is possible to believe in anything 
 corresponding to the supposed pre-human rebellion of the 
 angels, an event to which the term ‘ Fall’ would be more 
 appropriately applied.) When man alone is in question it 
 would seem more appropriate to employ the term which we 
 have seen to be both historically and logically associated 
 with the primitive or ‘ once-born’ theory, that is, ‘ trans- 
 gression’ (zapdBaois, praevaricatio), in the sense of a 
 ‘stepping-aside’ from the straight or proper path. The 
 hypothetical ‘ first human sin,’ or the first human action 
 which we should have been justified in classing as ‘ sin,’ had 
 we been able to observe the history of our remotest ancestors,? | 
 should thus be regarded not so much as a‘ Fall,’ but rather | 
 as a failure to climb—to be exact, a failure to climb as 
 directly and perpendicularly as God had desired. 
 
 In any case, however, and whatever may be thought with 
 
 1 y, supra, Lecture IV, p. 252, n. 4. 
 
 aA 52 7 
 
 3’ On the question whether it is possible to assume a historical event 
 which could be absolutely described as‘ the first human sin,’ v. infra, p. 514 f- 
 
456 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 regard to the question of terminology, it is clear that this 
 mode of conceiving the first human sin entirely rules out 
 Augustine’s contention that it was characterised by infinite 
 malice and a correspondingly infinite guilt. We shall agree 
 with Irenaeus that the primal sin of man was in a sense 
 pardonable ! ; and it is a possible speculation that, as being 
 the sin of a frail, imperfect, and ignorant creature, so far 
 from being the greatest, it was really the least of the crimes 
 which have stained the history of human kind. 
 (5) Ever since this first human transgression, our nature 
 has displayed an inherent moral weakness or bias towards sin. 
 This proposition is modelled on a phrase in which 
 Justin Martyr formulates his primitive and undeveloped 
 conception of the Fall-theory.2 It will be noted that it 
 abstains from asserting that the first human transgression 
 was the direct cause of the innate bias towards evil which 
 _ has revealed itself since, and leaves open the possibility 
 that the Jewish Rabbis may have been right when they 
 said that Adam sinned because the ‘ evil inclination’ was 
 jalready rooted in him.? It is true that this modified and 
 ‘cautious assertion does not solve the question how the 
 evil which was already at work in the universe managed to 
 find, or to retain, a foothold in human nature: but it does 
 not raise a difficulty which is inherent in the Augustinian 
 theory and even in the language of St. Paul, if rigidly 
 interpreted—the difficulty, namely, of understanding how 
 a single wrong act could have such illimitably ruinous 
 results, especially if, as we have just suggested, it was of 
 a comparatively venial nature. It is true that under the 
 complicated conditions of our modern world a single false 
 step may wreck a whole life; but that is largely due to the 
 clumsiness and inhumanity of our present social conventions ; 
 and even they do not involve the penalisation of the sinner’s 
 unoffending posterity until the end of time. We shall find 
 in our concluding lecture that we are relieved of many other 
 difficulties by the liberty, which the primitive doctrine 
 
 1 uv. supra, Lecture IV, p. 195. 
 
 2 dial. c. Tryph. 88... tod yévous rob tdév avOpdmwv, 6 amd Tod 
 "Adap b76 Odvatov Kai mAdynv Thy Tod Odews EmemTwKeLr: the whole passage is 
 quoted above, Lecture IV, p. 174, n. I. 
 
 * Lecture II, p. 70. 
 
 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 457 
 
 allows us, to regard the sin of the protoplast as being not 
 a Fall but a failure—not a wanton plunge into crime but 
 rather a wilful neglect to emancipate himself from tendencies 
 already existing in him, which he both could and should 
 have overcome. 
 
 For the sake of clearness it may again be observed that 
 the five propositions just formulated are concerned with 
 the idea of the Fall or ultimate origin of evil,.and have 
 therefore received only cursory comment. We now approach 
 the last two of our seven theses, which, taken together, 
 embody the primitive, Hellenic, or ‘ once-born’ version of 
 the idea of ‘Original Sin,’ and therefore claim a more 
 detailed and exhaustive examination. 
 
 The sixth proposition may be formulated as follows: 
 This innate bias or tendency towards evil is the effect and 
 symptom of ‘ weakness of will,’ or defective control of the lower 
 emotional and instinctive nature by the higher self. 
 
 The question of the exact nature of the inherited infirmity 
 is one in regard to which the area of agreement between the 
 thought of Eastern and Western Christendom is exiguous 
 and ill-defined. Of one thing we can be certain: historical 
 Christianity as such is not committed to the assertion that | 
 
 X 
 
 “ original sin,’ so called, is sin in the strict sense of the term. ' 
 
 The word sin either means a conscious act carried out with 
 full purpose and deliberation in defiance of a known law of 
 God, or it means nothing at all. It is therefore, strictly 
 speaking, a solecism to apply this term to a pre-determined 
 state, independent of conscious volition, which is alleged 
 to belong to unconscious infants. We must, accordingly, 
 admit that the term ‘ original sin,’ eccatum originale, which 
 (like the term ‘ Fall’) has no Scriptural authority, which we 
 have seen to be the legacy of Augustine’s semi-Manichean 
 view of human nature, and which is inextricably bound up 
 in the popular mind—as, indeed, it was meant to be—with 
 the idea of ‘ original guilt,’ is a singularly unfortunate and 
 misleading expression. It should be beneath the dignity 
 of theology to use a term of which the prima facie meaning 
 has to be elaborately explained away on every occasion of 
 its use; if our religion is to regain its ancient power in an 
 age which demands remorseless clarity of thought and 
 
458 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 fearless sincerity of expression, it cannot afford to disregard 
 a maxim dictated by common sense, namely, that if a term 
 cannot be used in a given connexion without a non-natural 
 interpretation, it had better not be used in that connexion 
 at all. I propose, therefore, during the remainder of these 
 lectures, to substitute for the word ‘sin,’ in speaking of the 
 hypothetical flaw in human nature, the word ‘ infirmity,’ 
 which avoids the implication irresistibly conveyed, and 
 meant to be conveyed, by the Augustinian phrase, namely, 
 that we are morally culpable in the sight of God for possessing 
 natures which we had no share in choosing and which we 
 cannot help possessing. It is hardly necessary to point out 
 that, with the term ‘ original sin,’ we discard all those 
 Augustinian and Western theories which have historically 
 been bound up with it—the idea that physical appetites, 
 especially the sexual appetite, are inherently sinful, that 
 we are morally guilty because we were born without the 
 imaginary splendid endowments enjoyed by the first man 
 in Paradise, that we were physically parts of Adam at the 
 moment when he ate the forbidden fruit and are therefore 
 justly deemed to have eaten it ourselves. To this list of 
 obsolete words and conceptions may be added the time- 
 honoured but ambiguous term ‘ concupiscence,’ which for 
 seventeen centuries has wavered, with more than Protean 
 elusiveness, between the meanings of ‘ physical appetite in 
 general,’ “inordinate physical appetite,’ and ‘lust,’ and 
 through the interminable confusion thereby engendered, 
 has amply earned the sentence of perpetual banishment 
 from the realms of exact theology. 
 
 If our argument so far is well founded, we may claim 
 that this particular area of the ground—the question of the 
 exact nature and seat of the inbred tendency to sin—has 
 thus been cleared of a great quantity of obsolete intellectual 
 structures, and now presents a fair open site for the erection 
 of a more solid and permanent fabric, composed of the 
 materials supplied by the universal Christian tradition and 
 cemented together by the best modern thought. But the 
 question has not yet been answered, What are those 
 materials ? in other words, What is the psychological 
 account given of the ‘ inherent flaw ’ by the basic and truly 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 459 
 
 ‘Catholic’ tradition, as distinct from, though doubtless 
 underlying, the specifically Latin and Western view of 
 “hereditary sin’? If we examine those Greek theologians 
 of the early centuries, in whose writings, as we have already 
 seen, the essential Christian doctrine of human nature and 
 sin appears in its purest and most unadulterated form, 
 we find no unanimous, clear-cut answer to this question. 
 Tatian+ and Theophilus? regard the inborn defect as 
 consisting in the loss of the special assistance of the Holy 
 Spirit, assumed to have been enjoyed in full measure by 
 unfallen man; Origen, in his Caesarean period, reverts for 
 a time to the barbarous conception of bad mana, supposed 
 to be inherent in the processes of generation and child- 
 birth ?; Athanasius takes refuge in the Platonic identifica- 
 tion of Being and the Good, and explains the bias towards 
 evil as a tendency inherent in the soul to disintegrate and 
 relapse into non-being *; Gregory of Nyssa, in a well-known 
 passage of the Catechetical Oration, describes the condition 
 of unregenerate man as ‘ weakness,’ ‘ a state of prostration,’ 
 ‘failure to attain to life,’ ‘lack of participation in the 
 Good,’ ‘ imprisonment in darkness.’ ® But no single psycho- 
 logical conception can be extracted from these heterogeneous 
 statements ; and in general it must be observed that the 
 Greek Fathers prefer to employ, in describing that unre- 
 generate condition of human nature which is the necessary 
 presupposition of any theory of Redemption, the somewhat 
 different, if not alternative, idea of servitude to a personal 
 devil, which both afforded greater scope for glowing rhetoric 
 and also cohered with the then popular view of the Atone- 
 ment as the temporary payment of Christ’s life to Satan in 
 ransom for captive humanity. To ascertain, therefore, 
 what is the common underlying element which is the basis, 
 of all views of the ‘ inherent infirmity ’"—to fix that highest 
 common factor of all the competing theories as to the nature 
 of the moral flaw, which alone can claim acceptance ubique, 
 semper, et ab omnibus—we must recur to the teaching of 
 the great Apostle who laid the foundations of Christian 
 
 Heecture LV, p.175. 2 ibid. p. 176. 
 8 ibid. p. 224. 4 ibid. p. 260. 
 5 or. cat. 15 (Sr. p. 63). ¢ Lecture IV, p. 292 f. 
 
460 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 anthropology, whose authority was unquestioningly claimed 
 by all those representatives of Christian thought who have 
 handled the subject, from Justin Martyr down to Baius and 
 Quesnel. St. Paul’s doctrine was examined at length in 
 our third lecture, and may therefore be summarised here 
 in a single sentence: the ‘inherent infirmity’ of human 
 nature consists in the discord between ‘ flesh’ and ‘ spirit ’ 
 which may be described in modern terms as ‘ weakness of 
 will-power,’ defective control over the emotional impulses, 
 or imperfect power of inhibiting the spontaneous flow of 
 psychic energy along the channels of the primary instincts. 
 We shall consider presently how far this conception is 
 ultimately intelligible and true; for the moment, it is 
 sufficient to insist that the only ‘ Catholic’ conception of 
 that inherent infirmity which has been misnamed ‘ original 
 sin ’—the only common element and foundation underlying 
 the various systems which we have reviewed—is simply 
 identical with the Pauline conception: and St. Paul’s 
 conception can be crystallised in the phrase ‘ inherent 
 _ weakness of will.’ On this point, the result of our long 
 historical research has been to show us that tradition and 
 dogmatic development, broadly interpreted, have added 
 absolutely nothing to the language of Scripture, despite the 
 well-nigh nineteen centuries which have elapsed since the 
 Epistles to the Galatians and Romans were first written. 
 The seventh and last proposition may be formulated as 
 follows: This quality of ‘ weakness of will,’ or defective control 
 of appetites, inheres in the human stock as a hereditary char- 
 acter transmitted from parent to offspring through biological 
 and not merely through what ts called social heredity, so that its 
 elimination from human nature is outside the power of man’s 
 unaided efforts. If man’s will is hereditarily weak it must 
 be supposed to be too weak to will effectually the abolition 
 of this weakness. Man can no more raise himself morally 
 without the help of external assistance, technically known 
 as ‘ grace,’ than he can lift himself physically without some 
 external fulcrum or point of support. Yet this does not 
 mean that the human will is non-existent, or completely 
 paralysed ; the general, diffused mind of Christendom on 
 this point would seem to have been well summed up in the 
 
 Se ee a. 
 
“ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 463 
 
 Tridentine assertion that “ free-will, although weakened and ,/ 
 attenuated, is by no means extinguished ’ by the Fall. It 
 is doubtless not necessary to adduce detailed evidence in 
 order to show that historical Christianity has, rightly or 
 wrongly, committed itself to the hypothesis of biological as 
 contrasted with merely social heredity, as the means whereby 
 the ‘inherent infirmity ’ is transmitted from generation to 
 generation; the general condemnation of the views of 
 Caelestius pronounced by the third Oecumenical Council 
 amounts at least to the affirmation of physiological heredity 
 in some sense, and to some extent, even though, as we have 
 seen, it cannot be interpreted as a positive approbation of 
 the whole Augustinian scheme.? 
 
 As formulated in this way the doctrine of ‘ inherited / 
 infirmity ’ would seem to be a merciful, rather than a rigor- 
 istic conception ; as compared with the unlimited indeter- 
 minism of Pelagius it makes a deliberate allowance for! 
 human frailty and to a certain extent diminishes, though it/ 
 does not abolish, man’s responsibility for actual sin.? It 
 affirms, indeed, that man is accountable for wilful sin, in 
 other words, that he deserves censure or punishment, but it 
 couples this with the assertion that he does not deserve quite 
 as much censure or punishment as he would have deserved 
 had he not been handicapped by this inherent weakness of 
 the higher self. The idea of man’s inherited frailty does not, 
 indeed, amount to the assertion that from God’s point of 
 
 - 
 
 1 decret. de tustif., cap. I (quoted p. 540). 
 
 2 Lecture V, p. 387. 
 
 3’ The fact that the doctrine of ‘ original sin’ (in the sense of ‘ original 
 infirmity,’ and apart from the idea of ‘ original guilt ’) is a merciful doctrine, 
 which tends to extenuate rather than to exaggerate man’s responsibility 
 for actual sin, may be illustrated by a dictum of Molinos: ‘ When thou 
 fallest into a fault, do not trouble or afflict thyself for it. Faults are 
 effects of our frail nature, stained by original sin. Would not he be a fool 
 who during a tournament, if he had a fall, should lie weeping on the ground 
 and afflict himself with discourses upon his misadventure ?’ (quoted by 
 W. R. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, ii. p. 151). It is Pelagianism 
 which by its theory of unlimited indeterminism exaggerates the malice of 
 actual sin to an intolerable degree (see Lecture V, p. 357). The con- 
 ventional criticisms directed against Pelagianism on the ground that it 
 “ minimises the sense of sin’ are totally wide of the mark, if ‘ sin’ be given 
 its normal and natural meaning of ‘ actual sin’ ; on the contrary, it is the 
 idea of the ‘ inherited infirmity ’ which (as I should contend, healthfully) 
 minimises a ‘ sense of sin’ which might otherwise become morbid. 
 
462 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 view tout savoir, c’ est tout pardonner, but it does carry with it 
 
 ‘the implication that tout savoir, c’est beaucoup pardonner. 
 It steers a middle course between the extreme positions of 
 
 Augustine and Pelagius, asserting against the former that 
 the occurrence of sin is not inevitable, and against the latter 
 that it is in every age, and under every combination of 
 circumstances, highly probable. 
 
 It will be well to complete this sketch of the universal 
 basic essence of the Christian Fall doctrine, as extracted 
 by our historical method from the materials provided by 
 Scripture and tradition, by indicating two consequences 
 which seem to follow irresistibly from it. 
 
 The first is this: that with the disuse of the phrase 
 ‘ original sin ’ as describing the inherited infirmity of man’s 
 nature it is desirable also to discard all phrases which imply 
 that this involuntary weakness, which is ex hypothesi simply 
 given in the conditions of human birth and existence and for 
 the possession of which the individual cannot reasonably be 
 held responsible, is in itself, and quite apart from any actual 
 
 ~~sins to which it may lead, the object of the Divine ‘ wrath.’ 
 The conception of God as regarding the newly born but still 
 unbaptised infant with ‘ wrath,’ that is, presumably, with 
 anger and hostility, is indissolubly bound up with those 
 Augustinian conceptions of seminal identity and original 
 guilt which we have already seen reason to reject ; and it is 
 well known that the phrase of Eph. ii. 3, ‘ children of wrath,’ 
 merely means persons guilty of actual sin.t It is doubtless 
 true that all attributions by theologians of human emotions 
 to the Divine Being represent the language of conscious 
 anthropomorphic metaphor ; and that they are nothing but 
 symbols, imperfectly describing the permanent attitude of 
 God, which is implied in His character, towards the various 
 actions or states of His creatures ; and it cannot be doubted 
 that the present condition of human nature, contrary as it is 
 to His holy will, must, if we are to use this human and almost 
 materialistic language at all, provoke in the Divine nature 
 a reaction which can only be described as one of abstract 
 disapproval. But such an attitude falls far short of 
 anything that could be appropriately described by the 
 2 Lecture 41) ports, tee 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 463 
 
 metaphor of ‘ wrath.’ It would seem truer to say that God 
 regards the nature of the newly born infant, containing, as 
 on this hypothesis it does contain, the seeds of moral failure 
 and possibly of tragedy, with sorrow and compassion, not 
 with resentment or vengeful indignation: these are terms 
 which should be kept to express His attitude towards wilful 
 transgression, towards ‘ sinning with a high hand,’ towards 
 the conscious adoption of the maxim of Milton’s Satan, 
 ‘Evil, be thou my good.’ In this matter we shall be con- 
 tent, if we decide that the whole theory is well founded, to 
 follow the customary language of the Greek Fathers, and 
 speak not so much of the ‘ wrath’ of God as provoked by 
 human nature, prior to human actions, but rather of His 
 plilanthropia, the loving-kindness which impelled Him to 
 send His Son to seek the sheep that was lost and by ‘a 
 higher gift than grace ’ to restore the disordered faculties of 
 human nature to that harmony, health, and peace which in 
 the beginning He meant them to possess. 
 
 The second of the corollaries to the Fall-doctrine, as just 
 restated, is concerned with the eschatological problem first 
 raised by the two Cappadocian Gregories,? and forced into 
 prominence by the Pelagians, namely, the question ‘ What 
 becomes in the next world of those who die in original sin ’ 
 —or, aS we prefer to phrase it, ‘ subject to the inherited 
 infirmity ’“—‘ without having committed actual sin?’ It is 
 unnecessary to say that the view which we have sketched 
 provides no justification whatever for Augustine’s condem- 
 nation of all such persons to eternal flames. If I may in 
 passing express a personal view on a mysterious and terrible 
 subject, which it is impossible here to examine at length, 
 I would suggest that the total elimination of the idea of hell 
 from our religion must eviscerate and emasculate it, and 
 annul much of its power to chain the tornadoes of human 
 passion. But the only conception of hell which is morally 
 or intellectually tolerable is one which regards it as the 
 sinner’s own free choice, as the freely willed culmination of a 
 deliberate course of self-degradation and of conscious rejec- 
 
 1 Paradise Lost, iv. 110. 
 2 v. supra, Lecture IV, pp. 279, 290. 
 3 Lecture V, p. 346. 
 
464 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 tion of God and goodness.1 As for the destiny of those, 
 whether infants or adults of infantile mind, who pass into the 
 next world, never having rejected God because they have 
 never known Him, nothing has been revealed, and we must 
 be careful not to be wise above that which is written. But, 
 if it is permissible to give the rein to speculation at all, there 
 is, I would suggest, much to be said for the conception of 
 Limbo, which, according to the merciful Scotist interpreta- 
 tion, is a state of natural beatitude, representing the utmost 
 perfection of which its tenants are capable; these tenants, 
 unbaptised infants, virtuous pagans, and the like, are 
 conceived as feeling no regret for their lack of the Beatific 
 Vision of God, either because they know themselves to be 
 incompetent to enjoy it, or because they are ignorant that 
 it is possible.2 Some such hypothesis as this, enlarged in a 
 manner consonant with the generous tendencies of modern 
 Christian thought in regard to the future destiny of non- 
 Christians, might form a theoretical justification for the 
 Church’s practical insistence upon the all-importance of the 
 evangelisation of the heathen, and upon the urgency of 
 bringing infants to baptism as soon as possible after their 
 birth.? If there are many mansions in the house of God, it 
 would seem not improbable that the forms of life and con- 
 sciousness which inhabit them may display a variety as 
 1 For an eloquent exposition of the idea of hell on these lines, see 
 F. von Higel, Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion (1921), 7, 
 “ What do we mean by heaven ? and what do we mean by hell ?’ 
 2 v. supra, Lecture VI, p. 415. The conception of Limbo has inspired 
 a modern French lyric, Casimir Delavigne’s Les Limbes, in which, however, 
 the negative aspect of this state—that is, deprivation of the Beatific Vision 
 —is emphasised at the expense of its positive aspect, that of ‘ natural 
 beatitude’: cf. this stanza : 
 ‘ Loin de Dieu, 1a, sont renfermés 
 Les milliers d’étres tant aimés, 
 Qu’en ces bosquets inanimés 
 La tombe envoie. 
 Le calme d’un vague loisir, 
 Sans regret comme sans désir, 
 
 Sans peine comme sans plaisir, 
 C’est 1a leur joie.’ 
 
 Milton utilises Limbo as a convenient receptacle for ‘ embryos’ and ‘ idiots,’ 
 friars, scapulars, rosaries, and papal bulls (Paradise Lost, iii. 445 ff.). 
 
 3 See Additional Notes D, ‘ Original sin, eschatology, and foreign 
 missions,’ p. 486, and G, ‘ Infant Baptism,’ p. 550. 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 465 
 
 inexhaustible and multitudinous as is provided by the 
 spectacle of animate nature on this planet ; and the problem 
 presented by the dwarf, the crétin, the imbecile, and other 
 stunted or helpless types of human flotsam and jetsam, may 
 be lightened if we allow ourselves to imagine that such beings 
 are capable of a perfection of their own, and may grow into 
 a mode of existence like that of the ethereal choir of child- 
 spirits, the cloud of selige Knaben, whom Goethe has painted 
 in the final scene of the second part of Faust, and on whose 
 lips he has placed the blissful song : 
 
 Sag’ uns, Vater, wo wir wallen, 
 Sag’ uns, Guter, wer wir sind ; 
 
 Gliicklich sind wir, allen, allen, 
 Ist das Dasein so gelind ! 4 
 
 Time, however, does not permit us to pursue these 
 fascinating speculations further, and we must return to the 
 idea of ‘ original infirmity,’ which is the main subject of this 
 lecture. Though the whole drift of our argument has been 
 towards a denial of the authority and validity of the specifi- 
 cally Western versions of the Fall-doctrine, we have already 
 admitted that one passage in one particular Western formu- 
 lary appears very accurately to embody the fundamental 
 and truly Catholic essence of this idea, namely, the first 
 chapter of the Tridentine decree ‘ concerning Justification ’ 
 which, borrowing a phrase from the Second Council of Orange, 
 affirms that in unregenerate human nature ‘ free-will is by 
 no means extinguished, although weakened in its strength 
 and warped’ (liberum arbitriuan minime exstinctum, viribus 
 licet attenuatum et inclinatum).2 The kernel of the whole 
 idea, which comes to light when the wrappers of Augustinian 
 and scholastic accretion are stripped away, consists solely in 
 the conception of an inherent ‘ weakness of will,’ which 
 to a certain degree diminishes,? but does not by any means 
 
 1° Tell us, father, whither float we: tell us, good father, who we are. 
 Happy are we, to all of us existence is so delicious !’ 
 
 2 Conc. Trident. Sess. VI, decret. de tustificat., cap. 1 (Denzinger- 
 Bannwart, Enchiridion, 1913, p. 266): cf. conc. Avausic. II, can. 25 
 (Denzinger-Bannwart, p. 84). 
 
 3’ Cf. F. H. Bradley, Ethical Studies (1876), p. 42: ‘ violent emotion 
 may make it impossible for the person to keep two courses before him and 
 decide—impossible to separate himself from the strain put on him, so as 
 
 2H 
 
466 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 abolish, moral responsibility. (It may be observed in paren- 
 thesis that the responsibility with which we are dealing here is 
 strictly individual responsibility ; the question whether there 
 is any such thing as racial responsibility belongs to that 
 complex of deeper and more metaphysical problems which 
 cluster around the idea of the Fall.) The phrase ‘ weakness 
 of will’ which we have employed hitherto belongs to the 
 vocabulary of the so-called ‘ plain man,’ and is doubtless an 
 unsatisfactory instrument of exact thought: if analysed, 
 however, it would seem to disclose two ideas underlying it, 
 namely that of volition, as involving effort, and that of this 
 effort as impeded, or opposed, by non-volitional factors. We 
 are, therefore, justified, without spending time in a more 
 minute analysis, in translating this conception of ‘ weakness 
 of will’ into philosophical terminology as the conception of 
 ‘partial determinism,’ or ‘ partial indeterminism,’ which 
 comes to the same thing, though the former expression is 
 perhaps preferable as bearing a positive connotation. ‘ Such 
 a doctrine would clearly stand in an equal opposition to 
 absolute or rigoristic determinism and to absolute or anarchic 
 libertarianism. It would, if intellectually defensible, repre- 
 sent the safe middle channel between a Scylla which devours 
 morals anda Charybdis which drowns Science. The result of 
 our historical survey has, in fact, been to suggest that the 
 only doctrine of human nature which is necessitated by the 
 Vincentian canon involves one particular answer to the world- 
 old enigma of free-will, and it is inevitable, therefore, that 
 our ensuing discussion should be to a certain extent con- 
 cerned with this all-too-hackneyed theme. No one who 
 possesses any acquaintance with the history of the discussion 
 of free-will can be under the delusion that he has anything 
 new to say on the subject—his only justification for touching 
 upon it must le in the hope that he may be able to speak 
 
 either to resist it or to identify himself with it. In such cases the agents 
 can not collect themselves so as to will, and though with knowledge, yet 
 with pain and feeling of guiltiness, as in a dream, they perform some act 
 which is abhorrent to them, and which they impute to themselves as guilt, 
 but which (provided always their fault has not led to it) the sober onlooker 
 may be unable to impute to them, in their character of a moral agent.’ 
 The last clause, in my opinion, is an overstatement of the case. 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 467 
 
 nove, non nova—to lay before his hearers not fresh con- 
 siderations but the familiar arguments envisaged from a 
 novel point of view. 
 
 It was pointed out just now that the hypothesis of 
 ‘partial determinism, which is presupposed by the irre- 
 ducible residuum of the doctrine of so-called original sin, finds 
 two competitors in the field: the rival theories of absolute 
 indeterminism or libertarianism, and of absolute deter- 
 minism. It is not necessary for us to spend any time in 
 refuting the former theory ; the question was fought out as 
 long ago as the fifth century, and the criticisms which were 
 formulated against the views of Pelagius in our fifth lecture 
 would appear to have a permanent validity as against his 
 modern successors. If any further argument be needed it 
 may be briefly pointed out that absolute indeterminism, by 
 making all human action unpredictable, entirely destroys 
 the possibility of the moral sciences—psychology, pedagogy, 
 criminology, politics, economics, and ethics. Nor need we 
 pay much attention to that slightly modified form of absolute 
 libertarianism which admits the external determination of 
 the will by the influences of environment but refuses to 
 acknowledge its interior determination by heredity, and, 
 like the Pelagians of old, finds the medium through which 
 evil is transmitted solely in what is called ‘ social heredity.’ 
 Such a theory, even if it had not been sufficiently refuted by 
 the teachings of biology, as summed up in a phrase associated © 
 with the name of Galton ‘ the all-importance of nature in 
 comparison with nurture,’ would seem to be untenable on 
 the simple a priori ground that Society is made up of human 
 beings and is not a mysterious abstract hypostasis existing 
 apart from or above them. Social heredity is merely the 
 epiphenomenon of biological heredity : bad laws only exist 
 because there have been bad legislators; and to lay the 
 blame of man’s moral deformities upon ‘ Society,’ conceived 
 as something other than and apart from its members, is a 
 fallacy analogous to the political delusion which imagines 
 that it is possible to throw the expense of extravagant 
 schemes upon an imaginary entity known as ‘the State’ 
 without increasing the burden of the individual taxpayer. 
 The most formidable antagonist which confronts our 
 
468 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 minimising doctrine of the ‘ inherited infirmity ’ is absolute 
 determinism. In the present condition of thought it is the 
 partial freedom of the will, not its partial determination, 
 which needs defence. By a paradoxical revolution of 
 thought, the residual doctrine of original sin has become the 
 last citadel and refuge of the idea of the freedom of the will ; 
 whilst, on the hypothesis of absolute determinism, all the 
 fiendish cruelties of the Inquisition, the Jacquerie, or the 
 Soviet, all the nauseous abnormalities which crowd the 
 pages of Krafft-Ebing 4 or Havelock Ellis,? with their minor 
 roots and ramifications which extend into the subconscious 
 selves of us all, must be regarded as necessary, inevitable, 
 predetermined manifestations of a principle of moral evil, 
 saturating the whole body of mankind and making the general 
 sum of human nature into a massa perditions which would 
 more than merit Augustine’s most lurid and terrifying 
 descriptions. 
 
 The classical nineteenth-century discussions of the 
 problem of free-will, such as those of Bain, Mill, and Leslie 
 Stephen, presuppose that now antiquated view of the mind 
 which regarded it as a piece of clockwork set in motion by 
 the insertion into it of hard, metallic objects, known as 
 ‘motives.’ With the remarkable development of the study 
 of human personality which has taken place during this 
 century the problem has assumed a new aspect. Both the 
 leading schools of psychology—the school which studies 
 human nature as revealed in moral behaviour and political 
 conduct, and the more specifically medical school which 
 draws its data from the study of mental pathology—agree 
 in regarding the soul, or psyche, as an organism; living and 
 growing and displaying the fundamental characteristic of 
 organic life, that of perpetual self-adaptation to environ- 
 ment; and, despite certain inevitable differences of 
 emphasis and proportion which flow from the different 
 interests and objects of the academic and the medical 
 psychologists, there is a very large measure of agreement as 
 to the general picture of the soul, its essential fibre and 
 structure, which results from recent research and discovery. 
 
 1 Psychopathia sexualis, New York, n.d. 
 2 Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Philadelphia, 1923. 
 
 
 
“ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 469 
 
 It is inevitable that such a picture should be built up of 
 metaphors, which may sometimes assume such a materialis- 
 tic complexion as to give the impression that we are dealing 
 with mythology and not with science; and it is no less 
 inevitable that the outlines of the picture should be invested 
 with a vague, fluctuating, and dreamlike quality, so that we 
 seem to be looking not at realities but at some phantasma- 
 goric dance of shadows, such as that which played and leapt 
 upon the walls of Plato’s cave. But psychology is not the 
 only science which is under the necessity of employing 
 pictorial thought-forms and categories moulded in the furnace 
 of imagination ; and if metaphor is frankly recognised for 
 what it is, there is no reason why it should lead us astray. 
 With this caution in mind we may now proceed to out- 
 line that composite portrait of the soul which seems to have 
 
 resulted from the two branches of psychological research _ 
 
 just mentioned. The soul is a living organism; and in 
 material organisms, such as form the subject-matter of the 
 biologists’ study, a clear distinction can be drawn between 
 the structure or tissue of the organism and the vital energy, 
 which informs and builds up this structure and is in turn 
 determined by it as regards the modes and channels of its 
 discharge. In the soul we can similarly distinguish between 
 structure and energy ; and it will conduce to clearness if we 
 devote a separate examination to these two factors in psychic 
 life. 
 
 The structural plan of the soul is marked out by the 
 frontiers, vague and undefined yet intensely real, between 
 its three areas, which are commonly known as the conscious, 
 the fore- or pre-conscious, and the unconscious. It is usual 
 and convenient to speak of these areas as though they were 
 vertically superimposed one upon another like storeys in a 
 building, a usus loguend: which we will here follow ; and, as 
 we are concerned with the present and normal condition of 
 human personality and not with its genetic history, we will 
 briefly describe the contents of these storeys in an order 
 contrary to that of their chronological development, begin- 
 ning with the latest addition to the fabric, the attic or garret 
 which is tenanted by, or rather which 7s, consciousness, and 
 working gradually downwards to the obscure and unexplored 
 
470 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 basement of the Unconscious which rests, perhaps, upon the 
 living bed-rock of God. 
 
 For our purpose the most important fact to notice about 
 this top storey, which we call the Conscious Self, is that it is 
 furnished with certain wide and spacious windows, which 
 are the senses, and which are never completely closed, even 
 during sleep. Through these windows there beats in a per- 
 petual blizzard of sense-impressions, derived mainly from the 
 outside world, but including also a not inconsiderable num- 
 ber which originate in the body and which, taken together, 
 constitute what is known as the coenesthesia or sum of the 
 organic sensations. This flux of sense-impressions, per- 
 petually pouring in through the windows of the Soul, is flung 
 into the broad framework of the subject-object relation, 
 sorted out and built up into percepts by means of the forms 
 of perception and the categories of the understanding, and 
 organised, with a never-ceasing readjustment of content, 
 perspective, and proportion, into a continuously flowing, 
 cinematographic representation of the objective world. The 
 details of this process belong to the subject-matter of epi- 
 stemology or the theory of knowledge and do not, therefore, 
 interest us now; the important fact for our purposes con- 
 sists in the no less perpetual drain of the impressions, images, 
 percepts and concepts, after they have played their part in 
 the diorama of consciousness, through what, if we are to 
 
 keep to our metaphor, must be imagined as a series of cracks .~ 
 
 or holes in the floor, into the storey immediately below, the 
 area of the preconscious, which is the domain of Memory. 
 Here these discarded elements are caught, held suspended, 
 and organised into more or less coherent conglomerates by 
 the force of the vital energies, of which more will presently 
 be said, welling up from the obscure depths of the Uncon- 
 scious. These constellations of ideas and images, which are 
 often charged with strong emotional feeling much as a 
 thundercloud is charged with electricity, which hover, as it 
 were, in the preconscious area just below the threshold of 
 the Conscious, and which exert, as we shall see, the most 
 powerful reflex influence upon the field of consciousness, are 
 called by one school of psychologists ‘sentiments’; by 
 Dr. Jung, however, they are known as ‘complexes’; and 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 471 
 
 there is yet a third method of terminology which describes 
 them as ‘ sentiments’ when occupying their normal position 
 in the preconscious and as ‘ complexes’ only when repressed 
 or driven down into the deep prison of the Unconscious. 
 This hierarchy of ‘complexes’ (we adopt the term in 
 Dr. Jung’s sense) which occupies the preconscious area, 
 constitutes what is generally known as ‘ character’ in its 
 more obvious and perceptible aspects, though in the con- 
 ception of character we have to include ‘sentiments’ or 
 complexes, which have been repudiated by the whole self, 
 conscious and preconscious, as incompatible with external 
 facts or with the conscious organisation of its purposes, and 
 repressed in the manner just explained. The lowest room 
 of all, the region of the Unconscious, is almost entirely 
 unexplored, and only reveals its contents by vague and 
 uncertain glimpses in the dream. All that we know about it 
 can be summed up in this—that its obscure recesses contain 
 the fountain of that mysterious energy or life-force which 
 penetrates and vitalises the whole superincumbent structure, 
 that it houses the uneasy and rebellious prisoners known as 
 “repressed complexes,’ and that the exit from it is guarded 
 against any possibility of their escape by a kind of psychic 
 Cerberus known as the ‘censorship,’ whose lair is on the 
 landing between the unconscious and the preconscious, and 
 which is a metaphorical personification of the intellectual, 
 social, and moral dispositions and conventions which forbid 
 the emergence into consciousness of ideas and impulses felt 
 to be inconsistent with its dominant organisations. 
 
 These divisions, however, only represent part of the 
 structure of the soul ; if we utilise the metaphor of a building, 
 they represent the horizontal elements in it, the floors or 
 storeys, and we have yet to consider certain highly important 
 vertical elements which pierce through the various floors at 
 right angles to them; or, if we prefer the metaphor of a 
 woven tissue or fabric, what we have considered so far con- 
 stitutes merely the warp of human personality, consisting of 
 the various grades of consciousness, and we have now to 
 consider the weft, consisting of the cross-threads of Instinct, 
 running up from the selvedge of the Unconscious through the 
 preconscious, the ends of which are gathered, ravelled and 
 
472 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 matted together, in manifold and bewildering intricacy, in 
 the sentiments or complexes. Perhaps it would be well, 
 for the sake of clearness, to drop metaphor for a moment, 
 and to take as the basis of our exposition the austerely 
 scientific language of Dr. W. McDougall’s definition. He 
 describes an instinct as ‘an inherited or innate + psycho- 
 physical disposition which determines its possessor to 
 perceive, and to pay attention to, objects of a certain class, 
 to experience an emotional excitement of a particular 
 quality upon perceiving such an object, and to act in regard 
 to it in a particular manner, or at least to experience an 
 impulse to such action.’2 It will be seen from this that an 
 instinct is not Energy ; it is rather an arrangement of the 
 psychic structure which determines the course which Energy 
 takes upon a given occasion in order to discharge itself. If 
 we may now relapse into what has already been indicated as 
 inevitable, the use of metaphor, we may say that an instinct 
 is a path, a channel, a pipe, or a wire, into which the funda- 
 mental energy of the soul is attracted by the impact of a 
 given stimulus. Strictly speaking, therefore, it is inaccurate 
 to speak of the Instincts as being the efficient causes of action. 
 The efficient cause of action is psychic energy, that which 
 the medical psychologists have named /ibido, which we shall 
 have occasion to discuss presently. Nor, in the light of this 
 conception of the instincts as paths or channels is it appro- 
 priate to speak of them as ‘ strong’ or ‘ powerful.’ What we 
 know as an ‘imperious’ instinct should rather be described 
 as one ‘ of high conductivity,’ if we think of the fundamental 
 energy of the soul as something analogous to electricity, or 
 as a ‘deeply graven channel,’ which attracts into itself a 
 great volume of lbido, if we think of the energy under the 
 metaphor of a fluid. It is not necessary for us to come 
 to any conclusion on the disputed question of the exact 
 number of the fundamental instincts. As is well known, 
 Dr. McDougall enumerates twelve—Flight, Pugnacity, 
 Repulsion, Curiosity, Self-assertion, Self-abasement, Parental 
 instinct, the reproductive instinct, the instinct towards 
 
 1 T have italicised these words in order to draw attention to their 
 importance for our enquiry. 
 2 An Introduction to Social Psychology, 18th edn., p. 29. 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 473 
 
 feeding or self-maintenance, Gregariousness, Acquisition, and 
 Construction.!_ Medical psychologists, on the other hand, 
 seem to recognise only three fundamental instincts: those 
 directed towards the preservation of the ego or self, towards 
 conformity and homogeneity with the herd to which the 
 individual belongs, and that directed towards the reproduc- 
 tion of the species ; in other words, what are generally known 
 _ as the ‘ ego-,’ the ‘herd-,’ and ‘sex-’ instincts. We need 
 not go into the question whether Dr. McDougall’s twelve 
 fundamental instincts are differentiations of the psycho- 
 therapist’s three, or whether the psychotherapist’s three are 
 compositions built up out of Dr. McDougall’s twelve. It is 
 sufficient for our purpose to know that, piercing the psychical 
 structure perpendicularly upwards, there is a web of pipes, 
 channels, or paths, which is innate and given by heredity, 
 which guides and determines the uprush of the fundamental 
 energies of the soul, and which can, at least in thought, be 
 separated out into three divisions or sets directed towards 
 the maintenance and development of the self, the preser- 
 vation of harmony between the self and the herd, and the 
 perpetuation through the individual of the life of the race. 
 We have now to consider the way in which the funda- 
 mental energy, or force of the soul, flowing along one or other 
 of these fixed, innate paths or channels, appears in con- 
 sciousness as volition and in the external world as action. 
 
 ‘’ It would seem that in the adult individual, in so far as he is 
 
 adult in personality, the instincts do not discharge the vital 
 energy directly into action. If and when they do, we are 
 accustomed to say that the person in question is acting like 
 a child, or an animal. Purely automatic actions, sometimes 
 described as purely instinctive, whereby a given stimulus 
 instantaneously causes a given external reaction, are 
 characteristic only of organisms in which self-consciousness 
 does not exist. The growth of self-conscious personality 
 involves the growth of the sentiments, or complexes, stored 
 in the preconscious area, which are continually being built 
 up and charged with energy by the life-force transmitted to 
 them through the instincts. In the adult individual, there- 
 fore, an instinct is not, or ideally should not be, directly 
 
 1 op. cit. c. iii. 
 
—- 
 
 aw 
 
 474 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 connected with the mechanism of muscular innervation 
 leading to act; it is, on the contrary, a pipe or a channel 
 which ends in the complex or sentiment, which must be 
 conceived as a kind of reservoir or accumulator, lying just 
 below the threshold of consciousness, containing the poten- 
 tiality of action in the shape of psychic energy, or libido, 
 which is being perpetually conducted to it by the channel 
 of the appropriate instinct. Ifwe may employ yet another 
 type of metaphor, we may think of the complex as a kind of 
 sponge made up of associated ideas and images, which is 
 kept in a state of perpetual saturation with psychic energy 
 by the pipe of the appropriate instinct ending in it. The 
 account of action and conation which results from this 
 general conception may be formulated as follows. A 
 
 ~stimulus enters the conscious area, either from above, through 
 
 the windows of sense, or from beneath, dragged up from 
 the preconscious by the machinery of association. The 
 appearance of the stimulus in consciousness calls the appro- 
 priate complex or sentiment into activity, and one of two 
 things happens: either the stimulated complex discharges 
 the psychical energy stored in it into the usual conative 
 channels, from which it emerges as muscular innervation, 
 and a bodily action follows ; or the stimulus simultaneously 
 or after an infinitesimal interval excites another complex 
 
 . inhibiting the action of the first. When this latter con- 
 
 wae 
 
 tingency occurs, the particular rivulet of energy which has 
 been dammed up and refused an outlet into action may 
 return upon itself, still further saturating the appropriate 
 complex, and increasing its potential explosiveness; or it 
 may be drained off and go to reinforce some other sentiment 
 which is not debarred from finding practical satisfaction. 
 In this way combative energy may be side-tracked and 
 find a harmless outlet in competitive games and sport, and 
 reproductive energy may be diverted and utilised as motive 
 power for artistic creation or philanthropic activity. When 
 the individual is able to resolve the conflict between the 
 sentiments by starving the weaker sentiment—that is, by 
 depriving it of the psychic energy which keeps it in being, 
 and by using up this rejected energy in some other form, 
 harmonising with the general organisation of his complexes— 
 
“ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 475 
 
 he is said to have achieved ‘sublimation.’ Too often, 
 however, a mind, which has no comprehension of itself and 
 its workings, takes a short and superficially easy cut to 
 interior peace by thrusting the rebellious complex, still alive 
 and charged with vital energy, down into the oubliette of 
 the Unconscious, from which it often emerges as a neurosis 
 or pathological symptom, disguising itself in some fantastic 
 or irrational form in order to evade the vigilance of the 
 
 ‘censorship.’ EL EMouaes 
 
 Such, then, is the portrayal of conation and action which 
 _is given in the modern picture of human personality. Action 
 | means the release of stored-up energy by a complex in 
 response to an appropriate stimulus ; abstinence from action 
 means the inhibition of a weaker complex by a stronger ; 
 and interior conflict, such as is manifested in the ‘ moral 
 struggle,’ represents the overlap and collision of two com- 
 es which must end either in the ‘ sublimation ’ or in the 
 
 ‘repression ’ of the weaker. This simple scheme—percep- 
 i of stimulus, excitation of complex, discharge of energy 
 —represents, of course, the simplest type of conscious action ; 
 but the most elaborate and complicated concatenations of 
 mental procedures, directed towards the most ideal and 
 abstract ends—the activities of a general working out a 
 strategic design, of a statesman planning and executing a 
 great measure of social reform, of a scientist or philosopher 
 pursuing a train of abstruse research or speculation—can 
 ultimately be dissected and resolved into such elementary 
 reactions of complex to stimulus, though the true character 
 of these conational units, if the phrase may be allowed, is 
 often disguised by the high degree of co-ordination and 
 integration which they have undergone. The conduct of 
 the most subtly organised and highly moralised personalities 
 can, in theory, be exhaustively explained on these lines, 
 given liberty to postulate a sufficiently numerous hierarchy 
 of ‘ sentiments,’ fed with power, not merely by the primary 
 instincts but by a multiplicity of secondary and derivative 
 conduits carved out for itself by the elemental energy of the 
 soul, like the network of minor watercourses which link up 
 with labyrinthine intricacy the main channels enclosing and 
 dividing the delta of a great river. 
 
476 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Having now before our eyes what may be described as 
 a cross-section photograph of the Self, displaying the interior 
 mechanism of conduct to view, we naturally enquire if in 
 this structure, the main outlines of which, as we have seen, 
 are given solely by heredity, we can recognise any lacuna, 
 any misfit or dislocation, corresponding to the ‘ inherited 
 infirmity ’ alleged by theology to inhere in human nature. 
 It must be emphasised, for the sake of clearness, that the 
 ‘infirmity ’ of which we are in search is a strictly moral 
 infirmity ; it would complicate our task to an impossible 
 extent if we took account, at this stage, of pathological and 
 morbid phenomena which no one would regard as bearing 
 an ethical character. And a moral infirmity must, pre- 
 sumably, mean an infirmity of the moral ‘sentiment’ or 
 ‘complex,’ resulting in a tendency for it to be overborne 
 by complexes more highly charged with psychic energy and 
 endowed with a more pleasurable affective tone. We must, 
 therefore, examine with some care the psychologist’s account 
 of the moral sentiment, inasmuch as in it, or in the primitive 
 instincts which have contributed to its formation, we shall 
 either find—or not find—the fundamental flaw which 
 Catholic Christianity declares itself to presuppose. 
 
 The ‘moral sentiment’ is capable of pure and lovely 
 efflorescence in ideal loyalties, self-sacrificing heroisms, and 
 self-transcendent yearnings for the Absolute and the Infinite, 
 in Whom the world of eternal values, like the world of 
 ultimate truths, finds its supporting pillar and stay. Yet 
 this interior power, which has been adored by poets and 
 thinkers under the name of ‘ Conscience’ or ‘ Duty,’ ‘stern 
 daughter of the voice of God,’ is, from the psychologist’s 
 unsentimental point of view, an artificial and secondary 
 construction, built upon one of the three primary, or at any 
 rate most massive and dominant complexes, that which 
 consists of ideas and images clustering round the idea of the 
 ‘herd.’ It is, doubtless, unnecessary to urge a cultured 
 audience not to allow itself to be prejudiced against the — 
 information which psychology has to give us in this con- 
 nexion by the apparent brutality of this technical term, 
 or by the postulation of a lowly basis for our most exalted 
 feelings ; ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,’ 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 479 
 
 and a diamond sparkles none the less brilliantly because it 
 is made of the same carbon as a lump of coal. The ‘ herd- 
 complex,’ then, with its various roots and ramifications, 
 constitutes the field in which the ‘ inherited infirmity,’ if it 
 is a reality, is to be found. 
 
 We must, however, delimit this field with some minute- 
 ness before proceeding to its investigation. It would clearly 
 be waste of time to analyse the higher developments of the 
 “moral sentiment,’ or to trace the process whereby, in 
 ethically gifted individuals, the partial fusion of the ego- 
 and the herd-complexes gives birth to an autonomous moral 
 ideal, independent of external or social sanctions. Nor are 
 we concerned with the weird and monstrous aberrations of 
 the specifically criminal temperament, such as formed the 
 subject-matter of the studies of Nordau and Lombroso— 
 the temperament in which the ‘ moral sentiment ’ is either 
 non-existent or so much atrophied as hardly to be recog- 
 nisable. It is, indeed, tempting to identify ‘ original sin,’ 
 so called, with criminality ; and such an identification was 
 implied in the half-serious, popular and journalistic cliché 
 which attributed the atrocities committed in the late war 
 to a ‘double dose of original sin’ in their perpetrators. 
 It would certainly seem that criminal dispositions are trans- 
 missible by heredity ; the progress of statistical research 
 may prove that in certain strains of mankind they behave 
 as Mendelian dominants; and it is probable that a reason- 
 able system of applied eugenics might do much towards 
 their elimination from the human stock.!. We shall certainly 
 not be able to ignore the question of criminality when we 
 approach our final: problem, that of the ultimate origin of 
 evil. But we cannot simply identify it with the ‘ inherited 
 infirmity ’ of which we are in search; for the innate flaw 
 or wound of human nature, which Christian tradition pre- 
 supposes, purports to be, not a varietal factor borne by 
 
 1 In so far as ‘ eugenics’ is a genuine science, no Catholic Christian can 
 claim to have a conscientious objection to it : if and in so far as it is an art, 
 it does not seem possible to find limits for its scope other than those dictated 
 by the inalienable rights and dignity of the individual. Such limits would 
 clearly rule out both the system of State-breeding suggested by Plato in 
 Republic V, and also the‘ sterilisation of the unfit’ enjoined by the law of 
 certain American States. 
 
478 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 particular individuals or stocks, but a generic quality, 
 existing in all men (with one, or, as some hold, with two 
 exceptions), inhering deeply in the fundamental plasm of 
 the race, beyond and below the reach of eugenics, psycho- 
 therapy, manipulation of the endocrine glands, or of any 
 remedial agency other than the delicate and viewless ° 
 influences of God’s redeeming grace. We must therefore 
 neglect the superficially more interesting qualities of the 
 ethical genius and the ethical degenerate, and dig deep, in 
 quest of the alleged ‘ inherited infirmity,’ into that instinctive 
 structure which is the basis of human personality in saint 
 and criminal alike. 
 
 The ‘ herd-complex,’ then, as it exists, not in the ethically 
 highest or lowest types of mankind, but in the generalised 
 average of humanity, is the starting-point of our search. 
 But here, again, a further limitation has to be added. 
 Civilised man belongs to many herds, and his preconscious 
 mind therefore contains many herd-complexes of greater 
 or lesser strength, built up round the ideas of his school, 
 college, regiment, social class, trade, political or religious 
 party, and so on; these structures tend to generate in the 
 surface mind feelings of esprit de corps, party loyalty, 
 “class-consciousness, and other quasi-moral emotions 
 familiar to us all. But the particular herd-complex which 
 forms the core and substratum of the moral sentiment 
 clearly cannot be identified with any one of the minor 
 conglomerates just mentioned, though it may on occasion 
 draw upon the energy with which they are charged. It can 
 be found only in that deep-lying psychic structure which 
 coheres round the idea of ‘society’ as such, and which, 
 from the standpoint of the morphology of personality, must 
 be regarded as the proximate source of specifically ethical 
 impulses and conations, no matter whether ‘society’ be 
 narrowly conceived as the individual’s own clan or totem- 
 group, or broadened out so as to include the whole human 
 race or the whole fellowship of conscious beings. In the 
 religious man, indeed, the perfected moral sentiment is 
 largely fused and identified with the mass of ideas, beliefs 
 and emotions which grow out of his conception of God ; but 
 an. examination of this loftiest efflorescence of ethical feeling 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 479 
 
 would lead us away from our immediate task, which is to 
 uncover its ultimate roots. And these roots lie in the idea 
 of ‘society,’ ‘the community,’ or ‘the herd.’ Whatever 
 metaphysical explanation of the pure forms or categories 
 of ‘ right ’ and ‘ wrong’ may commend itself to the specula- 
 tive reason, it is a mere statement of historical and psycho- 
 logical fact when we assert that the concrete content of 
 _ morality, as it exists at any given time, is defined for the 
 
 individual by the exigencies of the herd, and mediated to 
 his consciousness through the pressure of the herd-tradition 
 upon him. 
 
 The ‘ social complex,’ then, created and maintained by 
 “herd-instinct,’ is the basis of the ethical sentiment ; and 
 all interior moral conflicts are due to incompatible conations 
 arising from this on the one hand, and either from the ego- 
 complex or the sex-complex on the other. Sometimes, 
 indeed, the moral sentiment may be able to utilise the 
 ‘ energy latent in the ego-complex—or, in less technical 
 terms, morality and self-interest may combine to inhibit 
 some sensuous impulse; and a little imagination will show 
 that an alliance between the moral sentiment and the 
 sex-complex, to oppose the dictates of mere selfishness, is 
 not by any means unknown. But—and here we come to 
 the real point of this long excursion into the realm of 
 analytic psychology—experience decisively shows that the 
 “society ’ complex, in isolation and devoid of allies, is no 
 match for the powerful systems of thought and feeling 
 cohering round the ideas of the self and of sex—a fact 
 which is indicated in the restrained words of Dr. McDougall: 
 ‘ We have to recognise that the desire that springs from the 
 completed moral sentiment is usually of a thin and feeble 
 sort in comparison with the fiercer, coarser desires that 
 spring directly from our instincts and from our concrete 
 sentiments.’1 If we ask why the desire, which issues from 
 the moral sentiment into consciousness, is normally of this 
 ‘thin and feeble’ character, the answer must be that the 
 moral sentiment emits only a thin and feeble desire, because 
 it itself is only charged with psychic energy of a thin and 
 feeble quality. Just as a powerful electric spark cannot be 
 
 1 ODe Ctl... 1X Pp. 229. 
 
480 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 obtained from a weak battery, so a strong conational effort 
 cannot issue from a complex endowed with a relatively small 
 quantum of that libido or life-force which is the driving- 
 power behind actions of every kind, volitional and non- 
 volitional alike. And this weak saturation with psychic 
 energy of the social complex can only be due to the weakness 
 of the herd-instinct, which feeds it; which, in the meta- 
 phorical and symbolic language necessary for the purposes 
 of this enquiry, is a narrow and constricted gutter carrying 
 only a thin trickle of the forces of the soul; whereas in 
 comparison with it the two other elemental instincts, those 
 concerned with the maintenance of the self and the per- 
 petuation of the race, must be imagined as broad and deeply 
 cut canals, which take fierce swirling volumes of the vital 
 impulse. (The ultimate psychological fact, therefore, which ,. 
 gives rise to an interior ‘ moral struggle’ ending only too 
 often in the defeat of the social or ethical principle, is the 
 weakness or shallowness of the ‘ herd-instinct,’ relatively to 
 the two other primary instincts of human nature. And this 
 unsatisfactory proportion which the three cardinal instincts 
 bear to each other is, it must be remembered, nothing 
 acquired or artificially constructed ; it is simply given by 
 heredity, in the total make-up of human personality with 
 which we are born. It would seem therefore that we need 
 search no further, and that at this deep level in the struc- 
 ture of the soul, beneath the area of the preconscious and 
 lying in the obscure recesses of the Unconscious, we have 
 unearthed that precise weakness or interior dislocation of 
 man’s being which historical Christianity has steadfastly 
 affirmed to exist, and which forms the presupposition of its 
 redemptive and sacramental scheme. 
 
 In the light of this identification of the ‘ inherited 
 infirmity’ with congenital weakness or shallowness of 
 ‘herd-instinct,’ it is easy to understand the psychological 
 vationale of the traditional language employed by Christian 
 ascetic theology in regard to the forms assumed by ‘ innate 
 sin’ as it gradually grows within the growing soul. In this 
 traditional language it is often said that all actual sins 
 spring from one or other of two roots—namely, Pride and 
 Sensuality ; and that these again run back into Self-love 
 
“ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED A481 
 
 as their ultimate source. And ‘ Self-love’ is nothing but a 
 positive manner of describing the same fact which psycho- 
 logy, in agreement with the most primitive Christian modes 
 of thought, conceives as a negation, an €AAewws or 
 deprivatio, as deficiency in that ‘ herd-complex,’ that sym- 
 pathy or love, that corporate or social feeling which all men 
 do possess to some degree (for otherwise they would not be 
 moral beings at all), but which, in normal human nature, as 
 transmitted to us by birth and as it stands prior to moral 
 and religious educative influences, is strong enough only to 
 hamper and not to master the tendency of the life-force to 
 rush impetuously down the channels of the self-asserting 
 and the race-perpetuating instincts. ‘Pride’ is merely a 
 name for the exaggeration of the ego-complex, and ‘ sensu- 
 ality ’ for the hypertrophy of the cluster of ideas and images 
 connected with sex; and what we have already noted as 
 the somewhat excessive preoccupation of Jewish and 
 Christian anthropology ! with ‘ concupiscence’ in the more 
 restricted sense of that ambiguous term is doubtless due to 
 the somewhat greater depth and capacity of the latter 
 instinct as compared with the former. It would not, indeed, 
 be difficult to paraphrase the classical descriptions of the 
 inbred taint and the moral struggle given us by the masters 
 of the spiritual life in terms of the three dominant com- 
 plexes. It would be a task of the highest intellectual 
 interest (though considerations of time prevent us from 
 undertaking it now) to work through the great Pauline 
 passage, Rom. vii. 7-25, which we studied in Lecture III, 
 translating it into the terminology of modern mental science, 
 rendering ‘ the sin that dwelleth in me ’ as ‘ the innate weak- 
 ness of my herd-instinct,’ ‘ the law of my mind’ as ‘ my 
 completed moral sentiment,’ and the “ law of sin which is in 
 my members’ as the ‘ powerful complexes perpetually fed 
 with psychic energy by my animal instincts’; whilst the 
 cry of despair ‘ who shall deliver me from the body of this 
 death ?’ would represent the crisis of psychic pain born 
 of the clash of conflicting conations; and the victorious 
 
 1 See Lecture I, p. 34; Lecture, II, pp. 58, 66; Lecture III; p. 153; 
 Lecture LV,-pp. 226, 245, 273, 304; Lecture V, p. 360;° Lecture, V1) 
 
 PP. 403 Daz; 4IT nz: 
 pay 
 
482 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 reply ‘I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord’ would be 
 the exulting song of a soul which had won its way to interior 
 harmony and peace by the sublimation of the rebellious 
 complexes into the mystic aspirations of a great ideal love. 
 
 Yet when, in accordance both with the most primitive 
 Christian thought and the most modern psychological re- 
 search, we define the inherited wound of human nature in 
 negative terms as a deficiency, a lack, a privatio, we must 
 not be supposed thereby to minimise the deadliness and the 
 horror of the results to which it leads in human action. To 
 realise in full the objective evil of what, considered sub- 
 jectively, is nothing but a defect, a gap, a blank, a minus 
 quantity, we need only borrow the method used by Plato 
 for the detection of righteousness, and study that enlarged 
 and generalised portrait of the soul which is presented by 
 the state or the nation in its corporate bearing towards other 
 states or nations. It is instructive to review that world- 
 wide society constituted by the unity of our race, in which 
 peoples are the individuals, and humanity as a whole is 
 the ‘herd’ to which the individual owes allegiance. The 
 history of peoples, in their relations one with another, is 
 marked by an almost complete absence of collective “ herd- 
 instinct’ and by the unrestrained dominance of the ‘ ego- 
 instinct ’ in its most brutal and least disguised form. The 
 events of the last decade lend a melancholy confirmation 
 to words recently written, not by any Augustinian or 
 Calvinistic divine, but by a thinker whose theological 
 impartiality will nowhere be disputed, Mr. Bertrand Russell. 
 “Men’s collective passions are mainly evil; far the strongest 
 of them are hatred and rivalry directed towards other 
 groups. Therefore at present all that gives men power 
 to indulge their collective passions is bad. That is why 
 Science threatens to cause the destruction of our civilisa- 
 tion.’? It would be difficult to find a more apposite 
 commentary upon our Lord’s own grave and awful saying: 
 ‘From within, out of the heart of men, evil thoughts 
 proceed .. . thefts, murders . . . coveting, wickednesses, 
 deceit . . . an evil eye, railing, pride, foolishness: all these 
 evil things proceed from within, and defile the man.’ ? 
 
 1 Icarus (1924), p. 63. 2 Mark vii. 21 f. 
 
“ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 483 
 
 It may thus be reasonably claimed that the existence of 
 a hereditary psychic factor which tends to promote the 
 indulgence of self-assertive and sensualimpulses in despite of 
 ‘conscience,’ or the ‘ moral sentiment,’ is a hypothesis which 
 finds ample verification both in ordinary daily life and in 
 the scientific study of human personality. But, it may be 
 objected, this line of thought, if followed out consistently, 
 proves too much for our purposes: for it lands us, not in 
 ‘ partial determinism,’ but in a determinism just as absolute 
 as that which results from the older mechanistic view of 
 the mind. In the preceding description of the vationale of 
 conation and action, hardly anything was said about the 
 conscious ego, which occupies—or rather is—the uppermost 
 storey of the house of personality : and modern psychology, 
 especially that of the medical type, is largely epipheno- 
 menalistic, regarding the feeling of effort and struggle as an 
 illusion, and the ‘I’ as the passive mirror of events which 
 it has had no share in causing. The logical result of such 
 a view, when combined with a recognition of the fact 
 which we have described as man’s congenital deficiency of 
 herd-instinct, would be (as we have pointed out above 3) 
 something very like the ‘ twice-born’ view of human nature 
 characteristic of Latin and Western Christendom: some 
 elements at least of Augustinianism, having been driven 
 from the field of theology by the Vincentian Canon, would 
 have returned in triumph under the aegis of Freud. 
 
 We have already indicated what seems to us the 
 inconsistency of Augustinianism with a genuine belief in 
 the goodness and justice of God, and in the moral account- 
 ability of man. But we do not forget that this doctrine has 
 nevertheless been held by some of the greatest saints and 
 doctors of the Universal Church, that it is not without roots 
 in the teaching of St. Paul, and that the type of character 
 which has been nourished by it is, at its best, virile, austere, 
 and noble. Whatever may be the case in logic, it is at 
 least psychologically possible for an orthodox Christian to | 
 be a rigid determinist. It is, therefore, no part of the 
 contention of these lectures that Augustinianism is a heresy. 
 We have maintained that the ‘ once-born’ or ‘ Hellenic’ 
 
 1 p. 468. 
 
484 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 doctrine represents the maximum to which historical 
 Christianity is, as such, committed; but if any individual 
 orthodox Christian believes that he has grounds for going 
 further and adopting the ‘ twice-born’ view—if he thinks 
 that man can be justly held accountable by God for acts 
 which are completely determined by heredity and environ- 
 ment, and that the potter may justifiably wreak vengeance 
 on the pots for being of the shape into which he has himself 
 moulded them, or allowed them to be moulded—it would seem 
 that, so far as the auctoritas of Scripture and tradition is 
 concerned, he is well within his rights in so thinking and 
 believing. It is not, accordingly, necessary for our purposes 
 to embark at this juncture upon an extensive vindication 
 of free-will: and it will suffice to conclude this lecture with 
 the briefest possible summary of the present position of the 
 problem. 
 
 The situation in regard to the question whether a true 
 spontaneous causality, acting within limits! fixed by 
 heredity and environment, can be ascribed to the ego or not, 
 has not essentially altered since its treatment by Kant. 
 Determinism is the necessary methodological postulate of 
 
 1 The mere feeling of freedom is not always veridical : sometimes we 
 are most completely determined when we believe ourselves to be most free. 
 The smooth, unimpeded interaction of the psychic organisations sketched 
 in the text is not in itself freedom: freedom is only realised when the 
 conscious ego, the transcendental self, deliberately takes control of the 
 situation, with clear knowledge of itself, of its instinctive impulses, and of 
 the effort which it is putting forth in order to guide or restrain them. 
 What appears to be substantially this point has been expressed by Bergson 
 in his own characteristic language, and connected with his peculiar 
 philosophy of time and duration, in the following passage: ‘ Il y aurait 
 donc enfin deux moi différents, dont l’un serait comme la projection de 
 autre, sa représentation spatiale et pour ainsi dire sociale. Nous 
 atteignons le premier par une réflexion approfondie, qui nous fait saisir 
 nos états internes comme des étres vivants, sans cesse en voie de formation, 
 comme des états réfractaires 4 la mesure, qui se pénétrent les uns les 
 autres, et dont la succession dans la durée n’a rien de commun avec une 
 juxtaposition dans l’espace homogéne. Mais les moments ot nous nous 
 ressaisissons ainsi nous-mémes sont rares, et c’est pourquot nous sommes 
 vavement libres (italics ours). La plupart du temps, nous vivons extérieure- 
 ment & nous-mémes . . . nous vivons pour le monde extérieur plutét que 
 pour nous; nous parlons plutét que nous ne pensons; nous ‘‘ sommes 
 agis’’ plutét que nous n’agissons nous-mémes. Agir librement, c’est 
 reprendre possession de soi, c’est se replacer dans la pure durée’ (Les 
 données immédiates de la conscience, 1908, p. 178). 
 
“ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 485 
 
 the scientist and the statistician; but freedom is the no 
 less necessary assumption of the teacher and the judge, an 
 assumption which is largely employed in psycho-therapeutic 
 practice as distinct from theory.1 We cannot hope with 
 our present faculties to attain a complete logical synthesis » 
 of the dictates of the theoretical reason, which repudiates 
 the idea of an uncaused causality, with those of the practical | 
 reason, which demands it ; but it remains true to say that 
 determinism is only necessary to a psychology which studies 
 the mind objectively and ab extra, whilst the consciousness 
 of ability to exert or not to exert effort is, from the sub- 
 jective and introspective point of view, a datum of immediate 
 experience. In the light of these considerations, it may: _ 
 reasonably be claimed that the doctrine of ‘ partial deter- /” 
 minism ’—which, whilst admitting that conduct is the 
 result of the interplay of stimulus, complex, and instinct, 
 nevertheless affirms that consciousness has, within limits, 
 a real power of guiding the flow of psychic energy into this 
 complex rather than that, and of gradually modifying the 
 contents of the preconscious and unconscious by voluntary 
 ‘ sublimation ’—would seem to be the only one which does 
 justice both to man’s moral and to his intellectual experience. 
 If this be so, we have in the treasure-house of Christian 
 tradition that true conception of human nature, its power 
 and its weakness, which contains the key to the world-old 
 problems of social regeneration and reform. No readjust- 
 
 1 The restrained words of an eminent psychotherapist may be quoted 
 in this connexion: ‘ . . . one finds such a distinguished neurologist as 
 Dejerine saying in his book on psychotherapy that belief in freedom is 
 essential to the more successful application of the methods of psycho- 
 therapy. He claims, practically at any rate, that we must believe in 
 freedom if we are to hope to influence our patients on the mental side. 
 Without going so far as that, I am inclined to say that a belief in freedom, 
 in self-determination, on the physician’s part, strong enough to sustain or 
 originate a similar belief in the patient’s mind, is a very important factor 
 in mental cure’ (William Brown, Mind and Personality, 1926, p. 47). 
 
 2 Cf. O. Tansley, The New Psychology (1922), p.296: ‘ The fundamental 
 postulates of the new science of the mind, the doctrines of psychic deter- 
 mination and of the derivation of the springs of all human action from 
 instinctive sources, are essential as working hypotheses. But this science 
 need not commit itself to the conclusion that the play of instinctive forces 
 exhausts the meaning of the human soul, any more than biology need 
 commit itself to the conclusion that the play of chemical and physical 
 forces exhausts the meaning of life itself.’ 
 
486 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 ment of governmental or economic machinery, no perfection 
 of scientific or hygienic efficiency, will in itself avail to bring 
 the Kingdom of God upon earth one step nearer, apart from 
 a ‘change of heart’ in the individual member of society. 
 The essential condition of such a change, which is the 
 co-operation of human freedom and Divine grace, stands 
 written for all time in the great saying of the Apostle, 
 ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,’ 
 recognising and using to the full the God-given endowment 
 of self-consciousness, self-determination, and individual 
 autonomy, yet remembering, in humble acknowledgment 
 of the connatural flaw of human nature, that it is God, Who 
 alone can ‘ order the unruly wills and affections of sinful 
 men,’ ‘ that worketh in you both to will and to work, for 
 His good pleasure.’ 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE D 
 ORIGINAL SIN, ESCHATOLOGY, AND FOREIGN MISSIONS 
 
 One of the master-motives which spurred on the great 
 missionaries of the last four centuries, both Catholic and Evan- 
 gelical, to their heroic labours amongst the heathen was a burning 
 desire to snatch as many souls as they could from the eternal 
 perdition assumed to await all non-Christians as such in the next 
 world, in virtue of ‘ originalsin.’ In other words, Augustinianism 
 and its concomitant eschatology lay at the root of the apostolic 
 zeal manifested alike by a Francis Xavier and a Henry Martyn: 
 and these ideas still seem to appear in the missionary inter- 
 cession printed in the well-known devotional manual Sursum 
 Corda (1906, p. 121): ‘O God of all the nations of the earth, 
 remember the multitudes of the heathen, who, though created in 
 Thine image, are perishing in darkness and ignorance ’—where 
 there is little point or force in the word ‘ perishing’ unless it 
 means ‘ perishing eternally.’ Ifthe contention embodied in these 
 lectures is correct, this particular incentive to missionary effort 
 has ceased to exist. But the conception of Limbo, in some form 
 or other, as a possible destiny of the spiritually undeveloped, 
 may still provide a non-Augustinian Christianity with a satis- 
 factory, though not so dramatically appealing, substitute. The 
 
 2, Philais Dey 73: 
 
‘ORIGINAL SIN’ RE-INTERPRETED 487 
 
 desire to lead the child-like members of the human family up to 
 far higher planes of spiritual vision and power than any to which 
 they could have attained, apart from Christ and His Gospel, 
 either in this life or the next, may well prove to be an evangelistic 
 motive more truly inspiring than that which springs from the 
 crude eschatology of Augustinianism. 
 
 It may be added that the missionary cause would not suffer 
 by a reverent unwillingness on the part of Christian thinkers to 
 define too narrowly the category of those who may be incapable 
 of the highest beatitude, or by a refusal to draw too sharp a line 
 between Limbo and ‘ purgatory.’ The words of a previous 
 Bampton Lecturer are specially pertinent in this connexion : 
 “Few among us would desire to bar the gates of heaven against 
 the Unitarian Channing, against the Buddhist ascetic, against 
 even the naked savage who on his sea-swept coral reef, forsaken 
 as he may seem of God and man, is yet just and grateful and kind 
 to wife and child. Yet few would think that for these maimed 
 souls no instruction is needed, that the mere rending of the veil 
 can make tolerable the splendour which it reveals. We believe 
 in the many stripes and the few. We believe that star differeth 
 from star in glory, and in these words lies all that any sober- 
 minded man has ever maintained.’ } 
 
 1 Bigg, Christian Platonists of Alexandria (1886), p. 299. 
 

 
VIII. 
 THE ULTIMATE “FALL? 
 
O martyred Spirit of this helpless Whole, 
 Who dost by pain for tyranny atone, 
 And in the star, the atom, and the stone, 
 
 Purgest the primal guilt, and in the soul ; 
 
 Rich but in grief, thou dost thy wealth unroll, 
 And givest of thy substance to thine own, 
 Mingling the love, the laughter, and the groan 
 
 In the large hollow of the heaven’s bowl. 
 
 GEORGE SANTAYANA., 
 
 In my folly often I wondered why by the great foreseeing 
 wisdom of God the beginning of sin was not letted: for then, 
 methought, all should have been well. . . . But Jesus answered 
 by this word and said ‘ Sin is behovable, but all shall be well and 
 all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’ 
 
 JULIAN OF NORWICH. 
 
LECTURE. VIII. 
 THE ULTIMATE ‘FALL’ 
 
 Rev. xii. 7, 8: ‘ There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels 
 going forth to war with the dragon ; and the dragon warred, 
 and his angels; and they prevailed not, neither was their 
 place found any more in heaven.’ 
 
 In our last lecture we dealt with the question of what has 
 been called ‘ Original Sin,’ and defined the nature of the 
 inherited infirmity, declared to exist in human nature, 
 by the basic doctrine of traditional Christianity as held 
 “everywhere, always, and by all.’ We saw that our moral 
 consciousness, the interplay of ‘ thoughts accusing or else 
 excusing one another’? (to use St. Paul’s vivid phrase), 
 necessitates the assumption that in an ideal human per- 
 sonality the ‘herd-complex’ would form an adequate 
 counterweight to the ‘ ego-complex ’ and the ‘ sex-complex ’ 
 and also to the aggregate of them taken together, so that the 
 soul would enjoy a condition of perfect equilibrium or poise 
 on which conscious free-will could play, reinforcing now one 
 and now another of the dominant psychical structures and 
 controlling, modifying, or inhibiting the flow of vital energy 
 into them. And we saw further that the congenital weak- 
 ness or disorder of human nature consists precisely in this, 
 that such an equilibrium does not, in point of fact, exist ; 
 that, owing to the weakness of the herd-instinct which feeds 
 it, the herd-complex, and by consequence the moral senti- 
 ment which is built upon it, does not possess anything like 
 the amount of vital energy necessary to place it on equal 
 terms with the two other primary complexes, so as to 
 preserve that equilibrium of the empirical self, or ‘ me,’ 
 
 1 Rom. ii. 15: petaéd addAdAndAdv rdv Aoyiopdv Karnyopovvrwv H Kal 
 amoAoyoupevwv. 
 
492 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 which the transcendental self, or ‘I,’ needs in order to be 
 able to function with freedom. Hence the conscious ego 
 is in the position of an organist condemned to play upon an 
 instrument in which certain very powerful stops are liable 
 to speak of their own accord and at the most inappropriate 
 moments; or, in less metaphorical language, free-will, 
 though not destroyed, is weakened and hampered, in 
 comparison with what it ought to be, by the present con- 
 ditions of human nature, and the self-regarding and race- 
 perpetuating instincts tend to have things all their own 
 way. We now approach the final problem—namely, the 
 question how this state of affairs came into existence; that 
 is to say the problem of what is known to traditional 
 theology as the ‘ Fall.’ 
 
 It was observed in our first lecture, at the very beginning 
 of our historical review, that the hypothesis of a ‘ Fall’ is 
 essentially an inference from the facts of human weakness 
 and sin, considered in the light of the infinite holiness of 
 God.! It is not a premise given by history—a fact which 
 would have been quite sufficiently proved by the existence 
 in Judaism and Christianity for three hundred years of two 
 alternative Fall-stories, even if Biblical criticism and natural 
 science had never shown that the Paradise-story which 
 ultimately triumphed is just as devoid of historical character 
 as the ‘ Watcher ’-story which it superseded. The recog- 
 nition of this fact must compel a certain readjustment of 
 what has been, at least in Western Christianity, the 
 traditional view as to the interior structure, if the term may 
 be allowed, of the fabric of Christian doctrine. It was 
 pointed out in our first lecture that mediaeval Christians, 
 at least, thought of the Faith as borne up by the twin pillars 
 of a historic Fall and a historic Redemption, both vouched 
 for by written records of divinely guaranteed accuracy and 
 authority—as leaning upon the Tree of Death which stood 
 in the midst of the Garden of Eden, and the Tree of Life 
 which was planted upon the summit of Calvary. If the 
 argument developed in this course of lectures has been 
 sound, the first pillar is to be found not so much in the 
 
 1 Lecture I, p.19; and cf. the passage from Cardinal Newman’s 
 A pologia pro Vita Sua printed at the beginning of the last lecture. 
 
THE ULTIMATE ‘ FALL’ 493 
 
 idea of the Fall as in the idea of ‘ original sin,’ so called, and 
 the basis of this pillar consists in a certain kind of religious 
 experience—namely, the experience of penitence—and not 
 in history. I do not mean to imply that the idea of the 
 Fall ought to be discarded, or that it does not correspond to 
 any reality—I am only concerned to point out that, in view 
 of its inferential character, it must for the future be con- 
 ceived not as a column which supports the Christian Faith, 
 but rather as a pinnacle which is supported by it. It might 
 thus seem as though there were not very much to be said 
 about the Fall beyond the mere assertion that, if God is 
 infinitely good, He cannot be the author of evil, and that 
 the facts of human nature therefore compel us to assume 
 something corresponding to a Fall; and indeed, when once 
 the literal historicity of Gen. ii. has been given up, that is 
 all that can be affirmed to be of faith—at any rate for 
 Christians other than those of the Latin communion. But 
 because the idea of the Fall is a pinnacle and not a column, 
 it does not follow that it is of no structural importance. 
 A pinnacle need not be a mere ornamental excrescence ; 
 it may exert a downward thrust which plays an important 
 part in the system of stresses ensuring the stability of the 
 fabric to which it belongs. It has, in fact, been recently 
 ascertained in connexion with St. George’s Chapel at 
 Windsor that the gravitational pressure of a row of heavy 
 pinnacles is necessary in order to enable its buttresses and 
 columns to resist the lateral pressure of its flattened and 
 floriated vault, and that the threatened collapse of this 
 venerable fabric is largely due to the incautious removal 
 of these same pinnacles, a century ago, on the ignorant 
 assumption that they were nothing but unnecessary adorn- 
 ments.t We will therefore make no apology for endeavour- 
 ing to dispel the mists which surround this particular pinnacle, 
 that is, for devoting our final lecture to the task of arriving 
 at a conception of the Fall which may be congruous both 
 with the essential contents of traditional Christianity and 
 also with the deliveries of human reason. 
 
 It will be remembered that the fundamental Christian 
 doctrine of the Fall, as distinct from that of Original Sin, 
 
 1 This was written in 1924. 
 
494 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 was in our last lecture condensed into the form of five pro- 
 positions, which it will be well, for the sake of clearness, to 
 repeat at this juncture. They were as follows: 
 
 (1) God is infinite, not merely in power but in love and 
 goodness, and therefore the world of created being as He made 
 it must have been purely good, including no element of evil at all. 
 
 (2) The origin of evil is therefore to be sought in the 
 voluntary rebellion of created and finite wills, such rebellion 
 having taken place prior to the appearance of the human species 
 on this planet. 
 
 (3) Man, at his first entry into this world, was in moral and 
 intellectual stature a babe, created frail, imperfect, ignorant and 
 non-moral, but endowed with self-consciousness and the power 
 of self-determination which constituted a starting-point for 
 progress and upward evolution. 
 
 (4) The growth of man’s moral ideas brought in its train 
 some action, or system of actions, whereby man aligned himself 
 with the rebellious power, showed that he had partially thrown 
 in his lot with the forces of evil which were already at work in 
 the universe, and entered on a path largely divergent from 
 that upward career of spiritual evolution which God had 
 meant him to follow. 
 
 (5) Ever since this first human transgression, our nature 
 has displayed an inherent moral weakness or bias towards sin. 
 
 These are the propositions which must now be vindicated 
 if the doctrine of the Fall is to be preserved as a member of 
 the Christian dogmatic scheme. It will be noticed that they 
 are all couched in a strictly historical form. As they stand, 
 they purport to describe real events which occurred in past 
 time, which would, presumably, be capable, if we only had 
 the requisite knowledge, of being assigned to specific dates 
 B.c. We are all familiar with the conventional form which 
 the sequence of these alleged events has assumed in popular 
 religious thought and scholastic theology, and which has 
 been shaped into a vast cosmic drama in the mighty epic 
 of ‘ Paradise Lost.’ The revolt of Lucifer, setting up the 
 standard of revolt against the Most High in the regions of 
 the North, the hurling of the apostate angels from the crystal 
 battlements of Heaven, the desire to fill up the gaps left in 
 the ranks of His servants by the defection of the rebellious 
 
PEO UTARIN AH EAN TTE ¢ 495 
 
 spirits as being the motive which prompted the Almighty to 
 create Man in His own image and likeness, and the tempter’s 
 assault upon our first parents as prompted by a craving for 
 revenge upon the triumphant Deity—these are but the 
 pictorial and mythological husk in which the kernel of the 
 doctrine of the ‘ Fall,’ as expressed in the five more abstract 
 propositions given above, has been for many centuries con- 
 cealed. Such beliefs are only worth mentioning now for the 
 sake of helping us to realise the total and utter absence of 
 any sort of serious evidence for them. We have already 
 pointed out that the Paradise story of Gen. iii. was not 
 meant to narrate a ‘ Fall’ in the theological sense of the term, 
 and it may be added that the Scriptural texts which have 
 been adduced as testifying to the fall of the angels have even 
 less relevance to their supposed subject-matter. The battle 
 between Michael and the Dragon, narrated in the twelfth 
 chapter of the Christian Apocalypse, has too many parallels 
 in pagan mythology to be regarded as a literal revelation of 
 pre-mundane history !; the reference to the fall of ‘ Lucifer,’ 
 that is, the Day-Star, made by some prophet of the Exile, 
 whose work has been embodied in the Book of Isaiah, is 
 merely a metaphorical description of the collapse of the 
 Babylonian power”; and even our Lord’s saying, reported 
 in St. Luke’s Gospel, ‘ I beheld Satan fallen as lightning from 
 Heaven,’ ® clearly refers not to any pre-cosmic expulsion of 
 the revolting spirits from the abode of God, but to the 
 triumph just gained over the demons by His seventy 
 disciples through a successful series of exorcisms. There is 
 therefore as little a fostertovt evidence for the fall of the 
 angels as there is for the Fall, or rather the failure, of Man ; 
 and if the scheme contained in our five propositions, or any 
 part of it, is to be sustained at all, it can only be upon the 
 basis of purely a priori reasoning. 
 
 At this point we are faced by the consideration that the 
 use of the a priov1 method for establishing historical con- 
 clusions lies under profound, and not undeserved, suspicion. 
 
 1 For a list of these parallels, and a searching investigation of the origins 
 of the myth, see R. H. Charles, The Revelation of St. John (ICC., 1920), 
 vol. i. pp. 305 ff. 
 
 * Isaiah xiv. 12. 3 Luke x. 18. 
 
496 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 The argument ‘Such and such a thing ought to have hap- 
 pened, and therefore it did happen,’ has been so often 
 refuted by the critic’s pen or the archaeologist’s spade that 
 our modern intellectual conscience will not allow it so much 
 as a hearing until all other possible alternatives have been 
 decisively disposed of. Before, therefore, we can even begin 
 to consider the hypotheses of a pre-mundane revolt and a 
 failure of man to avoid complicity in this revolt we must give 
 careful consideration to the previous question, which is this : 
 Is it necessary to find the source of evil in a historical event 
 at all? If, for the time being, we use the term ‘ Fall’ asa 
 convenient label for designating that unknown % in which 
 the origin of evil lies hid, is it necessary to interpolate the 
 Fall into the historical time series, and to describe its 
 relation to empirical evil under the category of ‘ cause and 
 effect’ ? May it not be simpler to regard the Fall, in this 
 symbolical sense, as standing towards the actual sins of man 
 in the relation of ‘ ground’ to ‘ consequent,’ and as con- 
 stituting a timeless, transcendent and metaphysical fact, 
 rather than a phenomenal and historical event? The 
 shortest and most convenient method of answering this 
 question will be to examine the two classical attempts which 
 have been made by two of the most subtle and powerful of 
 philosophical intellects to remove the idea of the Fall from 
 the plane of history into that of metaphysic, in order to 
 ascertain whether they fulfil the essential function of the 
 Fall-doctrine, for the discharge of which it was first devised 
 and in which alone we, as Christians, are interested—namely, 
 that of saving the infinite goodness of God by relieving Him 
 from the direct responsibility for the creation of evil. These 
 two restatements or reinterpretations of the traditional 
 Fall-doctrine form part of the systematic attempts made by 
 Kant and Hegel to salve what seemed to them the permanent 
 essence of religion from the wreck in which a destructive 
 Biblical criticism and the remorseless rationalism of the 
 Aufkldrung seemed to have involved German evangelical 
 theology. Should we conclude that neither of these giants 
 of thought has succeeded in lifting the idea of the Fall out 
 of the phenomenal plane, we shall be entitled to assume that 
 the task is inherently impossible, and that—for good or for 
 
THE ULTIMATE ‘ FALL’ 497 
 
 evil—the propositions which were formulated above must 
 be taken au pied de la lettre, as purporting to describe 
 historical events lying, infinitely remote from us, in the 
 ‘dark backward and abysm of time.’ 
 
 Kant’s discussion of original sin is contained in the first 
 section of his treatise entitled ‘ Religion within the bounds 
 of Mere Reason.’1 This treatise is concerned mainly with 
 religion on its soteriological side, that is, in its aspect as a 
 way of salvation, and its main divisions are concerned with 
 the entry of the evil principle into human nature, the struggle 
 between the good and evil principles, and the eventual 
 triumph of the good principle.2. The argument of the first 
 of these sections is based upon the empirical universality of 
 sin, which Kant proves from the not very considerable store 
 of information at his disposal with regard to the habits of 
 savages. He does not regard badness as constituting part 
 of the essence of human nature, but rather as an inseparable 
 accident. Badness is not given in the concept of man, but 
 it is de facto so widely spread that it can be predicated of man 
 generically. Though Kant is distinguished amongst philo- 
 sophers by his contempt of psychology, he makes some show 
 of analysing human nature in order to throw light upon 
 the seat of the evil principle, and it is noteworthy that in 
 describing what he calls ‘ the animal nature of man,’ which 
 is the substratum and foundation of his strictly human and 
 moral being, he designates as its primary psychical con- 
 stituents, precisely those three instincts with which our last 
 lecture is so largely concerned, those, namely, which are 
 directed towards the maintenance of the self, the propagation 
 of the race, and the maintenance of harmony between the 
 self and the society to which it belongs—in other words, 
 what we now call the ‘ herd-instinct.’4 It would seem at 
 first sight as though this analysis might lead to results 
 
 1 Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (Kant’s sémmi- 
 liche Werke, ed. Rosenkrantz and Schubert, Leipzig, 1838, x. pp. I-244). 
 
 2 The first of these sections (‘ Von der Einwohnung des bésen Princips 
 neben dem guten, oder, Uber das radikale Bose in der menschlichen Natur’) 
 has been translated into English by T. K. Abbott (Kant’s Critique of Prac- 
 tical Reason, and other works on the Theory of Ethics, 1883, pp. 325-360). 
 
 3 p. 36 f. (paginal references are given to Rosenkrantz and Schubert’s 
 edition). 
 
 epee, SX 
 
 * 
 
 2K 
 
498 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 congruous with, and likely to illuminate, the conclusions which 
 were reached in the last lecture. Unfortunately, however, 
 Kant is obsessed by his conception of the Good as a Law, 
 eternal and supersensible, which, in Troeltsch’s phrase,? is 
 the ‘ focus’ of the intelligible world, which, like the axioms 
 of mathematics, carries its own authority within itself, and 
 neither requires nor is capable of genetic explanation or 
 logical proof: and his argument in consequence tends to 
 move in the rarefied atmosphere and amongst the bloodless 
 abstractions of metaphysics rather than upon the solid 
 ground of ascertained psychological fact. This Law is 
 communicated to man by the ‘ categorical imperative’ of 
 conscience, and Virtue, or moral goodness, consists in the 
 adoption by the individual man of the ‘ maxims,’ or concrete 
 universal commands, in which this law expresses itself, as 
 the motives which determine the voluntary choice of the 
 will. As we have seen, however, moral badness is, according 
 to Kant, universally characteristic of mankind, manifesting 
 itself in three stages or degrees which appear to represent 
 three chronologically successive phases of the individual’s 
 growth. The first degree of moral badness is designated 
 as ‘frailty’ or ‘weakness’ (Gebrechlichkeit), in which man 
 recognises the authority of the good maxims but is unable 
 to follow them, owing to the strength of his sensual nature. 
 This condition seems to correspond exactly to Aristotle’s 
 akpacia which, as we saw, is the moral state described by 
 St. Paul in Rom. vii.2 This is succeeded by the second 
 degree of moral evil, which is ‘impurity’ (Unlauterkeit), in 
 which the individual does indeed conform his conduct to the 
 dictates of the good maxims but from motives other than the 
 only moral motive—namely, the pure desire to obey the moral 
 law precisely and solely because it 7s the moral law. The 
 third and final stage of moral badness, which Kant describes 
 as ‘ depravity ’ (Bosartigkeit), ‘ corruption’ (Verderbtheit), or 
 ‘perversity ’ (Verkehrtheit), is reached when the individual 
 experiences a conscious inclination to adopt as the motives 
 of his conduct maxims which are positively contrary to the 
 moral law (gesetzwidrige). When this state is reached human 
 nature has displayed, in fully developed form, what he 
 
 a, BREDA O57. 2 Lecture III, p. 145. 
 
THE ULTIMATE ‘FALL’ — 499 
 
 describes as the innate ‘inclination to evil’ (Hang zum 
 Bésen) or ‘ radical evil.’ These law-contradicting maxims 
 arise out of the sensual nature of man, that is, out of the 
 three primary instincts, egoistic, reproductive, and social. 
 These are, indeed, not bad in themselves—Kant has no 
 sympathy with the Augustinian idea of the essential wicked- 
 ness of normal sex-feeling—and only become relatively bad 
 when the desirability or necessity of their indulgence is 
 exalted into a ‘maxim,’ endowed with such authority that 
 it overrides the maxims arising out of the moral law. This 
 inclination to evil, or tendency to adopt maxims dictated by 
 the sensual nature in preference to those provided by the 
 moral law, is expressly identified by Kant with ‘ original sin,’ 
 as understood by the only theology with which he was 
 acquainted—namely, that of Prussian Lutheranism—though 
 the fact that he uses the curious phrase peccatum originarium + 
 instead of the more usual feccatum originale suggests that 
 his familiarity with the official theology of his country was 
 not much more intimate than his acquaintance with the 
 interior of its churches. 
 
 So far this exposition of the problem appears to be not 
 unreasonable, though, in the light of modern psychology, we 
 shall naturally demur to the exceedingly abstract and trans- 
 cendental account of the moral law which it embodies and 
 to the attempt to represent the ‘ herd-instinct ’ not as the 
 basis of the moral sentiment, but as something essentially 
 separate from, and independent of, it. These, however, are 
 not fatal objections and need not prevent us from pursuing 
 the immediate object of our enquiry, which is that of examin- 
 ing Kant’s conception of the Fall—that is, the source or 
 ground of the inclination to evil. We must now draw atten- 
 tion to a further element in Kant’s doctrine of original sin, 
 which appears to have been simply taken over from Lutheran- 
 ism without much effort to examine its intrinsic merits, to 
 wit, the idea of ‘ original guilt.’ Never having examined the 
 monuments of Christian antiquity for himself, and taking 
 the Confession of Augsburg for granted as the authoritative 
 formulation of Christian anthropology, in much the same way 
 that Anglican divines have been apt to take the Thirty-nine 
 
 * p. 34. 
 
500 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Articles for granted, Kant assumes that we are respon- 
 sible for possessing an evil inclination, and justly deserve 
 censure because of it. But we can only be censured for that 
 which proceeds from the exercise of our own free-will. He 
 therefore arrives at the frankly self-contradictory definition 
 of original sin as a radical evil, inborn in human nature, 
 which is none the less acquired by ourselves. 
 
 It is doubtless true that the contradiction implicit in this 
 definition is merely the reflection of the antinomy which we 
 discover in our own moral experience, which both presents 
 us with the idea of inborn evil as stronger than our own 
 moral instinct and at the same time afflicts us with the 
 consciousness of responsibility and guilt for every actual 
 sin that we commit. From a philosopher, however, who 
 purports to explain religion within the bounds of mere 
 reason we naturally demand a resolution of this antinomy, 
 and it is in Kant’s attempt to resolve it that we come face 
 to face with his conception of the Fall. The antinomy, we 
 learn, between (a) the consciousness of an irresistible evil 
 inclination and (b) the practically necessary postulate of 
 freedom and responsibility, rests upon the dualism between 
 the phenomenal and the noiimenal self. The phenomenal 
 self, which is the sum of the actual contents of conscious- 
 ness, the totality of the feelings, ideas and volitions which 
 occupy the field of conscious experience, is part of the 
 phenomenal world. It is completely immersed in the time- 
 series, an indisseverable portion of the causal nexus which 
 stretches from eternity to eternity. As such, it is rigidly 
 and utterly determined, and from the point of view of pure 
 reason, which can only legitimately function within the 
 phenomenal sphere, freedom is an illusion. But from the 
 point of view of the practical reason, which is the guide 
 of our moral life, freedom is an indispensable regulative 
 principle which must consequently be assumed to belong to 
 the notimenal self. The contents of consciousness, indeed, 
 are empirical, belonging to the world of sense and change, 
 but consciousness itself, or rather the transcendent ego 
 which is conscious of these contents, belongs to the world 
 of things in themselves, which are the unknown causes of 
 
 1 p. 33f. 
 
THE ULTIMATE ‘FALL’ 501 
 
 phenomena. From this it follows that ‘ original sin,’ or the 
 adoption of sensual maxims as the guiding principles of 
 conduct, is due to a timeless, transcendental act of the 
 notimenal self, and that for Kant is ‘ the Fall’ ; or perhaps 
 it would be more accurate to say that these transcendental 
 acts committed by our noiimenal selves constitute the Falls 
 of man. For the philosopher of K6nigsberg, like Origen in 
 his Alexandrine period,? abandons the idea of one single 
 collective or representative Fall of all humanity, and finds in 
 each man the Adam of his own soul. We will only observe 
 in passing that this emergence of Origenistic ideas after 
 fourteen centuries of obscuration by Augustinianism is not 
 without significance ; though, to avoid the charge of going 
 further than the facts warrant, we must subjoin the quali- 
 fying statements that there is no reason for supposing that 
 Kant had ever read Origen, and that the views of the later 
 thinker differ from those of the earlier in this important 
 respect—that Origen’s Falls, though pre-natal, are strictly 
 in time, whereas Kant’s belong to the intelligible world, in 
 which the form of perception known as time has ex hypothes1 
 no validity. 
 
 Such is the first classical attempt to remove the Fall out 
 of the sphere of History into the plane of transcendental 
 truth, and to interpret it as the metaphysical ground rather 
 than the temporal cause of the innate sinfulness of man. 
 Daring as the attempt is, the criticisms to which it is open 
 will be obvious. The conception of a ‘ timeless act’ is one 
 which seems to involve a contradiction in terms—at any 
 rate if the word ‘ act’ be used in that sense which it bears in 
 ordinary usage. For it would seem that an act of the will 
 necessarily implies change, if not in the external world, at 
 least in the agent; it at least involves the idea of a 
 transition on the part of the agent from a previous condition, 
 either of inertia or of differently directed activity; anda 
 transition is a change, and change involves time. The 
 scholastic conception of the being of God as purus actus can 
 hardly be adduced to support or illustrate the conceivability 
 
 1 p. 34: ‘ Jene (der Hang zum Bosen) ist intelligibile That, bloss durch 
 Vernunft ohne alle Zeitbedingung erkennbar.’ 
 2 Lecture IV, pp. 210-219. 
 
502 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 of a timeless act on the part of the human noiimenal self ; 
 because an act which is both an action and a state, an 
 évépyeta axwyotas in which eternal activity and eternal 
 repose are transcended and synthesised, can only be affirmed 
 (if it can be affirmed at all) of the Absolute and Infinite 
 Being Himself, and is not thinkable of the finite and relative 
 selves of men, even when regarded sub specie aeternitatis as 
 members of the intelligible world. If, then, we desire to 
 penetrate deeply into the significance of Kant’s language, 
 so as to elicit from it a meaning which we can make real to 
 ourselves, we seem shut up to one or other of two alterna- 
 tives: either the ‘timeless act’ is merely the intelligible 
 aspect of man’s concrete acts of evil-doing, the fact of actual 
 sin seen, as 1t were, from above by God or by some hypo- 
 thetical supra-temporal observer ; or the term ‘ act’ must 
 in this connexion be taken to be simply equivalent to the 
 term ‘state’ or ‘condition.’ If we choose the former 
 alternative, we are forced to conclude that Kant has totally 
 failed to perform the feat which he has undertaken, namely, 
 that of exhibiting to us the ground of actual sin ; for a mere 
 ‘aspect’ cannot be the ground of the substantive reality of 
 which it is an aspect, and it would seem that on this inter- 
 pretation his alleged ‘explanation’ of the ‘evil heart’ 
 which is present within man reduces itself to a mere feat 
 of terminological jugglery. If, however, we take the term 
 ‘act’ to be simply the equivalent to the word ‘state,’ we 
 are led to conclusions which are at first sight equally disap- 
 pointing, though they contain a lesson which will in the long 
 run prove a helpful contribution towards the development 
 of our argument. If actual or ‘ derivative’ sin (peccatum 
 derivativum) is the baneful efflorescence in time of an 
 eternally evil state of the soul, it must not be forgotten that 
 the ‘ categorical imperative’ of duty also springs from the 
 timeless essence of the notimenal ego. It would seem, 
 therefore, that evil and good exist side by side as eternally 
 necessary principles in the intelligible world, to which the 
 human soul in its higher aspect belongs. In other words, 
 a very few logical steps have landed us in a highly refined 
 philosophic Manicheism. Kant’s attempt to lift the Fall 
 out of the temporal order either amounts to nothing at all, 
 
THE ULTIMATE “FALL” 503 
 
 beyond mere verbal gymnastics, or it involves us in precisely 
 that Iranian dualism which is intolerable to the Christian 
 who starts from the Biblical idea of God as infinite both in 
 power and in goodness. It is possible that this conclusion 
 might not have appeared particularly disastrous to Kant, 
 inasmuch as for him God, like Freedom and Immortality, is 
 merely a regulative principle, which the necessities of the 
 moral life compel us to assume as a working hypothesis, but 
 which cannot merely on that account be certainly known 
 to correspond to any reality. But, for the Christian, to 
 whom God is a luminously self-evident fact of immediate 
 experience, whose yearnings are summed up in the words of 
 the Psalmist, ‘ Whom have I in heaven but thee ? and there 
 is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of thee ’ 1— 
 and for whom it would be impiety to admit the existence of 
 an evil power co-ordinate and co-eternal with God, these 
 speculations will stand condemned as soon as they are 
 formulated or uttered. 
 
 We pass to the consideration of the second great classical 
 attempt to provide religion with a purely metaphysical, 
 as opposed to a historical, conception of the Fall. This is 
 expounded, not systematically but by way of frequent 
 allusion, in the third part of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion.? 
 The problem of the moral struggle which, as we nave seen, 
 is the fundamental psychological fact which has given birth 
 to all doctrines of ‘ original sin,’ ‘ radical evil,’ or ‘ inherited 
 infirmity,’ is expressed by Hegel in his common dialectical 
 form of a superficially contradictory pair of propositions. 
 The thesis runs ‘ Man is good by nature’; there is in him at 
 least the promise and potency of harmony and interior peace. 
 Corresponding to this we have the antithesis ‘Man is by 
 nature bad’ ; in actual life we see that hé follows his passions 
 and impulses even when he knows that their indulgence is 
 harmful to himself. The synthesis is obtained by referring 
 the inherent goodness of man to his notion or essence, and 
 his badness to the conditions of concrete existence upon this 
 
 1 Ps. xxiii. 24. 
 
 2 Philosophie der Religion, 3. Theil (Die absolute Religion), § II (Das 
 Reich des Sohnes): G. W. F. Hegel’s Werke, Berlin, 1832, Band xii. 
 pp. 204 ff. 
 
504 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 planet. In the words of Dr. J. E. McTaggart, ‘ Hegel’s 
 doctrine of Original Sin is that man in his temporal existence 
 on earth has in his nature a contingent and particular 
 element, as well as a rational and universal element, and that 
 while his nature is good in respect of the second it is bad in 
 respect of the first.’ Now this necessary evil which belongs 
 to man’s concrete nature appears to be inherent in his 
 existence as man at all; for, although the ‘ notion’ of man 
 is good, it is only good potentially, and in order that this 
 notion may realise itself it must necessarily pass into a condi- 
 tion of separation from, and consequently opposition to, the 
 absolute system in which, as notion, it inheres. Hence the 
 natural or animal condition of man prior to education and 
 moral discipline—a condition usually described as ‘ inno- 
 cence ’—is evil precisely because it is natural; and, indeed, 
 innocence on this showing is the greatest evil of all. Actual 
 sin is indeed wrong, because it represents a deliberate 
 purpose to remain in the animal stage after the possibility of 
 a higher development has dawned upon the individual man ; 
 but it is less evil than innocence, which means ‘ incapability 
 of moral choice.’ To choose wrong, therefore, is, according 
 to Hegel, better than not to choose at all, and the choice 
 of right is, apparently, only possible after and by means of 
 previous choice of wrong. The advance from innocence to 
 virtue can only be through sin, because ascent from innocence 
 can only be obtained by means of knowledge, and knowledge 
 reveals the possibility of sin. A quotation will make this 
 conception as plain as it is capable of being made. 
 
 It is knowledge which first brings out the contrast or antithesis 
 in which evil is found ; the animal, the stone, the plant, are not 
 evil. Evil is first present within the sphere of knowledge; it 
 is the consciousness of independent Being, or Being-for-self 
 relatively to an Other, but also relatively to an object which is 
 inherently universal in the sense that it is the notion or rational 
 will. It is only by means of this separation that I exist inde- 
 pendantly for myself, and it is in this that evil lies. To be evil 
 means, in an abstract sense, to isolate myself.? 
 
 1 Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1901), p. 232. 
 
 2 op. cit. (Berlin edition, xii. p. 216): ‘ Die Erkenntniss ist erst das 
 Setzen des Gegensatzes, in dem das Bose ist. Das Thier, der Stein, die 
 Pflanze ist nicht bése, das Bose ist erst innerhalb des Kreises der Erkennt- 
 
THE ULTIMATE (RALRL© 505 
 
 Despite the elusive phraseology in which it is enshrined, 
 this sequence of thought seems fairly clear. Evil is due to 
 knowledge, and a pre-condition of knowledge is that separa- 
 tion of the individual man from the rest of the universe 
 which is involved in his coming into being at all. But 
 moral evil is nevertheless not so objectionable as mere 
 innocence; for a man who has committed sin has, in the 
 words of Dr. McTaggart, ‘ at least started on the only road 
 which can eventually lead him upwards.’ 4 
 
 It is not surprising to find that Hegel, whilst considering 
 that the Paradise-story of Gen. i. embodies a profound 
 truth, regards the so-called Fall there narrated (or supposed 
 to be narrated) as having been in reality a successful climb. 
 When the Tempter promised man knowledge as the result of 
 sin, he told the exact truth. ‘ The Serpent says that Adam 
 will become like God, and God confirms the truth of this, 
 and adds His testimony that it is this knowledge which 
 constitutes likeness to God. This is the profound idea 
 lodged in the narrative.’* For Hegel, then, the creation and 
 the fall of man are identical ; they are simply different ways 
 of describing the same event, and the ‘ Fall’ is also an ascent, 
 for sin is the only road which ultimately leads to virtue. 
 It is hardly necessary to observe that this treatment of sin 
 is diametrically opposed to the Scriptural and Christian 
 teaching, which regards wilful sin as infinitely hateful and 
 loathsome. For the Christian no truly valuable end ever 
 has been attained, or can be attained, by means of sin, 
 which could not have been better attained without it. 
 The acceptance of Hegel’s presentation of the Fall-doctrine 
 would have the effect of transforming Christianity into 
 Gnosticism ; for he presupposes precisely that conception of 
 a non-moral and impersonal Absolute, including both good 
 and evil as moments in its infinite non-entity, which is the 
 
 niss vorhanden, es ist das Bewusstsein des Fiirsichseins gegen anderes, 
 aber auch gegen das Objekt, was in sich allgemein ist in dem Sinn des 
 Begriffs, des verninftigen Willens. Erst durch diese Trennung bin ich 
 fiir mich und darin liegt das Bése. Bdésesein heisst abstrakt, mich’ ver- 
 emzeln).\\.' tC; 
 
 4 op: ctt. p. 234. 
 
 2 op. cit. p. 217 (freely translated and compressed). 
 
506 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 basis of Hindu religious thought: and his conception of 
 Redemption bases it upon knowledge.1 Whilst then Kant, 
 if interpreted seriously, leads us straight into the arms of one 
 of the ancient foes of Jewish-Christian monotheism—namely, 
 the dualism of Persia—Hegel hands us over to its other 
 secular antagonist, the non-moral monism of India ; and we 
 are therefore entitled to conclude that the feat which both 
 claim to perform—namely, that of lifting the Fall out of the 
 time-series into some timeless metaphysical plane, whilst 
 yet leaving the rest of the Christian religion essentially 
 intact—is one of which the achievement is in the nature of 
 things impossible. In the world of thought, as in that of 
 action, ‘ Things are what they are, and their consequences 
 will be what they will be. No amount of dialectical 
 ingenuity can nullify or even soften the inexorable rigour of 
 the issue, as it was perceived by the Jews of old with the 
 clearness which comes not of speculative power but of 
 passionate religious devotion. If God is infinite in power, 
 dualism is intolerable, and if infinite in goodness, monism 
 not less so; the origin of evil must therefore be sought in 
 the world of created being, and within the sphere of time? 
 and contingency. 
 
 We conclude, then, that the attempts made by the two 
 giants of German philosophy, Kant and Hegel, to provide 
 us with a ‘ Fall’ which shall be neither temporal nor con- 
 tingent are, from the point of view of the believer in the 
 Christian God, the God of the Bible and of Jesus, worthless. 
 But a theory which proves to have no intrinsic value may 
 possess an accidental and adventitious importance as a 
 floating cork or straw, revealing the direction of some deep 
 natural current of thought, which invisibly and impalpably 
 determines the conscious speculative tendencies of a given 
 period. I called attention just now to the fact that Kant’s 
 theory of the radical evil in human nature, as grounded upon 
 an incalculable number of wrong decisions made on the 
 
 1 op. cit. p. 217: ‘ Die Erkenntniss ist das Princip der Geistigkeit, die 
 aber, wie gesagt, auch das Princip der Heilung des Schadens der Trennung 
 ist.’ 
 
 2 On the question whether the Fall-theory involves belief in the ultimate 
 reality of Time, v. infra, p. 523 N. 2. 
 
THE ULTIMATE ‘FALL’ 507 
 
 supersensible plane by our noitimenal selves—in other words, 
 on millions of separate and individual ‘ falls "—-was reminis- 
 cent of the hypothesis put forward by Origen in his first or 
 Alexandrine period, the hypothesis of a series of individual 
 pre-natal falls.1 I do not know of any evidence for supposing 
 that Kant had ever read Origen, and it is probable that there 
 is no direct relation of dependence between the earlier and 
 the later thinker. But this reproduction by Kant of one 
 aspect of Origen’s thought, fortuitous though it may have 
 been, is symptomatic of much. It means that with the 
 collapse of what had hitherto been the all-powerful 
 Augustinian doctrine, which had for thirteen centuries 
 banked up the stream of Fall-speculation, the main current 
 of thought on this subject tended to find its way once more 
 into the old and long dry channels which had been pro- 
 visionally cut out for it some sixteen centuries previously by 
 the genius of Origen. It is not too much to say that if a 
 single phrase be required for summing up the really pro- 
 gressive and valuable movements of Christian anthropology 
 and hamartiology which took place during the nineteenth 
 century, that phrase must be ‘ Away from Augustine, and 
 back to Origen.’ 
 
 This tendency shows itself with even greater clearness in 
 what is perhaps the most exhaustive and laborious treat- 
 ment of the Christian doctrine of sin which has ever been 
 published, the monumental treatise written some seventy 
 years ago by the learned Lutheran divine, Dr. Julius Miiller.? 
 Miller realised that there is no strictly historical evidence 
 for the Fall, and that the belief in such an event can only be 
 based upon a priori reasoning, which starts from the fact of 
 the moral struggle. Like Kant he finds the root of original 
 sin in the fact, or supposed fact, that whereas the tendency 
 towards sin is universal, ‘interwoven with human nature 
 and, as it were, rooted therein,’ yet we feel ourselves, and 
 really are, responsible and culpable for its existence. (It 
 will be noticed that Miiller is prevented by his Lutheran 
 orthodoxy from breaking decisively with that indefensible 
 
 1 See Lecture IV, p. 2io ff. 
 2 EK. tr., The Christian Doctrine of Sin, 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1852. 
 
508 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Augustinian conception of original guilt, which has done so 
 much to confuse and discredit the clear, reasonable, and 
 fundamentally Christian idea of the inherited infirmity.) 
 In order to solve this contradiction, which need never have 
 existed but for Augustine, he follows the guidance of Kant, 
 taking over the dualism which the latter had established 
 between the phenomenal and the notimenal selves. He 
 sees, however, the two difficulties which were raised just 
 now in our critical examination of the Kantian theory— 
 namely, the unintelligibility of the idea of a ‘ timeless act,’ 
 and the lack of any logical ground for the universality of 
 the supposed extra-temporal wrong decision. He therefore 
 endeavours to emend the Kantian theory so as to eliminate 
 both of these flaws. He gets rid of the difficulties inherent 
 in the idea of extra-temporal falls by (in effect) putting the 
 Falls back into the time-series. It is true that so far as 
 words are concerned he strenuously denies that he is doing 
 this ; but it is impossible to attach any other significance to 
 his description of the fall of the individual soul as occurring 
 in a mode of existence which precedes life on this planet. 
 If words have any meaning at all, the tell-tale prefix 
 ‘pbre-’ obstinately resists all attempts to strip it of its tem- 
 poral reference, and we must suppose that the heavenly or 
 noitimenal life from which man has descended, though 
 doubtless in every other way of a transcendental and 
 incomprehensible nature, is nevertheless as completely en- 
 closed in the framework of temporal succession as is the 
 life which we now live in this vale of tears. The second 
 difficulty, that of accounting for what appears at first sight 
 to be the remarkable coincidence that all men have in point 
 of fact made a wrong decision in their pre-natal lives, is 
 accounted for on strictly Origenistic lines. Origen’s solu- 
 tion of this problem, which was noticed in our fourth lecture, 
 and which cannot be denied the merit of considerable 
 
 1 Cf. op. cit. ii. p. 400: ‘ This were now a manifest contradiction, if 
 there were not (timelessly) preceding our earthly temporal existence of our 
 personality, as the sphere of that self-decision, by which our moral condi- 
 tion from the beginning is conditioned’; p. 4o1: ‘ the recognition of a 
 primitive fall preceding the individual time-life.’ I have not been able to 
 verify these passages in the original, but I assume that the translator has 
 not done Miller an injustice. 
 
TOBE UIA TE RATT 4 509 
 
 ingenuity, is this: all men are fallen, and have the tendency 
 towards evil in them, precisely because only those spirits 
 who fell in the heavenly sphere were banished to earth and 
 became incarnate, as human beings. Perhaps it would be 
 more exact to say that only those spirits who sinned venially 
 in the intelligible world become incarnate as men: for 
 Miiller is disposed to believe in the real existence of devils, 
 who must presumably be regarded as spirits who sinned 
 more grievously than those condemned to inhabit human 
 bodies, and who, therefore, have been banished to an even 
 lower plane of existence (a thoroughly Origenistic idea). 
 The spirits who did not make a wrong decision continued, 
 and presumably still continue, to exist in the heavenly 
 sphere as angels. In other words, we are not fallen because 
 we are men; on the contrary, we are men because we are 
 fallen ; and this accounts for the universality of the fallen 
 condition. Miiller’s Lutheranism makes him nervously 
 anxious to disclaim all sympathy with Origenism, but the 
 differences which he discovers between his own theory and 
 that of the Alexandrine thinker do not appear to be of any 
 great moment. He also endeavours, quite unnecessarily 
 from the point of view of logic, to find room for something 
 like a historical fall of Adam and Eve; but, as the supposed 
 historical sin of our first parents must, in accordance with 
 his main theory, be attributed to pre-creational trans- 
 gressions on their part, the story of Gen. i. is really, though 
 he will not admit it, nothing but an otiose excrescence upon 
 the main fabric of his theory. 
 
 The theory we have just sketched will doubtless appear 
 to many as unnecessarily elaborate and fantastic, and as 
 partaking equally with the old-fashioned scheme of a fall of 
 _ Lucifer, succeeded after an indefinite interval by a fall of 
 Adam, in the nature of mythology. But the theory of a 
 pre-natal Fall of individual souls is not one that can be 
 dismissed at first sight as inherently improbable. It enjoys 
 at the moment a certain measure of popularity as being an 
 element in the fashionable cult of theosophy. A well-known 
 philosophic teacher has declared that, in his opinion, there 
 are no arguments for the immortality of the soul after death 
 which would not equally well establish its pre-existence 
 
510 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 before birth.1 The hypothesis of a number of individual 
 pre-natal Falls certainly seems fully capable of performing 
 that essential function of the Fall doctrine which is its only 
 vaison ad étrve—namely, that of relieving God from responsi- 
 bility for the origin of evil. It is true that the weight of such 
 auctoritas as may be deemed to belong to the language of 
 Scripture, and the almost unanimous consensus of Christian 
 antiquity, is on the side of a single, collective, and racial 
 Fall rather than an undefined number of individual falls ; 
 and, if we were to conclude that this latter conception 
 represents the most probable account of the origin of evil in 
 man, we should necessarily be obliged to revise the defini- 
 tions which we gave of ‘original sin’ in Lecture VII, 
 and substitute for the word ‘ inherited,’ as a qualification 
 of the substantive ‘weakness of will’ or ‘infirmity of 
 herd-complex,’ the adjective ‘innate.’ But the theory of 
 individual falls has never been explicitly condemned by any 
 authority which English Churchmen can recognise as having 
 a right to the august title of oecumenical. It will therefore 
 not be waste of time if we devote a few words to the task of 
 examining this theory in regard to its intrinsic merits. 
 
 When we are faced by the hypothesis of a pre-natal 
 existence, our first impulse is to ask ‘ What, precisely, is 
 conceived as pre-existing ?’ It is natural to assume that 
 the advocates of this hypothesis mean to assert that the 
 entire human spirit, endowed at least in potentiality with 
 the whole structure of ‘instincts’ and ‘ sentiments’ which 
 was described in our last lecture, pre-existed. But much of 
 this instinctive structure is connected with the functions 
 of the physical organism, and would be meaningless and 
 purposeless apart from it. And all of it, in the generalised 
 form under which we sketched it, is ordinarily assumed by 
 psychology to be given by heredity; the old controversy 
 between creationism and traducianism which we noticed in 
 our review of patristic opinion has for all practical purposes 
 ended in the victory of the latter.2 If this assumption 
 
 1 Dr. J. E. McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), ch. iv.‘ Human 
 pre-existence,’ p. 113. For other supporters of or sympathisers with the 
 doctrine in recent times, see W. R. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus (1918), 
 
 it; D.3ts 
 a°v. supra, Lecture ITV, p.'237 n. 3. 
 
TARE ULTIMATE. PAL 511 
 
 of psychology corresponds to fact—and in the absence of 
 direct evidence to the contrary it is reasonable to assume 
 that it does—we can only conclude that nothing of the soul 
 existed before its birth into this world except a pure form, 
 empty of any content, an ego which possessed merely the 
 potentiality of self-consciousness without any self of which 
 to be conscious. It is difficult to see how such a naked and 
 vacuous pre-existent ego, with no instincts to control, and 
 no sentiments to resist or modify, could ‘ sin’ at all, or how 
 such an abstract pre-existence differs from that merely 
 ) ideal existence in the thoughts of God which will be con- 
 ) ceded to all souls even by the most convinced supporters — 
 | of a historic Adam. It would, then, seem that, if we are to\, 
 make the conception of a pre-natal sin intelligible at all, we 
 must regard the pre-existent soul as a monad or atom of soul- } 
 stuff, containing the potentiality of its fully developed adult | 
 structure, much as the acorn contains the germ and potency’: 
 of an oak. This, of course, means that the conception of 
 heredity in every department of life is a pure illusion, and 
 that the apparent transmission of such qualities as (to quote 
 two instances at random) mathematical genius or moral 
 imbecility from parent to child is really due to a ‘ pre- 
 established harmony ’ between the developmental capacities 
 of a pair of successively incarnate monads. This is no doubt 
 a thinkable theory; it is always possible to substitute a 
 pre-established harmony for direct causation in all spheres of 
 thought, from the most abstract and ideal down to the most 
 brute and mechanical, given sufficient determination and 
 ingenuity ; just as it would probably still be possible to 
 explain the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies in 
 accordance with the Ptolemaic astronomy, given unlimited 
 liberty to employ an indefinite number of cycles and epi- 
 cycles. But, though such a hypothesis is not inherently 
 impossible, it becomes inconceivably cumbrous and com- 
 plicated the moment any attempt is made to explain human 
 history in accordance with it; and it is not illegitimate to 
 suggest that William Occam’s ‘razor,’ which cuts at the 
 root of all unnecessary multiplication of entities, will prove 
 to possess an equally trenchant edge when turned against 
 the indefinite multiplication of causalities. 
 
 
 
512 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 It may be further urged against this theory that it 
 involves a view of human life and conditions of existence on 
 this planet so profoundly pessimistic as to make us doubt 
 whether the hypothesis of pre-natal falls has not already 
 tumbled into that abyss of Manicheism, on the edge of which, 
 as we have already seen, the doctrine of original sin is 
 perpetually trembling. According to the Hebrew Scriptures 
 the world, as God made it, is good, and a pleasant thing it is 
 to behold the sun ; but according to the ‘ pre-natal’ theory, 
 this life is a purgatory and a tearful prison-house, in which 
 the soul expiates a sin of which she no longer possesses even 
 the bare memory; and it is difficult to see how Christian 
 parents could rejoice that a man is born into the world if 
 they were under the necessity of regarding their new-born 
 offspring as a small culprit who had just been banished from 
 the intelligible sphere in consequence of some gross defiance 
 of the majesty of God. Whilst, therefore, we are not 
 prepared to pronounce dogmatically that Origen’s first 
 theory as revived by Julius Miiller is inherently impossible, 
 or directly unorthodox, its melancholy implications and its 
 complicated structure justify us in leaving it on one side, 
 and in searching for some theory which will both be free from 
 these objections and also will be more harmonious with the 
 general tenor of Scripture and tradition, and with our 
 instinctive consciousness of the essential, and not merely 
 accidental, unity and solidarity of the human race. 
 
 For the sake of clearness we will briefly resume the 
 substance of our argument up to this point. We saw that 
 the collapse of the rigid Augustinian system naturally 
 brought about a reversion, conscious or unconscious, to the 
 Origenistic method of dealing with the problem of the Fall, 
 and a concentration of interest upon the ultimate trans- 
 cendent origin of evil rather than upon the first of its mani- 
 festations in human history, the so-called Fall of Man. 
 But our examination of the theories propounded by Kant 
 and Hegel showed that for believers in the Biblical and 
 Christian idea of God, which I have assumed, without 
 apology, all through these lectures, even this ultimate fall 
 must still be conceived as a member of the time-series ; for 
 any attempt ‘to lift the ultimate origin of evil out of Time 
 
THE ULTIMATE ‘FALL’ 513 
 
 plunges us into the gulfs either of dualism or of unmoral 
 monism. And we have just seen reason for regarding the 
 hypothesis which polarises the Fall into an indefinite 
 multiplicity of pre-natal individual falls as open to grave 
 suspicions of the same nature. Of the conceptions, there- 
 fore, which have emerged in the course of our enquiry, that 
 which seems to offer the most attractive field for our explora- 
 tion is the conception of a collective fall of the race-soul of 
 humanity in an indefinitely remote past.1_ But this tentative 
 adumbration of a conclusion probably represents the most 
 we can extract with safety from the purely a priovz trains of 
 reasoning of which we have made use so far; and at this 
 juncture it will be well to change our method of approach to 
 the problem, and see if body and substance can be given 
 to this attractive vision by means of a posterior: evidence, 
 derived from an examination of the world as we actually 
 know it to be, in the light of that Darwinian revolution in 
 thought and knowledge which the eyes of the great German 
 philosophers were never destined to see. 
 
 If, then, we turn our backs on the fascinating but 
 mysterious realm of metaphysics, and bend our gaze upon 
 that vast evolutionary panorama in which the history of 
 this planet and of our race has been depicted by the genius 
 of modern science, we shall naturally concentrate our 
 attention, first of all, upon the facts which have now been 
 ascertained about the origin of man, in so far as they are 
 relevant to our purpose. In this connexion, it is unnecessary 
 to do more than repeat an observation already made, 
 namely, that Augustinianism, with its theory of a Paradisal 
 condition of original perfection, cannot possibly be dove- 
 tailed into the picture of a gradual ascent from gross and 
 brutish beginnings which is given us by geology and biology.? 
 
 1 Coleridge seems to hint at some such theory when he speaks of a 
 ‘ Spiritual Fall or Apostasy antecedent to the formation of Man’ (Azds to 
 Reflection, London, 1836, Aphorism X, p. 285). 
 
 2 Mr. H. J. T. Johnson (Anthropology and the Fall, 1923), writing from 
 the Roman Catholic standpoint, does not attempt to adduce any positive 
 evidence for the hypothesis of ‘ original righteousness,’ and is content to 
 argue that science has not disproved the essential positions of Latin theology 
 with regard to the state of the first men, positions which for him are based 
 upon revelation. But, in the last resort, his only ground for thinking that 
 
 the alleged ‘ revelation’ 7s arevelation is the authority of the Roman Church. 
 2L 
 
514 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Few Christian thinkers will now attempt to identify the 
 protoplast of Augustine’s imagination with the original 
 owner of the Piltdown skull, none with fithecanthropus 
 evectus. In so far as the traditional Christian doctrine of 
 man involves any affirmation about the historic state of the 
 first men at all, it is clear that the only version of this 
 doctrine which has the faintest chance of surviving in the 
 modern world is that taught by the primitive Greek Fathers, 
 which regards the protoplast as a babe, a frail, undeveloped, 
 ignorant creature, and views the first human sin rather as a 
 praevaricatio—a stepping-aside from the true line of upward 
 progress—than as a /apsus or fall from a high level of moral 
 and intellectual endowment.t But this conception of a 
 ‘ first sin ’’ needs somewhat closer examination than we have 
 hitherto been able to devote to it. It is very doubtful 
 whether, if we could travel back into the past, on some Time- 
 machine, like that imagined by Mr. H. G. Wells, and observe 
 the whole history of the origins of our race—from a point in 
 Time at which it was certain no human creature existed upon 
 the earth at all, to the point (let us say) at which the race 
 of Neanderthal finally disappeared before the conquering 
 march of the men of Cromagnon—we should be able to lay 
 our finger upon any one single event which could be described 
 as a ‘first sin’ at all. The idea of sin presupposes the 
 existence both of self-consciousness and of a developed moral 
 sentiment, built up upon that primitive ‘ herd-instinct’ of 
 which the deficiency constitutes the innate infirmity ; and 
 the development of both of these cardinal facts, self- 
 consciousness and the moral sentiment, must have been 
 such a slow, gradual and continuous process, that even if we 
 possessed the fullest knowledge in regard to its actual course 
 it would still appear entirely arbitrary to draw a line across 
 it and label all acts disapproved of by the ‘ herd’ as non- 
 moral accidents on one side of the line, and as moral offences 
 or ‘sins’ on the other. We can only say that there was a 
 time, doubtless to be counted by aeons, during which the 
 moral consciousness had not dawned on this planet, and that 
 there was—and now is—an age of responsibility, and con- 
 scious ethical obligation. But in regard to the question 
 1 v. supra, Lecture IV, pp. 253, 302. 
 
THE ULTIMATE ‘ FALL’ 518 
 
 how the former age passed into the latter, we can only 
 confess ourselves to be totally ignorant; and all analogy 
 suggests that the transition was mediated, not by a sudden 
 flash of moral illumination, succeeded by a single act in 
 which man turned his back upon the new light, but rather 
 by a period of twilight during which the lineaments of the 
 animal slowly melted into the human, the faint glow of 
 potential self-consciousness which smouldered in the brains 
 of our simian ancestors grew in brightness, consistency, and 
 firmness, and the gregarious impulse which had kept the 
 ancient hunting-pack together gradually flowered in the idea 
 of acommunal law and in a rudimentary sense of ethical 
 and tribal obligation. 
 
 It might be urged as a counterbalancing consideration 
 that the continuity of evolution in no way prejudices the real 
 distinctness of the main stages passed through by the 
 evolving organism, a distinctness which is self-evident if a 
 pair of such phases be mentally held together for purposes of 
 comparison. The process whereby the child grows into a 
 boy, the boy into an adolescent, the adolescent into a man, 
 manifests this precise quality of smoothness and unbroken 
 continuity. It is impossible, except for legal purposes and 
 on the basis of arbitrary convention, to point to a single date 
 in the calendar at which a given individual ceases to be 
 a youth and becomes a man. But, nevertheless, common 
 sense affirms that there is a time after which it is reasonable 
 and necessary to treat a given individual as being, in point 
 of fact, an adult man, though it may not be possible to say 
 exactly when he attained to this status or how long he has 
 enjoyed it. Soit might be urged, with regard to the human 
 race as a whole, that—however long the crepuscular period 
 of semi-humanity and semi-bestiality may have lasted— 
 there must have been a definite date at which it would have 
 been possible for an extra-terrestrial observer to say ‘ Now, 
 at least, whatever it may have been before, this race of 
 advanced biped mammals must be regarded as having 
 become fully self-conscious and morally responsible.’ It 
 would, therefore, be theoretically possible, if we possessed 
 the requisite knowledge, to lay our finger upon some primi- 
 tive action, and say ‘ This, at least, may be certainly desig- 
 
516 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 nated as a moral offence, no matter whether any previous 
 human actions deserve to be so designated or not.’ 
 
 Even if, however, we admit the theoretical possibility 
 of arriving at some human action which could be labelled, 
 not indeed as the ‘ first sin’ but as the ‘ first known sin,’ 
 such an action must still have occurred far too late in the 
 history of the physical development of our species to be 
 regarded as a ‘ fontal sin’ or as the source of subsequent 
 weakness or corruption. For the possibility of ‘sin,’ as 
 St. Paul has taught us, presupposes the existence of a moral 
 law to sin against !; and the birth of a moral law, consciously 
 recognised as such, must have taken place many thousands 
 of years after the emergence of man as a distinct zoological 
 species. Even if the ‘ monophyletic’ theory of the origin of 
 humanity (that is, the view which regards the whole of man- 
 kind as descended from a single pair of ancestors) be true, it 
 - is impossible to suppose that the first sinner was one of this 
 hypothetical original pair. We must assume that hundreds 
 of generations were born and died upon this planet whilst 
 the dictates of herd-instinct were crystallising into custom, 
 and tribal custom was hardening into law. By the time that 
 the ‘ first known sin’ became possible, the human family 
 must have multiplied and ramified over a great area of the 
 earth’s surface; and the ‘first known sinner,’ if it were 
 possible to establish his identity, must have been, not the 
 original father of mankind, but merely one amongst 
 thousands of brethren and cousins, whom he could only 
 infect by example and not by heredity. Moreover, even 
 if we take into consideration the somewhat fanciful sup- 
 position that the descendants of this primeval sinner may 
 have intermarried with the descendants of his ex hypothest 
 sinless or non-moral brethren, in such a way that the whole 
 body of mankind eventually became polluted by the ever- 
 widening stream of moral infirmity flowing forth from him, 
 we have still to reckon with the fact that such a theory pre- 
 supposes the transmissibility of acquired as distinct from 
 congenital characteristics—a supposition of which the 
 possibility is strenuously disputed by Weismann and his 
 school, and which therefore cannot be regarded as forming 
 
 1 Rom. v. 13: ‘ sin is not imputed when there is no law.’ 
 

 
 THE ULTIMATE “FALL: 517 
 
 a secure foundation for a modern presentation of the 
 theological Fall-doctrine. 
 
 All these considerations combine to suggest that the first 
 known human sin, even if we could ascertain what precisely 
 it was, would not contain the explanation of subsequent 
 sins ; like them it would refer us beyond itself; it would be 
 not the cause but the first known effect of the ‘ hereditary 
 infirmity.’ In other words, the first human sin, or the first 
 human action which an extra-terrestrial observer could 
 have certainly designated as sin, was not ‘ the Fall ’—it was 
 merely the first result in human history of ‘ the Fall.’ This 
 is a conclusion upon which the three lines of thought which 
 we have been examining—the tendency or direction revealed 
 by the residual (or ‘ Hellenic’) Christian doctrine when 
 stripped of its Augustinian accretions, the movement of 
 metaphysical speculation from Kant to Coleridge, and the 
 general trend of modern empirical and scientific knowledge as — 
 to the origins of man—converge with impressive unanimity. 
 The origin of evil must lie in some catastrophe much more 
 ancient, remote, and mysterious than the first homicide, 
 rape, or theft committed by a palaeolithic savage. If we 
 take ‘Adam’ as a pictorial designation for the hypothetical 
 first human sinner,! we shall see that the Rabbis and the 
 author of 4 Ezra were perfectly right when they said that 
 Adam sinned because he had already got the yé¢er ha-ra‘— 
 the ‘ evil inclination ’"—rooted in him. Cor enim malignum 
 baiulans primus Adam transgressus et victus est. All that 
 basic Christian thought requires us to affirm, and all that 
 modern knowledge permits us to affirm, of the first speci- 
 fically human creatures that trod this earth, is not a Fall 
 but a failure—a failure to ‘move upward, working out the 
 beast,’ a failure to rid themselves of the anachronistic ‘ ape 
 and tiger ’ strain in their blood, a failure to emancipate them- 
 selves from the fatal flaw of deficiency in ‘herd-instinct ’ 
 or gregarious feeling, the flaw of which their developing 
 intellects had made them progressively conscious. 
 
 It is natural at this point to raise the question whether 
 
 1 But see below, p. 526, n. 1, for another possible way of utilising the 
 pictorial concept of ‘ Adam.’ 
 Rt acizra, 111.:21. 
 
518 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the innate deficiency of herd-instinct on which we have fixed 
 as the root of moral weakness, and which would appear to 
 have been characteristic of man from the moment when he 
 first becomes recognisable as a strictly moral and responsible 
 agent, is to be regarded as having been inherited directly 
 from his pre-human ancestors. There seems no reason for 
 returning an affirmative answer to this question. ‘There is 
 no evidence to show that the hominidae or anthropoid 
 animals, who were the immediate progenitors of the human 
 race, were any less loyal as individuals to the hunting-packs 
 or hordes in which they were associated than the hyenas or 
 the wolves of the present day. The fact is that when we 
 speak of ‘defective herd-instinct,’ we mean ‘ defective ’ 
 relatively to the exacting, penetrating and intimate demands 
 of the modern herd, whether we think of this as Church, or 
 State, or civilised society in general, or the whole world of 
 moral beings summed up in God. What is wrong with 
 the average man, as distinct from the criminal, on the one 
 side, and the saint who has won his way to settled and 
 permanent virtue, on the other, is that although a member 
 of a complex society, which claims the allegiance of his 
 innermost thoughts and feelings, he yet possesses only so 
 much strength of herd-instinct as was sufficient to enable 
 his sub-human ancestors to fulfil the simple and elementary 
 requirements of the primitive horde. Hence, in every age 
 of human development the innate weakness of herd-instinct 
 is relative to existing social conditions, and its immediate 
 origin is to be attributed, not to a deprivation of something 
 which man once possessed, but rather to an arrested develop- 
 ment. Whereas self-consciousness and intellectual power 
 have during the ages increased enormously in scope and 
 clearness, thus revealing more and more opportunities of 
 indulging the instincts connected with self and sex, there 
 has been no corresponding development of the social instinct, 
 or of the moral sentiment which should grow out of it. 
 We can therefore enlarge and enrich our definition of the 
 inherited infirmity by describing it as ‘ arrested develop- 
 ment’ of the herd-instinct. And this conclusion takes us a 
 step further back in our investigation of the origins of evil in 
 man. We must postulate some unknown factor or agency 
 

 
 TAEY ULTIMATE RAI’ 519 
 
 which interfered to arrest the development of corporate 
 feeling, just when man was becoming man, some mysterious 
 and maleficent influence which cut into the stream of the 
 genetic evolution of our race at some point during the twilit 
 age which separates pre-human from human history. It 
 would seem, then, that the negative pre-condition of sin in 
 man, the pvivatio or mutilation which we have found to 
 consist in relatively defective or atrophied herd-instinct, 
 points to a positive or substantive power which at the 
 moment we can only describe as an unknown ~ representing 
 evil, or the potentiality of evil, as it existed in the nature of 
 things before man was. This provisional conclusion may 
 appear disappointingly vague ; but it must be expected that 
 the more deeply we penetrate into the tunnel of the past and 
 the further we leave behind the daylight of recorded history, 
 the more general and indefinite our judgments are bound to 
 become. 
 
 The history of man’s immediate ancestors is involved in 
 such obscurity that it throws no light upon the nature of 
 this positive evil factor, and it would seem as though our 
 exploration had been brought to a standstill by a blank 
 wall. If, however, we follow the lead given by the prince 
 and master of all Christian Fall-speculators, the Apostle 
 St. Paul, we shall, I think, be able to find a way round 
 the obstacle It was shown in our third lecture that, for 
 St. Paul, evil in man is closely connected with the pain and 
 suffering and waste of life which reigns in sub-human 
 nature.1 The Apostle, indeed, regards the former as the 
 direct cause of the latter, echoing the Jewish speculations 
 which had sought to explain evil in nature by the naive 
 supposition that the Almighty deliberately infuriated the 
 previously tame and gentle animal tribes in order to provide 
 an uncomfortable environment for man as part of the 
 punishment for his sin. This conception, in its literal form, 
 is impossible for us because we know that the strong preyed 
 upon the weak, that ‘tooth and claw’ were ‘red with 
 ravin,’ and that the ‘ dragons of the prime . . . tare each 
 other in their slime,’ millions of years before our race was 
 born. But it is perfectly possible, and, indeed, necessary, 
 
 + p. 157: 
 
520 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 given our modern view of man as organic to Nature, to 
 assume a real connexion of a collateral rather than a directly 
 causal nature, and to regard the unknown factor, which 
 intervened in the crisis of the birth of man and held back the 
 natural, proper, and God-designed development of ‘ herd- 
 instinct,’ as being one with the mysterious power which 
 vitiates the whole of sub-human life with cruelty and 
 selfishness. Further light, therefore, though of a dim and 
 wavering kind, may be shed upon the problem by the 
 consideration of extra-human or sub-human evil. 
 
 The concrete forms assumed by evil amongst our humbler 
 kinsfolk present certain superficial contrasts with the 
 manifestations of sin in man. We cannot accuse them of 
 defective ‘ herd-instinct,’ because great numbers of sub- 
 human species consist of solitary individuals, and are not 
 gregarious at all. Andin those which are associated in packs 
 or herds the gregarious instinct, so far from being defective 
 or atrophied, seems nicely calculated in amount and degree 
 to subserve the necessary purposes of the corporate life, 
 rising in the marvellous complexity of some insect com- 
 munities, such as those of ants, bees, and wasps, to a degree 
 infinitely transcending the most self-effacing patriotisms 
 ever dreamed of by man, and to a point at which the indi- 
 vidual, though physically distinct from its fellows, is 
 psychically no more than a cell in a single self-determining 
 organism. Nor, if we neglect certain comparatively rare 
 phenomena,? does it seem possible to discover in the animal 
 world the type of evil known as sexual; broadly speaking, 
 that remains the shameful prerogative of self-conscious man. 
 The evil that exists in the animal world appears rather to 
 consist in a ruthless egotism which asserts the right on the 
 part of the individual or the species to live at the expense of 
 others, which expresses itself in ferocity and occasionally in 
 what appears to us as unnecessary cruelty. We can only 
 bring this quality under the general head of ‘lack of herd- 
 instinct ’ if we extend the denotation of the term ‘ herd’ to 
 include the totality of organic life, which would be a some- 
 what unnatural expansion of its meaning. It therefore 
 
 1 See the authorities quoted by E. Westermarck, The Origin and 
 Development of the Moral Ideas (1908), ii. p. 456, n. I. 
 

 
 THES SaIMA TRO opALTY 521 
 
 seems better to describe the manifestations of evil in sub- 
 human nature as characterised by the common quality of 
 selfishness, which is the negation of love. Here, it would 
 seem, we have come to close quarters with the unknown 
 mysterious agency, which had dominated the world for aeons 
 before man was, and which suddenly and inexplicably 
 asserted itself, as against the upward-striving powers which 
 co-operated in the making of man, in the very crisis of his 
 birth, partially repressing and strangling that instinct 
 towards fellowship and social harmony of which the due 
 development was necessary in order that his personality 
 might attain to that perfect poise and proportion which the 
 Creator meant it to possess. Employing the indefinite 
 language which is all that the obscurity of the subject allows, 
 we seem to see, lying behind all forms of evil, human and 
 animal alike, a single, deeply lying principle which manifests 
 itself mainly amongst the brutes as the ruthless self-assertion 
 of one herd against another, but in man, with his developed 
 self-consciousness and his more intense individuality, as the 
 self-assertion of the individual against the herd, a principle 
 which we can only designate by the inadequate titles of 
 selfishness, lovelessness, and hate. 
 
 The question may be raised at this juncture, whether it is 
 legitimate to employ terms such as these, which contain a 
 note of moral censure, in speaking of the behaviour of sub- 
 human organisms. It might be objected that we spoke of 
 man’s non-human ancestors, and indeed of man himself 
 during the early stages of his history, as a distinct zoological 
 Species, as non-moral, a mere bundle of instincts devoid of 
 that governing power which we know as self-consciousness 
 and free-will, and which alone makes possible strictly moral 
 _and responsible action ; and it may be questioned whether 
 we have the right to use such a term as ‘ evil’ in this con- 
 nexion at all. The answer to these questions seems to lie 
 in the consideration that not all evil is sin. We apply the 
 term ‘evil’ to all phenomena which our moral conscious- 
 ness tells us ought not to exist, but we only describe such 
 phenomena as ‘ sins’ if they are due to conscious, voluntary 
 action, if, that is, they are the expressions of evil volitions, 
 which alone can be termed ‘sins’ in the strict sense of the 
 
522 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 word. And, superficially regarded, this consideration may 
 appear to relieve the problem of evil in nature of some of its 
 oppressive weight. There is much evil amongst the brutes, 
 but (with the possible exception of some of those higher 
 animals which, through their domestication by man, seem 
 to have acquired the germ of a moral faculty) they are free 
 from sin. The cat which tortures the mouse by playing 
 with it ; the wasp which deftly stings the living caterpillar in 
 the chief ganglia of its spinal cord, so as to keep it, paralysed, 
 as a store of fresh food for her young; the microbe which 
 destroys a life that might have been the source of un- 
 numbered blessings to the human race; and that most 
 uncanny manifestation of the spirit of evil in nature—the 
 insectivorous plant, which with cold and Mephistophelean 
 ferocity disguises its death-dealing petals in the form of 
 more innocent blossoms so as to allure and entrap its unwary 
 victims: all these perform functions which are evil in the 
 sense that they rouse the detestation of the refined moral 
 consciousness in man; but they are free from guilt, they 
 commit no sin, because they are but blindly following the 
 fundamental law of their being. , 
 
 Yet the problem is only lightened in appearance, for the 
 guiltlessness of the brutes merely emphasises the apparent 
 guilt of Nature, which has made them what they are. If 
 savagery and cruelty are the expressions of a fundamental 
 law, how evil must be that law, and how deep its discordance 
 with the will of the all-loving Creator revealed by Christ, 
 Who clothes the lilies of the field, and without Whom not one 
 sparrow falls to the ground. If we face the facts candidly, 
 we must admit that no one of us, if he had been in the 
 position of Demiurge, would have created a universe which 
 was compelled by the inner necessity of its being to evolve 
 the cobra, the tarantula, and the bacillus of diphtheria. 
 How, then, shall that God, the infinite ardours and pulsations 
 of Whose love bear the same relation to our weak emotions 
 of sympathy and fellow-feeling as the infinity of His wisdom 
 does to our dim and limited knowledge, have done so? 
 The answer can only be that He did not do so; that He did 
 not create such a universe ; that, in the words of the most 
 ancient scriptures of our monotheistic faith, in the beginning 
 
PEE \ULTIMATE BALL 523 
 
 ‘God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was 
 very good.’1 To explain evil in Nature, no less than in man, 
 we are compelled to assume a Fall—a revolt against the will 
 of the Creator, a declension from the beauty and glory 
 which God stamped upon His work at the beginning. And, 
 to account for the vast and intimate diffusion of evil, 
 selfishness and hate amongst all the multitudinous tribes 
 of living creatures, we must place this ultimate Fall, which 
 the argument contained in the first part of this lecture 
 compels us to regard as an event in Time, at a point before 
 the differentiation of life into its present multiplicity of 
 forms and the emergence of separate species. We must 
 summon to our aid the great conception first elaborated by 
 
 the Stoics under the title of the ‘ Logos Spermatikos’ or ! 
 “seminal reason,’ and more recently reformulated, in the © 
 light of modern biological conceptions, by M. Bergson under ! 
 the name of the élan vital, the Life-Force which is the’ 
 
 immediate ground of our own being as of that of all the 
 multitudinous creatures of the universe. If we can assume 
 that there was a pre-cosmic vitiation of the whole Life-Force, 
 when it was still one and simple, at a point of time? prior to 
 its bifurcation and ramification into a manifold of distinct 
 individuals or entelechies, we shall be in possession of a 
 conception which should explain, so far as explanation is 
 
 1 Gen. i. 31. Unfortunately we cannot add, with Goethe’s archangels 
 (in the Prologue to the first part of Faust) : 
 “ Und alle deine hohen Werke 
 Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag.’ 
 
 2 It may be asked at this point ‘ Does such a transcendental Fall- 
 doctrine necessitate the assumption of the ultimate reality of Time?’ 
 The answer would seem to be in the negative. The doctrine of the Fall 
 does, indeed, imply that the created universe is in Time; it may, indeed, 
 be taken to involve the assumption that there is what may be called for 
 human purposes an ‘ absolute’ Time or duration, of which the times 
 relative to different percipients or groups of percipients are imperfect and 
 distorted copies. But such an ‘ absolute Time’ would only be absolute 
 within the realm of created being ; it could have no reference to the eternal 
 Essence of God, Who is the supreme and timeless Reality. The version of 
 the doctrine of the Fall suggested above does not, therefore, involve the 
 attribution of a higher degree of reality to Time than to the created world 
 of which Time is a dimension; it ascribes no more than a phenomenal 
 reality to either; and it is amply consistent with the Platonic and 
 Augustinian position that the world was created, not in Time, but together 
 with Time. 
 
524 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 possible, the continuity and homogeneity of evil throughout 
 all ranks of organised life, from the bacillus up to Man. 
 This remote and mysterious event, and not the compara- 
 tively recent failure of primitive man to escape from already 
 existing evil, would then be the true and ultimate ‘ Fall.’ 
 Such a view of the primeval catastrophe and its effects is 
 vaster, more solemn and more awe-inspiring than that which 
 regards the Fall merely as the affair of our species, and it 
 proportionately increases the scope, the amplitude, and the 
 magnificence of redemption. 
 
 This conception of the Life-Force permeates much of the 
 cosmological speculation of modern times, appearing as it 
 does not merely in the system of M. Bergson but in the 
 thought of Schopenhauer, as a blind Will or uzsus which is 
 the underlying reality of the universe, and attains to self- 
 consciousness in the minds of men. It follows that theology 
 would be acting in accordance with many precedents pro- 
 vided by the great creative epochs of its own past history if 
 it were, as we suggest, frankly to borrow this conception for 
 the purpose of elucidating and placing on a secure intellectual 
 basis the preliminary assumptions which lead up to the 
 central body of its redemptive scheme. The Catholic 
 Church, which within the first thirty years after Pentecost 
 took over from Philo the great metaphysical conception of 
 the Logos, to be employed as the foundation stone which 
 supports the majestic dome of Trinitarian and Christological 
 dogma, need feel no antecedent difficulties about borrowing 
 this smaller fragment from the philosophy of the present 
 day, to be used in the reconstruction of that outlying porch 
 or narthex in the temple of Christian thought which is con- 
 stituted by the doctrines of Man and of Sin. Such a sub- 
 stitution of the idea of a corruption of the whole cosmic 
 energy at some enormously remote date for the idea of a 
 voluntary moral suicide of Man in comparatively recent 
 times would be no greater a revolution than that which was 
 effected by St. Anselm, when he substituted a satisfactional 
 theory of the Atonement for the view which regarded the 
 death of Christ as a ransom paid to the Devil—a view which 
 had behind it the venerable authority of a thousand years of 
 Christian history. 
 

 
 THE ULTIMATE ‘ FALL’ 528 
 
 If, however, this conception of the Life-Force is to form 
 part of our reconstructed anthropology, it must be used with 
 a difference. We must make an important addition to it 
 which may, at first sight, appear somewhat startling ; and 
 that is this—we must conceive it as having been at the 
 beginning, when it first sprang forth from the creative 
 fecundity of the Divine Being, free, personal, and self- 
 conscious. This follows from the conception of its rebellion 
 against God which, as we have seen, is required by the 
 necessities of our theodicy. It is impossible to think of an 
 impersonal force as rebelling against a Creator of infinite 
 wisdom and power. In the case of Man, indeed, we often 
 see the mighty natural forces which he has harnessed for his 
 convenience escaping from his control and running amok in 
 blind destructiveness. But such disasters are due to the 
 limitations of Man’s knowledge or of his powers of attention. 
 We cannot save God’s goodness at the expense of His 
 wisdom, or regard the Creator in the light of an inexpert 
 electrician who has inadvertently released a powerful 
 current into channels which cause it to burn and destroy 
 instead of lighting and warming. The necessities of safe- 
 guarding the Biblical conception of God, no less than the 
 intellectual obligation to avoid an infinite regress, compel 
 us to place the origin of the perversion of the Life-Force 
 in some point of spontaneity, some uncaused cause, lying 
 within its own being ; and the moment that we have done 
 this, the moment that we have attributed to it an uncaused 
 causality, we have made it personal. Hence, if our revised 
 Fall-doctrine is to be intelligible at all, the ‘ Life-Force’ 
 becomes for us the World-Soul, the ‘ only-begotten Universe ’ 
 of Plato’s Timaeus, which, for its excellence, was able to be 
 company to itself and needed no other, being sufficient for 
 itself as acquaintance and friend.t Like the Attic Moses, 
 we must assume that God, the Father of all things, created 
 this conscious Life-Force or anima mundi, replenished 
 (with the potentiality of) all mortal and immortal creatures, 
 living and visible, containing all things that are visible, the 
 image of its Maker, most mighty and good, most fair and 
 perfect.2, And here, rather than with regard to any sup- 
 
 1 Timaeus, 34 B. 2 tbid. 92 C. 
 
526 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 posed condition of palaeolithic man, the idea of ‘ original 
 righteousness ’ may be usefully employed. 
 
 The World-Soul, then, was created good ; but, our theory 
 must continue, at the beginning of Time, in some transcen- 
 dental and incomprehensible manner, it turned away from 
 God and in the direction of Self, thus shattering its own 
 interior being, which depended upon God for its stability 
 and coherence, and thereby forfeiting its unitary self- 
 consciousness, which it has only regained, after aeons of 
 myopic striving, in sporadic fragments which are the separate 
 minds of men and perhaps of superhuman spirits. It is not 
 necessary to assume, with Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa, 
 that the existence of our limited and imperfect conscious- 
 ness represents a f7s-alley, an unsatisfactory substitute for 
 the one first-created world-consciousness ; if speculation 
 may be carried so far, we may surmise that the cosmic 
 consciousness was meant from the beginning to develop 
 within itself smaller individual consciousnesses without in 
 any way prejudicing its own unity, and so that if it had 
 developed in accordance with the plan pre-ordained by its 
 Creator, it would have been the ideal society or community, 
 endowed with a corporate mind which would have trans- 
 cended, without mutilating or repressing the minds of its 
 
 1 It will not have escaped the reader’s notice that the speculative re- 
 construction of the Fall-doctrine suggested in the text bears certain 
 resemblances to that expounded by St. Gregory of Nyssa in de hom. opif., 
 and commented on in Lecture IV, pp. 270 ff. Our ‘World-Soul’ corresponds 
 to his ‘ archetypal man,’ numerically one and endowed with original 
 perfection ; though of course the World-Soul must be conceived as including 
 the potentiality of all life, supra- and sub-human as well as human. On 
 occasions when the use of pictorial language is pedagogically desirable, 
 there seems no reason why the World-Soul should not be described as 
 ‘ Adam,’ ‘ the Man,’ DN: the assertion of the ‘ original righteousness ’ 
 of ‘ Adam’ would thus cease to be a mere Rabbinical figment, and would 
 become a mythological way of expressing a necessary inference from 
 ethical monotheism. The Greek fancy of an extra-terrestrial or even 
 metaphysical‘ Paradise’ (v. supra, pp. 193, 216) might also be re-utilised 
 in an allegorical presentation of our theory. And, like Gregory, we regard 
 the break-up of the intellectual unity of the general Soul as due to the 
 Fall, though (as stated above) we are very far from regarding multiplicity 
 as in itself evil, and have no sympathy with his semi-Manichean view of 
 sex. The affinity of our conception with the ideas of Origen will be 
 obvious ; and the last paragraph of this lecture suggests the kind of 
 ‘ Recapitulation ’-theory to which it would naturally lead up. 
 
La OLEATE PATE 527 
 
 individual members. On this supposition it would seem 
 natural to suppose that the Fall wrecked the unity of the 
 world-consciousness, reducing the cosmic soul to a stream 
 of blind and internally discordant effort, and delaying for _ 
 millions of years the appearance of conscious individual 
 personalities. In our own infirm wills and circumscribed 
 intelligences, and in the efforts which our race has made to 
 develop sympathy and fellowship through families, tribes, 
 nations, and the still shadowy and embryonic World-State or 
 League of Nations, we may trace the instinctive strivings of 
 the dissociated World-Soul to recover, in all its noonday 
 brightness, the unitary self-consciousness that it had at the 
 beginning. 
 
 However this may be, we can at least feel sure that 
 this interior self-perversion, which we have hypothetically 
 attributed to the collective Life-Force which was God’s 
 primal creature—this orientation away from God and in the 
 direction of ruthless self-assertion—would necessarily mani- 
 fest itself in a development of organic life permeated through 
 and through with the spirit of selfishness, manifested in 
 ferocious competition and in a bloodthirsty struggle for 
 existence. It might a priov have been expected to appear 
 in the cruelty which ravages the animal world, in the 
 unknown maleficent factor which hindered the due de- 
 velopment of herd-instinct just when the anthropoids were 
 becoming men, and in the mysterious ebullitions of pure 
 fiendishness which, within the sphere of responsible human 
 action, are known as ‘criminality.’ If, in harmony with 
 later Jewish and primitive Christian thought, and with the 
 consensus of those who are known as‘ spiritual experts’ in 
 every age of the newer dispensation, we are prepared to 
 admit the existence of evil discarnate intelligences, it 
 would doubtless follow that the malevolent nature of such , 
 beings was to be regarded asthe outcome of the pre-mundane* 
 Fall of that World-Soul, of which they, equally with men 
 and beasts, would be the offspring. A place could thus be 
 found in this provisional scheme for the idea which has been 
 expressed in mythological form as the Fall of Lucifer and 
 the apostate angels ; though on this showing the fall of the 
 angels would be parallel to and collateral with the fall, or 
 
528 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 rather the failure, of Man, and need not be (though we know 
 too little about these matters to deny that it may have 
 been) its direct cause or chronological antecedent. 
 
 For such a hypothesis it may be claimed that, if we are 
 prepared to make allowances for the vagueness and the 
 indefiniteness of its outline, and for the many lacunae which 
 the imperfection of our knowledge, and the uncertainty of a 
 priori speculation, render inevitable, it explains better than 
 any other existing theory the existence and the wide diffusion 
 of evil in a universe which, as Christians, we believe to have 
 been created by an all-powerful, all-wise, and all-loving God. 
 And for those who recognise that a religion which claims to 
 be ‘ Catholic’ or universal, in an intensive, as well asin an 
 extensive, sense, is thereby endowed with the right, and 
 subject to the duty, to make use of categories and thought- 
 forms drawn from any source for the elucidation of its 
 fundamental ideas, it will not appear an objection to this 
 view that it has certain affinities with the thought of the 
 great Neo-Platonist and mystic Plotinus, who makes the 
 World-Soul, the divine fuy7, the third member of his Trinity. 
 But, in the light of the Christian revelation, we are con- 
 strained to diverge decisively from him with regard to two 
 points. Inthe first place, the World-Soul for us is a created 
 being, not an element in, a part of, or a necessary emanation 
 from, the Godhead. This position is so _ self-evidently 
 involved in those Biblical conceptions of God as Creator and 
 as infinitely good, which have been taken for granted all 
 through this discussion, that I need not dilate upon it 
 further. Secondly, whereas Plotinus seems to find the 
 origin of evil in the wilful self-detachment of the human soul 
 from the World-Soul,1 we find the Fall in the voluntary 
 deviation of the World-Soul from conformity with the will of 
 the Creator; and we cannot but feel that if Plotinus and 
 Origen had possessed our modern realisation, induced by the 
 scientific study of nature, of the vast diffusion of evil outside 
 of, and apart from, the realm of specifically human life, they 
 would have been constrained to agree with us in enlarging 
 
 1 Cf. Enn. i. 8, 4, ad fin. For Plotinus’ not always consistent views 
 with regard to the descent of the soul, and its relation to the Universal 
 Soul, see W. R. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, i. p. 254. 
 
 7 
 

 
 THE ULTIMATE ‘ FALL’ 529 
 
 the subject of the Fall, that is, the personal being who fell, 
 beyond the confines of Man, individually or collectively 
 regarded, until it becomes conterminous with the totality of 
 organic life. 
 
 Yet though for us the World-Soul is erring and sinful, 
 created and not divine, we are constrained by the historic 
 Christian revelation to recognise a certain profound and 
 intimate connexion between the created Life-Force of the 
 universe and the eternal Logos of God, the express image of 
 His substance, Who upholds all things by the word of His 
 power and in Whom all things consist. This connexion was 
 meant to consist in the continuous penetration, inspiration, 
 and guidance of the created anima mundi by the Almighty 
 and uncreated Logos: and the rebellion of the former has 
 not banished the patiently working, healing, and refining 
 influences of the latter. Even in marred and vitiated 
 Nature much goodness still survives; many of the dumb 
 beasts may well put our arrogant race to shame by their 
 gentleness, their humility, their love of their offspring, their 
 devotion to their human masters. Such facts as these may 
 embolden us to believe that, long ages before man was, the 
 Spirit of Christ was at work in the world, sustaining the 
 blinded Life-Force, which otherwise would have lapsed into 
 nothingness, fostering within it the potentialities of good- 
 ness and love, combating those elements which made for 
 selfishness and cruelty, and leading it slowly and gently | 
 back towards the recovery of its original harmony, peace, - 
 and unified self-consciousness. And when the cosmic Soul 
 had so far progressed along the upward path as to be able to 
 find expression in Man, the eternal Logos was present in his 
 birth, assisting and inspiring the growth of reason, will, and 
 social or gregarious feeling. Nor, when our race had finally 
 failed to extricate itself from the pre-existing stream of 
 selfish tendency, and was seen still to bear within it, deeply 
 stamped upon its fundamental plasm, the lack of love and 
 weakness of social instinct which were the legacy of the 
 primal Fall, did the immanent Word of God withdraw from 
 it His interior inspiration: the long line of pre-Christian 
 prophets, saints, and sages, in whom the fire of man’s 
 
 highest aspirations has shone with clear and steady flame, 
 2M 
 
530 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 testifies to the benign and pervasive influences of that Light 
 which lighteth every man, as it cometh into the world. In 
 the fullness of time, the gracious Power which had guided 
 man so far deigned to enter into an even closer bond with our 
 race, and through it with the fallen World-Soul, by uniting 
 humanity to His divinity : 
 And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
 With human hands the creed of creeds. 
 
 Yet not by mere example, or by ‘loveliness of perfect deeds’ 
 alone did He design to heal the inherited weakness of human 
 nature, but also by forming a sacramental society which 
 would be the extension of His personal being, within which 
 the defect of love, of social feeling, of gregariousness, of 
 ‘herd-instinct "—it matters not how it be named—might 
 be remedied through the direct transfusion into our souls 
 of His own self-sacrificed life. This is the point to which 
 our revised formulation of the doctrines of the Fall and 
 of Original Sin has naturally led us, and at which we may 
 well be content to leave it. In the completion of the 
 eternal Christ Who all in all is being fulfilled—in that 
 summing up and recapitulation in Him, not only of all 
 humanity but of all forms of created being, in their count- 
 less hierarchical gradations, whether things on earth or 
 things in heaven—all individual spirits will have grown 
 to their full stature, the perfection of their fellowship will 
 express itself in the redintegrated consciousness of the 
 general Soul, the Redemption which is the predestined 
 sequel of the Fall will be for ever consummated, and the 
 regenerated universe, in all its multitudinous members, will 
 know the full meaning of the mystic paradox—‘ O felix culpa, 
 quae talem et tantum meruit habere Redemptorem.’ 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE E 
 
 Dr. F. R. TENNANT’S ALTERNATIVE THEORY OF THE 
 ORIGIN OF SIN 
 
 ‘To the evolutionist sin is not an innovation, but is the survival 
 or misuse of habits and tendencies that were incidental to 
 an earlier stage in development, whether of the individual or the 
 
DR. TENNANT’S THEORY 531 
 
 race, and were not originally sinful, but were actually useful. 
 Their sinfulness lies in their anachronism: in their resistance to 
 the evolutionary and Divine force that makes for moral develop- 
 ment and righteousness.’ 1 These words, quoted by Dr. Tennant 
 from an address delivered to the Church Congress of 1896 by 
 Archdeacon J. M. Wilson, contain nothing which we desire to 
 contradict: though the argument of Lecture VII has endeavoured 
 to supplement them by exhibiting ‘ the evolutionary and Divine 
 force that makes for righteousness ’ as manifested in the growth 
 and development of ‘herd-instinct,’ social feeling, and love. 
 Dr. Tennant, however, (if I have rightly grasped the argument; 
 of his third and fourth Hulsean Lectures,) appears to consider | 
 these words to be, not a statement, but the solution of the 
 problem of the origin of sin. In so far as the empirical uni- 
 versality of sin is a fact, he finds the explanation of this fact 
 in the chronological priority of feeling, impulse, and instinct to 
 conscience in the historical order both of the race’s and of the 
 individual’s evolution. The moral consciousness experiences 
 difficulty and pain in disciplining appetite and impulse, because 
 the moral consciousness itself is a late arrival in the house of 
 human personality. This I take to be the gist of his third 
 lecture, expressed in such a sentence as this: ‘ The foundation 
 from which we start is the fact already asserted of the race 
 and now to be repeated of the individual, that we are natural 
 before we are moral beings, and that the impulses of our nature 
 are in full sway before the moral consciousness begins to dawn’ ? 
 (italics ours). The result of this temporal priority of instinct 
 to the ethical sense is that sin must be regarded as ‘ something 
 empirically inevitable for every man’ though by no means 
 ‘theoretically, or on a priori grounds, an absolute necessity.’ 3 
 The temporal priority of instinct to conscience is, of course, 
 
 a fact. But it appears to me that two criticisms may be made 
 upon the contention that this fact constitutes an adequate 
 explanation of a second fact—namely, the empirical universality 
 and practical inevitability of sin. The first criticism is, that this 
 contention ignores the possibility that the two facts in question , 
 may be collaterally related, as effects of the same cause, and ~ 
 need not necessarily stand in a direct causal relation. If there 
 is an evil principle infecting organic life, including human life, 
 it may both have delayed the development of the moral will, 
 
 1 Quoted, Origin and Propagation of Sin (Hulsean Lectures) (1902), 
 p. 82. Except where otherwise specified, paginal references given in this 
 Additional Note are to this work. 
 
 2 op. cit. Pp. 93. 
 
 8 p.110. But, if ‘ empirical inevitability ’ is a fact, must it not be the 
 index and epiphenomenon of an underlying ‘ theoretical necessity’ ? Such 
 at any rate appears to be the assumption of physical science within its 
 own sphere. 
 
532 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 and ensured that the moral will should be relatively weak when 
 at length it did develop. In any case, there seems no a priori 
 reason why temporal posteriority of development should involve 
 weakness ; an omnipotent God presumably might, and could, 
 so have ordered matters that the moral consciousness, when it 
 did appear, should have sprung into existence endowed with 
 the fullest control and power over the animal impulses, like 
 Athene springing fully armed from the head of Zeus. 
 
 This latter consideration naturally leads to our second 
 criticism, which is that, even if it could be proved that the late 
 emergence of the moral consciousness necessarily involved its 
 practical weakness, Dr. Tennant’s position does not logically 
 
 -»exempt the Almighty from the responsibility of causing evil, as 
 the Fall-theory (except when combined with ‘ supra-lapsarian ’ 
 predestinarianism +) does. (No theodicy, indeed, that human 
 ingenuity can elaborate will ever exempt Him from the responsi- 
 bility of permitting evil: because He obviously does permit it.) 
 For, on any other than a Deistic view of God’s relation to the 
 world and to human souls, the temporal priority of instinct to 
 conscience, which is alleged to be the source of man’s observed 
 proneness to evil, must (if the Fall-theory be excluded) be 
 attributed to the Divine appointment; that is to say, we must 
 conclude that the will of God immanent in organic evolution 
 has brought man into existence with a secret flaw in his soul 
 which sooner or later betrays him into actual sin. If man’s 
 nature is a ‘ chaos not yet reduced to order,’ and if the hypothesis 
 of a ‘ Fall’ of any kind be ruled out, we can only suppose that 
 man started his career as a ‘ chaos’ because God willed that he 
 should so start; and if this his ‘ chaotic ’ condition involves the 
 “empirical inevitability ’ of sin, then God must be deemed to 
 have laid the foundations of human nature in such a way that 
 sin inevitably results. One sentence in the fourth Hulsean 
 Lecture seems expressly to accept this consequence. ‘ What 
 introspection really discovers is an internal conflict between 
 nature and nurture, natural desire and moral end’: (so far we 
 entirely agree; but the sentence continues) ‘and this is the 
 inevitable condition of human life and the expression of God’s 
 purpose’ 2 (italics ours). If an arrangement which involves the 
 “empirical inevitability’ of sin be really ‘the expression of 
 God’s purpose,’ the human race may well say to its Maker, in 
 the words of FitzGerald: 
 
 Oh, Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make, 
 And who with Eden didst devise the Snake, 
 
 For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man 
 Is blackened, Man’s Forgiveness give—and take ! 3 
 
 1 v. supra, Lecture VI, p. 436f. tn CE 
 3 Rubdiydt of Omar Khayydm, lviii. 
 

 
 DR. TENNANT’S THEORY 533 
 
 This consideration is of such importance for the comprehension 
 of the Fall-theory, and also (as it appears to me) so decisive 
 against the sufficiency, from a theistic and Christian point of 
 view, of Dr. Tennant’s ‘ alternative hamartigeny,’ that I make no 
 apology for insisting upon it at some length. ‘ Anachronisms,’ 
 or ‘ chronological misfits,’ are not accepted by the mind as self- 
 caused or self-explanatory, i in any department of human affairs. 
 If an antiquated law or-institution lingers on in the State after 
 its original usefulness has departed, needlessly causing friction 
 between classes or wasting the resources of the community, we 
 do not record the judgment ‘ This is an anachronism, and there 
 is no more to be said’; on the contrary, our comment is ‘ This 
 is an anachronism, and the Government, or Parliament, is very 
 much to blame for not having abolished or reformed the law or 
 institution in question when the conditions which originally 
 justified it ceased to exist.’ The idea of an ‘ anachronism’ 
 seems logically to involve the idea of some conscious agent’s 
 (more or less) culpable neglect of his duty as its cause, though 
 the more harmless the anachronism, the less culpable the neglect 
 which has produced it. Now it is a not uncommon practice 
 to apply the term ‘ anachronism’ to certain vestigial and now 
 useless structures in man’s physical organism: Dr. Tennant 
 himself instances ‘the troublesome wisdom tooth and the 
 dangerous caecum.’*+ If the term ‘anachronism’ is seriously ‘ 
 used in this connexion, it implies a teleological view of the 
 universe as its background, and prima fa jacié involves a note of 
 censure, or quasi-censure, on the power or powers responsible 
 for the continued existence of the ‘anachronistic’ structure— 
 a power which may for the moment be vaguely described as‘ 
 ‘Nature’ (natura naturans). When disease arising from such 
 a source brings pain or death to some dear one, the most im- 
 passive philosopher may well experience a moment’s indignation 
 against the apparent negligence of ‘ Nature,’ whose irresistible 
 pressure compels men to adopt changed modes of life, without 
 simultaneously effecting the necessary modifications of their 
 physiological organism. 
 
 The thoughtful believer in Christian theism will naturally de- 
 mand an explanation of the existence of such cruel anachronisms 
 in a world which he has been taught to believe was created and 
 is sustained by an all-loving and merciful God; he will no 
 more take them for granted, as self-explanatory, than the his- 
 torical student takes political anachronisms for granted. Our 
 own explanation has been generally indicated in Lecture VIII ; 
 to the poet who cries ‘ Are God and Nature then at strife?’ we 
 answer ‘ Yes, to a large extent; because of the pre-mundane 
 rebellion against God of that which men have called the Logos 
 
 1 The Concept of Sin (1912), Pp. 147. 
 
534 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Spermatikos, the World-Soul, natura naturans, the élan vital, 
 the Will to live.’ Underlying all the evil in physical nature we 
 suppose vitiated streams of the disintegrated Life-Force, par- 
 ticular entelechies or idées-forces (to quote Fouillée’s pregnant 
 term) which owing to the primal catastrophe have become forces 
 of sloth, of cruelty, or of death. Such a view at least relieves 
 ‘God of the responsibility for the origination of physical evil, 
 though not from that of originating its possibility and tolerating 
 its actuality. But it appears that Dr. Tennant’s view does not 
 claim to do so much. Speaking of the relative independence 
 vis-a-vis of God and of its fellow-creatures which he attributes 
 to the human self, he observes ‘ It is compatible with solidarity 
 in sin and penalty, and does not necessitate that the ills of the 
 creature are events wholly external to the life of the Creator, 
 though indeed their sins are—so that “‘ the Creator has fashioned 
 suffering in which He Himself has no share and of which He is 
 independent.” ’ 4 
 The sentence is vaguely expressed; but, if we are justified 
 in arguing from its verbal form, it would seem to imply that ‘the 
 ills of the creature’ (physical ills are presumably meant) are at 
 least partly included in ‘the life of the Creator,’ in a way in 
 which men’s sins arenot. And, a little further on, it is suggested 
 ‘that physical evils, though not ‘ direct expressions of the will 
 of God,’ are yet ‘necessarily incidental’ to His ‘plan of realising 
 His end,’ or ‘inevitable bye-products of the. . . course of 
 nature.’2 But is it possible to relieve God of responsibility for 
 ‘necessary,’ even though ‘ incidental,’ consequences of His own 
 plan? Surely it would not have been beyond the resources 
 of Omniscience to devise another plan, which would not have 
 mecessarily involved such consequences as cancer or syphilis? 
 ‘In human justice a man is held to intend the necessary, reasonably 
 foreseeable, and foreseen consequences of his acts, even though 
 he may urge that the idea of such consequences was not the 
 motive which prompted the acts or a ‘ direct expression’ of his 
 will: and a'theodicy can hardly be conducted on laxer principles 
 than those which prevail in earthly courts. I venture to suggest 
 that, so far as physical evil is concerned, Dr. Tennant despite 
 ‘the subtlety and brilliance of his dialectic has not really succeeded 
 in evading the ancient dilemma ‘ Ezther there has been a “‘ Fall”’ 
 of some kind, ov God must be deemed to be the author of evil,’ 
 and that though he refuses to admit the fact, he is really impaled 
 upon its latter horn. 
 
 But if physiological anachronisms of such a kind that they 
 produce disease or death must be regarded either as the conse- 
 quences of a ‘ Fall’ or as the products of the Divine will, there is 
 at least a strong presumption that the same holds good of the 
 
 PDT 20) 0 Ace Dp $2.0 S45 
 
DR. TENNANT’S THEORY 535 
 
 psychological anachronisms which predispose man to sin. They 
 must be due to some cause: that cause ex hypothesi does not lie 
 in the will of the individual man who suffers from them—the 
 bully in whom the combative instinct is endowed with a degree 
 of strength, which would have been appropriate and useful in 
 a Pleistocene anthropoid but is useless and dangerous in a member 
 of modern civilised society, has clearly not willed this anachron- 
 istic quality of hisnature. And what cause of such anachronisms 
 can be or ever has been suggested, by believers in monotheism, 
 other than the will of God or a primal rebellion of some created 
 will or wills against the will of God? Those who reject both of 
 these alternatives are surely under an intellectual obligation 
 to produce a third explanation: and this it appears to me that 
 Dr. Tennant has failed to do. 
 
 Dr. Tennant has laid Theology at large under an immense 
 obligation by the courage with which, following in the steps of 
 Julian and Scotus, he has proclaimed the moral neutrality of/ 
 appetite (the fomes peccati) as such, thereby sweeping away at 
 one blow the endless confusions which clustered round the word 
 “concupiscence’; and by insisting that the word ‘sin’ means, 
 not a psychological state nor yet a forensic status, but an act 
 committed with full and conscious deliberation in defiance of 
 a known law. To criticise the constructive views of one who 
 can claim the credit of such far-reaching and permanently. 
 valuable achievements may well appear to many minds in the 
 light of presumption. Yet I must needs think that the argu- 
 ment of Dr. Tennant’s third and fourth Hulsean Lectures, eloquent 
 and persuasive though it is, obscures the real logic of the matter, 
 which, I suggest, is perfectly simple. So far as sin is capable 
 of a genetic explanation at all, there are four possible explana- 
 tions and four only: namely (1) monism, (2) dualism, (3) Pelagian- 
 ism, (4) the theory ofa‘ Fall’ ofsome kind. Dr. Tennant rejects 
 the fourth, and, even more emphatically, the second of these! ; 
 but I venture to think that, when rigorously analysed, his own 
 explanation will be found to amount, not to a fifth theory, but 
 to an inconsistent combination of the first and third (monism < 
 and Pelagianism). When he tells us that an ‘inevitable condi- 
 tion of human life,’ which involves the ‘ empirical inevitability 
 of sin,’ is ‘ the expression of the Divine purpose,’ 2 he is speaking 
 as a thoroughgoing monist; when he removes the Divine; 
 control from a great part of the world-process, and describes | 
 many events as having no teleological import? and as mere: 
 ‘incidental results’ or ‘ bye-products’ of the Divine plan, he 
 at least approximates to the Deistic view of God which is 
 
 1 p. 135. Seu LBs 
 8 p. 130: ‘. .. the incidental nature of much that happens in God’s 
 world, and from which teleological import is excluded.’ 
 
’ 
 
 536 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 inseparable from the Pelagian view of man?!; when he asserts 
 that ‘the actuality of sin is derived solely from the individual 
 will influenced by its social environment’ ? and that ‘ the con- 
 tents of man’s moral life and the quality of his character are 
 ... the results of his own determination according to his 
 opportunities,’ 2it is difficult to interpret his words otherwise 
 than as expressing the complete indeterminism and the ethical 
 atomism on which the thought of Pelagius and Julian was based. 
 
 Nevertheless, there is one sentence in the fourth Hulsean 
 Lecture which, if allowed its fullest meaning, seems to concede 
 the whole principle for which we have been contending. ‘ Man’s 
 condition denotes, on our theory of sin, a fall [italics ours] from 
 the divine intention, a parody of God’s purpose in human history, 
 though not a fall from an actual state of original righteousness.’ 4 
 With regard to the last clause, it need only be said that we have 
 already repudiated the idea of the original righteousness of 
 the first concrete human individuals as unhistorical. But the 
 statement that man’s present condition denotes a ‘fall’ from 
 God’s intention presumably means that the idea of Man, as 
 conceived in the Divine mind from all eternity, included the idea 
 of a perfect moral character; that ‘original righteousness,’ 
 though its attribution to any generation of our remote semi- 
 brutish ancestors is mythological, may yet be ascribed to the 
 Ideal or Archetypal Man as existing in the intelligible world ; 
 and that the human race, as we know it in the world of time and 
 sense, represents a grave declension or ‘ fall’ from the eternal 
 pattern of manhood laid up in the heavens. Two logical steps 
 forward (neither of them very difficult) from this position would 
 bring Dr. Tennant into complete accord with the general Fall- 
 conception vaguely adumbrated by Gregory of Nyssa, and set out 
 in our last lecture. The first of these steps consists in the hypo- . 
 statisation and personalisation of the archetypal Idea, and in the - 
 reference to its conscious self-determining activity of the cause 
 of the declension from perfect righteousness manifested by the 
 human race as we know it ; the second, in expanding the content 
 of the Idea so that it becomes the Idea not of humanity alone 
 but of all organic life, so that its self-perversion accounts not 
 merely for the tendency to evil in man but for the equally 
 oppressive and saddening phenomenon of evil in sub-human 
 nature. The justification of these steps will be found stated 
 at length in Lecture VIII, and need only be summarised here by 
 pointing out (a) that unless the relation between the perfect 
 Idea and the degenerate particulars be conceived, as we have 
 suggested, under causal, contingent, and temporal forms, it can 
 only be conceived under the timeless category of ‘ ground and 
 
 4° See Lecture’ Vi,\p.13 56: ? 2 DHIT 7 
 *ips T19. : Dura 
 
FORMULARIES 537 
 
 consequent,’ which would involve postulating a principle of evil 
 necessarily inherent in the Idea itself, and thus making God the 
 direct author of evil; (5) that the evolutional continuity between 
 man and the brute requires that evil in both should be brought 
 under the head of a single explanation. It is, perhaps, not 
 temerarious to suggest that a full recognition of the implications 
 of the phrase ‘a fall from the divine intention’ would entirely 
 eliminate whatever divergence may be thought to exist between 
 the ‘evolutionary view’ and the ‘ecclesiastical doctrine’ 
 (understood in the historical and Vincentian sense of the term, 
 and construed as we have suggested) regarding the origin and 
 ground of sin. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE F: FORMULARIES 
 
 [Only such texts are printed as are strictly relevant to the Fall- 
 doctrine. ] 
 
 I. OECUMENICAL 
 
 Council of Ephesus, A.D. 431. can. I. et rus 6 wntpomodirys rijs émap- 
 xlas, amooraryicas THs aytas Kal olxovperkhs avvodov, mpocelero TH THs 
 Gmooracias ovvedpiw, 7) peTa TotTO mpooTebein, ) Ta Kedcoriov édpovyncev 7 
 Ppovicer, ovTos KaTa THY THs émapxias emuoxoTwv SiamparrecOal Te ovdayds 
 dvvarar, maons exkAnoaoTiKfs Kowwvias éevretbev 75n bro TIS avvddov exBeBAn- 
 févos, Kal avevépyntos bmdpywv. . . . 
 can. 4. ei d€ twes amoorarnoaey TOV KAnpiKdv, Kal ToAujoaey 7 Kat” 
 idtay 7) Snpocta ta Neoropiov % ta Kedeoriov dpovica, Kai tovrous eivat 
 KaOnpnuevous, b70 THs ayias avvddov SediKaiwrar. 
 {[Hardouin 1. 1621 D; Denzinger-Bannwart, Enchiridion, 
 §126; W. Bright, Canons of the First Four General 
 Councils, 1892, p. xxvii f.] 
 
 II. WESTERN AND ROMAN 
 1. Canons of the Second Council of Orange, A.D. 529 
 
 can. I. Si quis per offensam praevaricationis Adae non 
 totum, id est secundum corpus et animam, in deterius dicit 
 hominem commutatum, sed animae libertate illaesa durante 
 corpus tantummodo corruptioni credit obnoxium, Pelagii errore 
 deceptus adversatur scripturae dicenti: anima, quae peccaverit, 
 ipsa morietur [Ezek. xviii. 20]: et, nescitis quoniam qui exhibetis 
 vos servos ad oboediendum servi estis e1us, cut oboeditrs ? [Rom. 
 vi. 16]: et, a quo quis superatur, evus et servus addicitur [2 Pet. 
 10): 
 
538 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 can. 2. si quis soli Adae praevaricationem suam, non et eius 
 propagini asserit nocuisse, aut certe mortem tantum corporis, 
 quae poena peccati est, non autem et peccatum, quod mors est 
 animae, per unum hominem in omne genus humanum translisse 
 testatur, iniustitiam Deo dabit, contradicens Apostolo dicenti: 
 per unum hominem peccatum intravit in mundum, et per peccatum 
 mors, et ita 1m omnes homines movs pertransiit, in quo omnes 
 peccaverunt [Rom. v. 12]. 
 
 can. 8. si quis alios misericordia, alios vero per liberum 
 arbitrium, quod in omnibus, qui de praevaricatione primi 
 hominis nati sunt, constat esse vitiatum, ad gratiam baptismi 
 posse venire contendit, a recta fide probatur alienus. is enim 
 non omnium liberum arbitrium per peccatum primi hominis 
 asserit infirmatum, aut certe ita laesum putat, ut tamen quidam 
 valeant sine revelatione Dei mysterium salutis aeternae per 
 semetipsos posse conquirere .. . 
 
 can. 13. arbitrium voluntatis in primo homine infirmatum 
 nisi per gratiam baptismi non potest reparari: quod amissum 
 nisi a quo potuit dari non potest reddi.. . 
 
 can. I5. ab eo quod formavit Deus mutatus est Adam, sed 
 in peius per iniquitatem suam. ab eo quod operata est iniquitas 
 mutatur fidelis, sed in melius per gratiam Dei. illa ergo mutatio 
 fuit praevaricatoris primi, haec secundum Psalmistam mutatio 
 est dextrae excelst (ps. Ixxvi. II]. 
 
 can. I9. natura humana, etiamsi in illa integritate in qua 
 est condita permaneret, nullo modo se ipsam creatore suo non 
 adiuvante servaret : unde cum sine Dei gratia salutem non possit 
 custodire, quam accepit, quomodo sine Dei gratia poterit reparare 
 quod perdidit ? 
 
 From the doctrinal statement appended to can. 25. ac sic 
 secundum supra scriptas sanctarum scripturarum sententias vel 
 antiquorum patrum definitiones hoc Deo propitiante et praedicare 
 debemus et credere, quod per peccatum primi hominis ita in- 
 clinatum et attenuatum fuerit liberum arbitrium, ut nullus postea 
 aut diligere Deum sicut oportuit, aut credere in Deum, aut 
 operari propter Deum quod bonum est, nisi eum gratia miseri- 
 cordiae divinae praevenerit. 
 
 2. Council of Trent 
 
 Sessio V (June 17, 1546). 
 Decretum de peccato originals. 
 
 I. si quis non confitetur, primum hominem Adam, cum 
 mandatum Dei in paradiso fuisset transgressus, statim sancti- 
 tatem et iustitiam, in qua constitutus fuerat, amisisse, in- 
 currisseque per offensam praevaricationis huiusmodi iram et 
 indignationem Dei atque ideo mortem, quam antea illi com- 
 

 
 FORMULARIES 539 
 
 minatus fuerat Deus, et cum morte captivitatem sub eius 
 potestate, qui mortis deinde habuit imperium, hoc est diaboli, 
 totumque Adam per illam praevaricationis offensam secundum 
 corpus et animam in deterius commutatum fuisse: anathema sit. 
 
 2. si quis Adae praevaricationem sibi soli, et non eius 
 propagini asserit nocuisse, et acceptam a Deo sanctitatem et 
 iustitiam quam perdidit, sibi soli et non nobis etiam eum 
 perdidisse ; aut inquinatum illum per inoboedientiae peccatum 
 mortem et poenas corporis tantum in omne genus humanum 
 transfudisse, non autem et peccatum, quod mors est animae ; 
 A.S., cum contradicat Apostolo dicenti: per unum hominem 
 peccatum intravit in mundum etc. [Rom. v. 12]. 
 
 3. si quis hoc Adae peccatum, quod origine unum est, et 
 propagatione, non imitatione, transfusum omnibus inest uni- 
 cuique proprium, vel per humanae naturae vires vel per aliud 
 remedium asserit tolli quam per meritum unius mediatoris 
 Domininostrilesu Christi) 2 A.S. oi 
 
 4. Si quis parvulos recentes ab uteris matrum baptizandos 
 negat, etiam si fuerint a baptizatis parentibus orti, aut dicit in 
 remissionem quidem peccatorum eos baptizari, sed nihil ex Adam 
 trahere originalis peccati, quod regenerationis lavacro necesse sit 
 expiari ad vitam aeternam consequendam, unde fit consequens, 
 ut in eis forma baptismatis in remissionem peccatorum non vera, 
 sed falsa intelligatur: A.S., quoniam non aliter intelligendum 
 est id, quod dixit Apostolus: per unum hominem peccatum 
 intravit in mundum etc. [Rom. v. 12], nisi quemadmodum 
 Ecclesia catholica ubique diffusa semper intellexit. propter hanc 
 enim regulam fidei ex traditione Apostolorum etiam parvuli, 
 qui nihil peccatorum in semetipsis adhuc committere potuerunt, 
 ideo in remissionem peccatorum veraciter baptizantur, ut in eis 
 regeneratione mundetur, quod generatione contraxerunt.1 mist 
 enim quis renatus fuerit ex aqua et Spiritu Sancto, non potest 
 introive in regnum Det [John iii. 5]. 
 
 5. si quis per Iesu Christi Domini nostri gratiam quae in 
 baptismate confertur reatum originalis peccati remitti negat, aut 
 etiam asserit, non tolli totum id, quod veram et propriam peccati 
 rationem habet, sed illud dicit tantum radi aut non imputari : 
 A.S. ... manere autem in baptizatis concupiscentiam vel 
 fomitem haec sancta Synodus fatetur et sentit, quae cum agonem 
 relicta sit, nocere non consentientibus sed viriliter per Christi 
 Iesu gratiam repugnantibus non valet; quin immo quz legitime 
 certaverit coronabitur [2 Tim. 1i.5]. hanc concupiscentiam, quam 
 aliquando Apostolus peccatum [Denzinger refers for this to 
 Rom. vi. 12 ff.] appellat, sancta Synodus declarat Ecclesiam 
 catholicam nunquam intellexisse peccatum appellari, quod vere 
 
 1 This canon is practically identical with can. 2 of the Carthaginian 
 Synod of A.D. 418 ; see above, p. 391. 
 
840 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 et proprie in renatis peccatum sit, sed quia ex peccato-est et ad 
 peccatum inclinat. si quis autem contrarium senserit: A.S. 
 declarat tamen haec ipsa sancta Synodus, non esse suae in- 
 tentionis, comprehendere in hoc decreto, ubi de peccato originali 
 agitur, beatam et immaculatam Virginem Mariam Dei genitricem,* 
 sed observandas esse constitutiones fel. rec. Sixti Papae IV sub 
 poenis in eis constitutionibus contentis, quas innovat. 
 
 [Hardouin x. 27 C ff.; Denzinger-Bannwart, § 788 ff.] 
 
 Sessio VI (Jan. 13, 1547). 
 
 Decretum de tustificatione. 
 
 cap.1. de naturae et legis ad tustificandos homines imbecillitate. 
 
 primum declarat sancta Synodus, ad iustificationis doctrinam 
 probe et sincere intelligendam oportere, ut unusquisque agnoscat 
 et fateatur, quod, cum omnes homines in praevaricatione Adae 
 innocentiam perdidissent ... usque adeo servi evant peccato 
 [Rom. vi. 20] et sub potestate diaboli ac mortis, ut non modo 
 gentes per vim naturae sed ne Iudaei quidem per ipsam etiam 
 litteram legis Moysi inde liberari aut surgere possent, tametsi in 
 eis liberum arbitrium minime exstinctum esset, viribus licet 
 attenuatum et inclinatum.? 
 
 [Hardouin x. 33 C; Denzinger-Bannwart, § 793. | 
 
 Canones de iustificatione. 
 
 can.5. siquisliberum hominis arbitrium post Adae peccatum 
 amissum et exstinctum esse dixerit, aut rem esse de solo titulo, 
 immo titulum sine re, figmentum denique a satana invectum in 
 ecclesiam: A.S. 
 
 can. 6. si quis dixerit, non esse in potestate hominis vias 
 suas malas facere, sed mala opera ita ut bona Deum operari, non 
 permissive solum sed etiam proprie et per se, adeo ut sit pro- 
 prium eius opus non minus proditio Iudae quam vocatio Pauli: 
 A.S. (This canon is directed against the dictum of Melancthon, 
 mentioned above, p. 435.) 
 
 [Hardouin x. 40 E; Denzinger-Bannwart, §§ 815, 816.] 
 
 For the relation of the foregoing definitions to the drafts 
 submitted to the Council by the ‘ private congregations,’ see 
 J. Waterworth, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 1848, 
 Ppp. XCili—c. 
 
 1 Cf. St. Aug. de nat. et grat. 42, quoted above, Lecture V, p. 370, n. 2. 
 2 uv. supra (p. 538), canons of the second Council of Orange, statement 
 appended to can. 25. 
 
 
 
 ee —————— ee ee 
 
 ae —- Fs 
 
 Se Oe 
 

 
 FORMULARIES 541 
 
 III. EASTERN ORTHODOX 
 
 1. Confessio Orthodoxa. (ap. E. J. Kimmel, Monumenta 
 jidet Eccl. orient., 1850, p. 83 ff.) 
 
 quaest. xxii. “ But seeing that man, whilst he was yet in the 
 state of innocency, forgat the commandment of God, and plucked 
 and tasted of the forbidden fruit: for this reason was he stripped 
 of the honour which he had from the moment of creation, during 
 the time of his innocency, and driven forth from Paradise. 
 Wherefore he became such an one as the Prophet describes: 
 ‘““ Man being in honour had no understanding, but was compared 
 unto beasts void of reason, and was made like unto them ”’ 
 (Ps. xlix. 20): and he heard the sentence “‘ Earth thou art, and 
 unto earth shalt thou return ”’ (Gen. ili. I0).’ 
 
 quaest. xxiii. ‘ Of what kind was the state of man’s innocency, 
 or purity and sinlessness ? ’ 
 
 Answer. ‘There are two kinds of innocency and integrity : 
 the first is a voluntary departure from sin, as when a man after 
 the daily and habitual exercise of vice by his own choice renounces 
 sin; the second is a simple ignorance and inexperience of sin 
 
 . due to tender age or to other causes. With this latter kind 
 was the innocency of Adam to be compared before his sin, joined 
 as that innocency was with every perfection and innate righteous- 
 ness, both on the side of intellect and on the side of will; in his 
 intellect was included every kind of knowledge, and in his will 
 every kind of goodness and virtue. And seeing that Adam had 
 a most perfect knowledge of God (in accordance with that measure 
 which was granted unto him for that time, and in accordance 
 with that which was seemly), for this very reason that he knew 
 God, he also knew all other things in God.’ [This is proved by 
 the incident of his naming the animals, which he was able to do 
 because he possessed a perfect knowledge of the nature and 
 disposition of each, due not to scientific investigation but to 
 meditation on God and His goodness.] ‘As for his will, this 
 was always subject to reason; though he always retained his 
 liberty, and though it was always in the power of man either 
 to sin or not to sin, as the Scripture saith [Ecclus. xv. II-17, 20, 
 quoted at length]. In this state, therefore, of innocence and 
 sinlessness man was like unto the angels. But so soon as he had 
 fallen through the transgression, forthwith in the same place of 
 Paradise, being endued with the state of sin, he became mortal 
 [Rom. vi. 23]. Then forthwith, the perfection of his reason and 
 intellect having been lost, his will also became more inclined to 
 evil than to good. And in this way the state of integrity and 
 innocency passed into a state of sin, man having already experi- 
 enced evil; and man who had once been perfect was so much 
 
542 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 humbled, that he may now say with David, ‘‘ I am a worm, and 
 no man”’ [Ps. xxii. 6].’ 
 
 quaest. xxiv. ‘ Are all men subject to the same sin? (efvar 
 Taxa Grou of dvOpwrot broxeipevor cis THY adTiy dpapTiva;) 
 
 Answer. ‘As all men were in Adam during the state of 
 innocency, so also from the moment that he fell all fell in him 
 (sro. €opadav ¢is adrév) and remained in the state of sin. Where- 
 fore they are subject not only to sin, but also to punishment 
 because of the sin [Gen. 11. 17; Rom. v. 12]. Wherefore also 
 we are conceived in our mothers’ wombs and are born with this 
 sin, as the holy Psalmist saith [Ps. li. 7]. And this sin is called 
 Ancestral [zporaropixov—or ‘original’]; firstly, because man 
 was defiled by no other sin before it. Though the devil was 
 already corrupted by his own sin; and at his instigation this 
 which is called “‘ ancestral sin’’ began to germinate in man, that 
 sin to which Adam became subject and all we who descend from 
 him. Secondly, because no man is conceived except in sin.’ 
 
 2. Dosithet Confessio (ap. Synod. Hierosol., Kimmel, 
 Op.\cit., Dp. 425 Tf.) 
 
 decretum vi. (Kimmel, p. 432 f.). 
 
 ‘We believe that the first man was created by God and fell 
 in Paradise, when, neglecting the divine command, he obeyed 
 the deceitful counsel of the serpent ; and that thence has flowed 
 in succession the ancestral sin (tiv rpotatopixny dpaptiav) ; so that 
 no one is born according to the flesh who does not bear this 
 burden and perceive the fruits thereof in this present world. 
 And by the “ fruits’? and the “ burden ’”’ we mean, not sin, 
 such as impiety, blasphemy, murder... etc.: for many of 
 the Patriarchs and Prophets, and myriads of others of those both 
 who lived in the shadow of the Law and in the truth of the 
 Gospel, and the divine Forerunner, and especially the mother of 
 God the Word, the ever-virgin Mary, had no share in these or like 
 sins; but we mean those things which the divine justice sends 
 upon man as a penalty on account of the transgression, such 
 as the sweat of toil, tribulations, bodily infirmities, the pains 
 of childbirth, a toilsome life during this pilgrimage, and finally 
 bodily death.’ 
 
 [Note that this formulary appears to restrict the consequences 
 of the Fall to external and physical evils. ] 
 
 3. The Longer Catechism of the Russian Church. (R. W. 
 Blackmore, The Doctrine of the Russian Church, 1845, 
 
 p. 60) 
 Q. ‘Why did not the first man only die, and not allas now?’ 
 A. ‘Because all have come of Adam since his infection by 
 sin, and all sin themselves. As from an infected source there 
 
FORMULARIES 543 
 
 naturally flows an infected stream, so from a father infected with 
 sin, and consequently mortal, there naturally proceeds a posterity 
 infected like him with sin, and like him mortal.’ 
 
 [The definitely Augustinian tone of the sections quoted from 
 the Confessio orthodoxa of Peter Mogila is notable, and contrasts 
 strongly with the vagueness which had previously characterised 
 Eastern thought on this subject. It is doubtless to be attributed 
 to the wave of Latinising influence which swept over Eastern 
 theology in the middle of the seventeenth century, as a reaction 
 from the Protestantising tendencies of the unfortunate Patriarch 
 Cyril Lucaris ({1637). To judge by the sketch of modern Greek 
 theology given by F. Gavin (Some Aspects of Contemporary Greek 
 Orthodox Thought, 1923, Lecture III, § 3, ‘ The Fall,’ § 4, ‘ Original 
 Sin,’ pp. 165 ff.), the current hamartiological teaching of Eastern 
 divines, as represented by two such eminent scholars as 
 M. Androutsos and M. Dyobouniotis, is still strongly coloured 
 by ‘Augustinianism; though Gavin (p. 168) quotes Damalas 
 as deeming ‘concupiscence’ to be morally indifferent, whilst 
 Androutsos rejects the Augustinian disparagement of the good 
 works of the heathen (Gavin, p. 167).] 
 
 IV. LUTHERAN 
 
 (In this and the following section it has not been possible to 
 print more than a few typical texts, owing to considerations of 
 space. | 
 
 1. Confession of Augsburg, A.D. 1530 
 
 art. i. de peccato origins. 
 item docent, quod post lapsum Adae omnes homines secundum 
 naturam propagati nascantur cum peccato, hoc est, sine metu 
 Dei, sine fiducia erga Deum, et cum concupiscentia, quodque 
 hic morbus seu vitium originis vere sit peccatum, damnans et 
 afferens nunc quoque aeternam mortem his qui non renascuntur 
 per baptismum et Spiritum Sanctum. 
 damnant Pelagianos et alios qui vitium originis negant esse 
 peccatum, et ut extenuent gloriam meriti et beneficiorum Christi, 
 disputant hominem propriis viribus rationis coram Deo iustificari 
 DOSSErn.. 
 [F. Francke, libri symbolict eccl. Lutheranae, 1. p. 13 f.; 
 B. J. Kidd, Documents of the Continental Reformation 
 LEQEE L202. | 
 
 2. Schmalkaldic Articles, A.D. 1537 
 
 pars ii, I. de peccato. 
 I. hic confitendum nobis est, ut Paulus Roman. v. affirmat, 
 peccatum ab uno homine Adamo ortum esse et introisse in 
 
544 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 mundum, per cuius inobedientiam omnes homines facti sunt 
 peccatores, morti et diabolo obnoxii. hoc nominatur originale, 
 haereditarium, principale, et capitale peccatum. 
 
 2. huius peccati fructus postea sunt mala opera, in decalogo 
 prohibita, ut sunt diffidentia, incredulitas, falsa fides sive 
 xaxomotia, idololatria, sine Dei timore esse, praesumptio seu 
 temeritas, desperatio, caecitas seu excaecatio, et ut summatim 
 dicam, Deum non agnoscere, non curare; deinde mentiri, 
 nomine Dei abuti, peierare, non orare, non invocare, verbum 
 Dei contemnere vel negligere, parentibus immorigerum esse, 
 occidere, lascivire, furari, decipere etc. 
 
 3. hoc peccatum haereditarium tam profunda et tetra est 
 corruptio naturae, ut nullius hominis ratione intelligi possit, sed 
 ex scripturae patefactione agnoscenda et credenda sit (Ps. li, 
 Rom. v., Exod. xxxiii., Gen. iii.).. quapropter meri sunt errores 
 et caligines contra hunc articulum scholasticorum doctorum 
 dogmata, quibus docetur : 
 
 4. post Adae lapsum hominis naturales vires mansisse 
 integras et incorruptas, et hominem naturaliter habere rationem 
 rectam et bonam voluntatem, sicut philosophi docent : 
 
 5. et hominem habere liberum arbitrium faciendi bonum 
 et omittendi malum et e contra omittendi bonum et faciendi 
 malum, etc. 
 
 [Francke, 1. p. 20 f.] 
 
 3. The Formulary of Concord, A.D. 1577 
 I. Epitome, c. 1. de peccato originals 
 B. Affirmativa 
 
 I 
 
 credimus, docemus, et confitemur, quod sit aliquod discrimen 
 inter ipsam hominis naturam, non tantum quemadmodum initio 
 a Deo purus et sanctus et absque peccato homo conditus est, 
 verum etiam qualem iam post lapsum naturam illam habemus, 
 discrimen, inquam, inter ipsam naturam, quae etiam post lapsum 
 est permanetque Dei creatura, et inter peccatum originis, et quod 
 tanta sit illa naturae et peccati originalis differentia, quanta est 
 inter opus Dei et inter opus diaboli. 
 
 II 
 
 credimus, docemus, et confitemur quod summo studio hoc 
 discrimen sit conservandum, propterea quod illud dogma, 
 nullum videlicet inter naturam hominis corrupti et inter peccatum 
 originis esse discrimen, cum praecipuis fidei nostrae articulis 
 de creatione, de redemptione, de sanctificatione et resurrectione 
 carnis nostrae pugnet, neque salvis hisce articulis stare possit. . . 
 
 
 

 
 _  FORMULARIES 545 
 
 III 
 
 vicissim autem credimus, docemus atque confitemur, 
 peccatum originis non esse levem, sed tam profundam humanae 
 naturae corruptionem, quae nihil sanum, nihil incorruptum in 
 corpore et anima hominis, atque adeo in interioribus et exteriori- 
 bus viribus eius reliquit. sicut ecclesia canit ‘lapsus Adae vi 
 pessima humana tota massa, natura et ipsa essentia corrupta, 
 luce cassa ’ etc. 
 
 {Francke, i. p. 20 f.] 
 
 II. solida declaratio, c. 1. B. I 
 
 et primum quidem constat, Christianos non tantum actualia 
 delicta et transgressiones mandatorum Dei peccata esse agnoscere 
 et definire debere, sed etiam horrendum atque abominabilem 
 illum haereditartum morbum, per quem tota natura corrupta 
 est, inprimis pro horribilt peccato, et quidem pro principio et 
 capite omnium peccatorum, e quo reliquae transgressiones 
 tamquam e radice nascantur et quasi e scaturigine promanent, 
 omnino habendum esse. et hoc malum aliquando D, Lutherus 
 pbeccatum naturae, item fpeccatum personae appellare solet, ut 
 significet, etiamsi homo prorsus nihil mali cogitaret loqueretur 
 aut ageret (quod sane post primorum nostrorum parentum lapsum 
 in hac vita humanae naturae est impossibile) tamen nihilominus 
 hominis naturam et personam esse peccatricem, hoc est, peccato 
 originali quasi lepra quadam sfiritualt prorsus et totaliter in 
 intimis etiam visceribus et cordis recessibus profundissimis 
 totam esse coram Dei infectam, venenatam et penitus corruptam ; 
 et propter hanc corruptionem atque primorum nostrorum lapsum 
 natura aut persona hominis lege Dei accusatur et condemnatur, 
 ita ut natura filii irae, mortis et damnationis mancipia simus, 
 nisi beneficio meriti Christi ab his malis liberemur et servemur. 
 
 [Francke, ii. p. 84 f.] 
 
 V. REFORMED 
 1. Confessio Helvetica prior, A.D. 1536 
 
 7. Von dem menschen. 
 
 Der mensch, die volkomnest bildnus gottes uff erden, under 
 allen sichtbaren creaturen, die edleste und furnemste, der ist 
 uss lib und seel zusamen gesetzt. Der lib ist todtlich, die seel 
 untodtlich, diser mensch als er von gott recht und wol geschaffen 
 war, ist er durch sin eigne schuld in die sund gefallen und hatt 
 das ganz menschlich geschlecht mit ihm in solichn fall gezogen, 
 und solicher arbeitsalikeit underwurflich gemacht. 
 
 2N 
 
5,46 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 8. Von der eerbsiind. 
 
 Dise eerbsucht aber und urspringenliche sund ist das ganz 
 menschlich geschlecht dermasen durchgangen, und hetts der- 
 masen verwust und vergifft, dz dem menschen, der ein kind des 
 zorns und fyend gottes worden war, niema denn gott durch 
 Christi helffen oder widerbringen mocht, und was in ihm guts 
 uberbliben ist, dz wirt durch taglich mangell und prasten fur 
 und fur geschwacht, das es zi eergeren geratet, dann die krafft 
 der sund und des prestens in uns trifft fur, das weder die vernunfft 
 dem, dz sy erkendt nachkomen, noch der hochverstand das 
 gottlich funckli pflanzen und furbringen mag. 
 
 [H. A. Niemeyer, Collectio confesstonum in ecclesiis reformatts 
 publicatarum, Lipsiae, 1840, p. 106 f.] 
 
 2. Confessio Belgica, A.D. 1561 
 
 XIV. De hominis creatione, lapsu et corruptione. 
 
 credimus Deum ex limo terrae hominem ad imaginem suam, 
 bonum, iustum et sanctum creasse, qui proprio arbitrio suam 
 voluntatem ad Dei voluntatem componere et conformem reddere 
 posset. verum cum in honore esset nescivit, et excellentiam 
 suam non cognovit : sed seipsum sciens et volens peccato et per 
 consequens morti ac maledictioni subiecit: dum diaboli verbis 
 et imposturis aurem praebens mandatum vitae transgressus 
 est, quod a Domino acceperat ; seque a Deo, vera ipsius vita, 
 penitus subduxit, atque abalienavit, vitiata omnino atque 
 corrupta per peccatum ipsius natura: quo factum est, ut morti 
 tum corporeae tum spirituali sese obnoxium reddiderit, improbus 
 atque perversus effectus fuerit, atque in omnibus viis et studiis 
 suis corruptus, et praeclara illa dona omnia amiserit, quae a 
 Deo acceperat: adeo ut non nisi exiguae illorum scintillae et 
 vestigia exilia illi relicta sunt, quae tamen sufficiant ad in- 
 excusabiles reddendos homines .. . idcirco quaecunque de 
 libero hominis arbitrio traduntur ea merito reiicimus, cum homo 
 sit servus peccati: nihilque ex se possit, nisi datum sit illi de 
 coelo. 
 
 XV. De peccato originals. 
 
 credimus Adami inobedientia peccatum, quod vocant originis, 
 in totum genus humanum diffusum esse. est autem peccatum 
 originis corruptio totius naturae et vitium haereditarium, quo 
 et ipsi infantes in matris utero polluti sunt: quodque velut 
 noxia quaedam radix genus omne peccatorum in homine pro- 
 ducit, estque tam foedum et execrabile coram Deo, ut ad universi 
 generis humani condemnationem sufficiat. meque vero per 
 baptismum penitus aboletur aut radicitus evellitur, quando- 
 quidem ex illo tanquam ex infausta ac corrupta scaturigine 
 
 De 
 

 
 FORMULARIES 547 
 
 perpetui rivuli assidue exoriuntur et effluunt ... hinc ergo 
 Pelagianorum errorem damnamus, qui hoc peccatum originis 
 nihil aliud esse asserunt quam imitationem. 
 
 (Niemeyer, pp. 368-70. ] 
 
 3. Confessio fider Gallicana, A.D. I561 
 
 Article IX 
 
 Nous croyons que l’homme ayant esté créé pur et entier et 
 conforme a l’image de Dieu, est par sa propre faute descheu de 
 sa grace qu'il avoit recue, et ainsi s’est aliéné de Dieu .. . en 
 sorte que sa nature est du tout corrompue: et estant aveuglé 
 en son esprit et dépravé en son cceur, a perdu toute integrité 
 sans en avoir rien de residu. .. . 
 
 Article X 
 
 Nous croyons que toute la lignée de Adam est infectée de 
 telle contagion, qui est le péché originel et un vice héréditaire, 
 et non pas seulement une imitation, comme les Pelagiens ont 
 voulu dire. . . . Et ainsi que en la personne d’iceluy (sc. Adam) 
 nous avons esté dénués de tous biens, et sommes trébuchés en 
 toute pauvreté et malédiction. 
 
 Article XI 
 
 Nous croyons aussi que ce vice est vrayement paché: qui 
 suffit a condamner tout le genre humain, iusques aux petis 
 enfants dés le ventre de la mére, et que pour tel il est reputé 
 devant Dieu, mesmes qu’aprés le baptesme c’est toujours péché, 
 quant a la coulpe, combien que la condamnation en soit abolie 
 aux enfans de Dieu, ne la leur imputant point par sa bonté 
 gratuite : outre cela, que c’est une perversité produisant tousiours 
 fruicts de malice et de rebellion, tels que les plus sains, encore 
 quils y résistent, ne laissent point d’estre entachez d’infirmitez 
 et de fautes, pendant qu’ils habitent en ce monde. 
 
 Article XII 
 
 Nous croyons que de cette corruption et condamnation 
 générale, en laquelle tous hommes sont plongez, Dieu retire ceux 
 lesquels en son conseil éternel et immuable il a éleus par sa seule 
 bonté et miséricorde en nostre Seigneur Jesus Christ, sans con- 
 sidération de leurs ceuvres, laissant les autres en icelle mesme 
 corruption et condamnation, pour démontrer en eux sa iustice, 
 comme és premiers il fait luire les richesses de sa miséricorde. .. . 
 
 [Niemeyer, pp. 316-318.] 
 
548 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 4. The Westminster Confession, A.D. 1647 
 Chapter VI. Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punish- 
 
 ment thereof. 
 
 I. Our first parents, being seduced by the subtilty and tempta- 
 tion of Satan, sinned in eating the forbidden fruit. This their 
 sin God was pleased, according to his wise and holy counsel, to 
 permit, having purposed to order it to his own glory. 
 
 II. By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and 
 communion with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly 
 defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body. 
 
 III. They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin 
 was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature 
 conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary 
 generation. 
 
 IV. From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly 
 indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly 
 inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions. 
 
 V. This corruption of nature during this life doth remain in 
 those that are regenerated; and although it be through Christ 
 pardoned and mortified, yet both itself and all the motions 
 thereof are truly and properly sin. 
 
 VI. Every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression 
 of the righteous law of God and contrary thereto, doth in its own 
 nature bring guilt upon the sinner, whereby he is bound over to 
 the wrath of God and curse of the law, and so made subject to 
 death, with all miseries spiritual, temporal, and eternal. 
 
 [P. Schaff, The Creeds of the Evangelical Protestant Churches, 
 
 1877, p. 615 f.] 
 
 (A.D.'1553 ; 1562 5) 1571) 
 
 ARTICLE IX 
 
 VI. ANGLICAN. 
 
 De peccato originale 
 
 peccatum originis non est (ut 
 fabulantur Pelagiani) in imita- 
 tione Adami situm, sed est 
 vitium et depravatio naturae 
 culuslibet hominis ex Adamo 
 naturaliter propagati, qua fit, 
 ut ab originali iustitia quam 
 longissime distet, ad malum 
 sua natura propendeat, et caro 
 semper adversus spiritum con- 
 
 Of Original or Birth Sin 
 
 Original Sin standeth not in 
 the following of Adam (as the 
 Pelagians do vainly talk), but 
 it is the fault and corruption 
 of the Nature of every man, | 
 that naturally is ingendered of 
 the offspring of Adam ; where- 
 by man is very far gone from 
 original righteousness, and is 
 of his own nature inclined to 
 

 
 FORMULARIES 
 
 cupiscat. unde in unoquoque 
 nascentium iram Dei atque 
 damnationem meretur. manet 
 etiam in renatis haec naturae 
 depravatio ; qua fit ut affectus 
 carnis, Graece ¢povnpa capkés, 
 (quod alii sapientiam, alii sen- 
 sum, alii affectum, alii studium 
 carnis interpretantur) legi Dei 
 non subiiciatur. et quanquam 
 renatis et credentibus nulla 
 propter Christum est con- 
 demnatio, peccati tamen in 
 sese rationem habere concu- 
 piscentiam fatetur Apostolus. 
 
 549 
 
 evil, so that the flesh lusteth 
 always contrary to the spirit ; 
 and therefore in every person 
 
 born “into wathis soworled aot 
 deserveth God’s wrath and 
 damnation. And this  in- 
 
 fection of nature doth remain, 
 yeainy them) thatwareienhe- 
 generated ; whereby the lust 
 of the flesh, called in the 
 Greek, dpdvypa capxés, which 
 some do expound the wisdom, 
 some sensuality, some _ the 
 affection, some the desire of 
 the flesh, is not subject to the 
 Law of God. And although 
 there is no condemnation for 
 them that believe and are 
 baptised, yet the Apostle doth 
 confess, that concupiscence and 
 lust hath of itself the nature 
 of sin. 
 
 ARTICLE. X 
 
 De libero arbitrio 
 
 ea est hominis post lapsum 
 Adae conditio, ut sese naturali- 
 bus suis viribus et bonis 
 operibus ad fidem et invoca- 
 tionem Dei convertere ac prae- 
 parare non  possit; quare 
 absque gratia Dei, quae per 
 Christum est, nos praeveniente, 
 ut velimus, et co-operante, 
 dum volumus, ad pietatis opera 
 facienda, quae Deo grata sint 
 et accepta, nihil valemus. 
 
 Of free will 
 
 The condition of Man after 
 the fall of Adam is such, that 
 he cannot turn and prepare 
 himself, by his own natural 
 strength and good works, to 
 faith, and calling upon God: 
 Wherefore we have no power 
 to do good works pleasant 
 and acceptable to God, with- 
 out the grace of God by Christ 
 preventing us, that we may 
 have a good will, and working 
 with us, when we have that 
 good will. 
 
 ARTICLE XIII 
 
 Opera ante tustificationem 
 
 opera quae ffiunt ante 
 gratiam Christi et Spiritus eius 
 affatum, cum ex fide Jesu 
 
 Of Works before Justification 
 
 Works done before the grace 
 of Christ, and the Inspiration 
 of his Spirit, are not pleasant 
 
550 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Christi non prodeant, minime 
 Deo wagrata) ssunteys © neque 
 gratiam (ut multi vocant) de 
 congruo merentur; Imo cum 
 non sint facta ut Deus illa 
 fieri voluit et praecepit, peccati 
 rationem habere non _ dubi- 
 tamus. 
 
 to God, forasmuch as they 
 spring not of faith in Jesus 
 Christ, neither do they make 
 men meet to receive grace, 
 or (as the School-authors say) 
 deserve grace of congruity ; 
 yea rather, for that they are 
 not done as God hath willed 
 
 ee 
 
 and commanded them to be 
 done, we doubt not but they 
 have the nature of sin. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE G 
 INFANT BAPTISM 
 
 THE ceremony of baptism, as known to the Apostolic Church, 
 seems to have formed the central act of a process which 
 may be described as ‘Christian Initiation.” This began with 
 ‘Repentance’ (presumably manifested by an oral confession of 
 sin), was consummated by the immersion of the catechumen in 
 the living waters of a spring or river, symbolising the washing 
 away of sin, and concluded with the imposition of hands, which 
 imparted the gifts of the Spirit. As we have pointed out in the 
 text and elsewhere,! the New Testament references to Initiation 
 assume that its recipients are adults, and that the dispositions 
 required in them are those of conscious and deliberate renuncia- 
 tion of sin and idols, and of personal faith in and allegiance 
 to Christ. Thus conceived, the rite illustrates vividly the true 
 principles of ethical sacramentalism, which demand not merely 
 the due performance of a sacred act by the minister but the right 
 response of heart and will on the part of the worshipper, and 
 which regard the objective opus operatum as ineffective unless 
 met and completed by the subjective opus operantis. 
 
 It will be clear from this account of the original institution 
 of baptism that the custom of baptising unconscious infants, 
 which, as we have suggested, seems to have grown up spon- 
 taneously on a basis of popular feeling, and not of any reasoned 
 theory, and which has now for many centuries been the normal 
 means of entrance to the Christian Church, involves two very 
 serious difficulties: (1) the apparent incongruity of administer- 
 ing a sacrament, the purpose of which is declared both by its 
 symbolism and by the language of Scripture to be the ‘ washing 
 away of sins,’ to beings who ex hypothes1 cannot have committed 
 
 1° The Origins of the Sacraments,’ in Essays Catholic and Critical, 
 1926, pp. 369 ff. 
 

 
 INFANT BAPTISM 587 
 
 any sins; (2) the exclusive emphasis which the practice appears 
 to lay upon the opus operatum, in view of the presumption that 
 unconscious infants are incapable of repentance or of personal 
 faith in Christ. It might in fact be contended, that if the 
 epithets ‘ magical’ and ‘ mechanical’ can be applied to any parts 
 of the traditional sacramental system at all, it is the custom of 
 infant baptism first and foremost to which they ought to be 
 affixed ; and such a contention might be thought to derive some 
 force from the curious stratagems employed by the Jesuit 
 missionaries in North America to enable them to baptise dying 
 infants amongst the heathen surreptitiously (by unobservedly 
 flicking a few drops of water over the infant’s face, and simul- 
 taneously whispering ego te baptizo, etc., whilst apparently 
 engaged in conversation with the parents), for the purpose of 
 adding as many souls as possible to the Kingdom of God. 
 
 We have already pointed out that the first of these diffi- 
 culties stimulated the growth of the idea of ‘original guilt,’ 
 or guilt of nature, as its own solution. If, however, the 
 history of the Fall-doctrine has been correctly portrayed in 
 Lectures I to VI, this idea is no part of the body of revealed 
 Christian truth, but a mere human figment: and in whatever 
 way it be conceived—whether as the guilt of having sinned ‘in 
 Adam,’ of being destitute of the splendid endowments alleged to 
 have been originally possessed by Adam, or of being infected 
 by ‘concupiscence ’—it is equally irrational, as involving the 
 self-contradictory assertion that we are held ‘ guilty’ by God 
 in respect of facts for which we have ex hyfothesi no personal 
 responsibility whatsoever. If, then, the insistence of the historic 
 Church upon the permissibility, and indeed necessity, of infant 
 baptism is to be justified, some theoretical basis for this custom 
 other than the idea of ‘ original guilt ’ must now be found. 
 
 It is necessary at this point to distinguish between the fact 
 (assuming it to be a fact) of, and the veasons for, the necessity, 
 or at least high desirability, of the baptism of infants. That 
 infants may and should be baptised is a proposition which rests 
 solely upon the actual practice of the Church; as in the fifth 
 century, the sole argument for the fact is simply this: ‘The 
 Church does baptise infants, and we cannot suppose that the 
 Church has acted wrongly or without good cause in so doing.’ 
 It is not possible here to enter into such vast questions as the 
 nature of the stewardship which the Church holds in regard to 
 the methods and conditions of administering the sacraments, 
 the amount of liberty which our Lord may have intended to 
 leave to His Church in regard to developments or variations of 
 sacramental usage, or the degree of auctoritas which attaches 
 to a custom which has come to be accepted by the whole, or 
 
 1 See F. Parkman, The Jesuits in North America, i. pp. 185 f., 206 f. 
 
552 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 practically the whole, of the Christian society. It must suffice 
 to state that in the author’s view the argument a praxi ecclesiae 
 is the only, but also a sufficient, ground for affirming the 
 legitimacy and laudability of Paedo-baptism: and that those 
 who do not trust the instincts of the historic Church to the extent 
 which this argument requires should in logic either abandon the 
 custom altogether or interpret it solely as a picturesque and 
 dramatic method of registering the name of the infant as an 
 honorary member of the Christian society. 
 
 Those, however, who are prepared on this ground to accept 
 the proposition that infant baptism is permissible and desirable, 
 will still demand some explanation as to why it should be desirable. 
 If the theory that ‘ original guilt’ is thereby remitted be ruled 
 out, and if, nevertheless, the baptism of infants be regarded as 
 strictly sacramental and grace-bestowing, and not as merely 
 symbolical, there appears to be no explanation of its efficacy 
 other than that hinted at by St. Gregory of Nazianzus in the 
 words already quoted : 
 
 vnmiaxous ev 
 odpnyis, deEopevorcs 8’ dkos Kal odpnyts apiorn * 
 
 and developed by Julian of Eclanum in the suggestion that 
 whilst infants, not being vez, do not need venia, they are never- 
 theless capable of receiving ‘inluminatio spiritualis, adoptio 
 filiorum Dei, municipatus Jerusalem caelestis, sanctificatio, atque 
 in Christi membra translatio, et possessio regni caelorum.’ ? 
 We must frankly regard baptism as having two sets of effects, 
 negative and positive, sin-remitting and strength-bestowing. 
 And we must conceive of the baptism of adults as fraught with 
 both kinds of operation, in that it both remits men’s actual sins 
 and imparts to them the germ of the supernatural life ; whilst 
 the baptism of infants involves only the positive operation of 
 making its recipients members of the Church and of Christ, 
 capable of receiving the influx of grace which, when their Initia- 
 tion has been completed by Confirmation, will assist them 
 gradually to overcome that ‘inherited infirmity’ which daily 
 experience shows, so far from being abolished by the opus 
 operatum of baptism, to remain ‘ yea, even in them that are 
 regenerated.’ It would follow from such a view of infant 
 baptism that the idea of its efficacy cannot be dissociated from 
 the influences of a Christian upbringing and of life within the 
 shelter of Church membership, and that the indiscriminate 
 baptism of children, with regard to whom no guarantee exists 
 that they will be trained as Christians, is both useless and to be 
 deprecated as a cheapening of the Sacrament. 
 
 1 carmina i. § i. 9, 22, 91, 92 (quoted above, p. 290, n. I). 
 2 op. imperf. c. Iulian. i. 53. 
 
INFANT BAPTISM 553 
 
 Nevertheless, though part of the efficacy of infant baptism 
 must be conceived as prolepiic, in that by admitting its recipients 
 to the Christian society it makes it possible for them in future 
 years to imbibe the graces which flow from a supernatural 
 environment, the actual practice of the Church clearly assumes 
 that the administration of the rite has its own immedzate efficacy ; 
 for otherwise there would be no reason for baptising dying 
 infants, who ex hypothesi have no prospect of being brought to 
 Confirmation or of being trained up in Christian virtue within 
 the fold of the Church militant here in earth. We must, then, 
 believe that through the act of the Christian society, represented 
 for the time being by the minister of the Sacrament, the begin- 
 nings of the Christ-life are planted in the infant soul, even though 
 there may appear to be no conscious effort to prepare for or to 
 appropriate them. Those who find this a hard saying may be 
 asked to weigh well the words of Fr. C. C. Martindale, S.J. : 
 ‘Less and less objection should be taken to the Catholic baptism 
 of children or the weak-witted, in proportion as modern psycho- 
 therapy proves how very deep and active is the sub-consciousness 
 of those who, like children or seeming “‘idiots,’’ have their 
 superficial consciousness very undeveloped or ill-controlled,’ and 
 “ Even in those whose wits do not seem capable of coping with 
 the natural life of man, the germ of the supernatural may yet 
 take root.’ } 
 
 The question may be raised, as it was raised in the fifth 
 century,” ‘ How can such a view of the rationale of infant baptism 
 be reconciled with the clause of the Oecumenical Creed which 
 affirms ‘“‘one baptism for the remission of sins’’?’ If it were 
 an admitted principle that the meaning of the clauses of the 
 Creed must be determined in complete abstraction from their 
 history, this question would possess a certain amount of force 
 as an objection to the explanation of Paedo-baptism indicated 
 above. Butno such principle has been formulated by any person 
 or body with any claim upon our intellectual allegiance, and the 
 Council of Chalcedon, which first conferred official authority 
 upon the ‘Creed of the 150,’ did not append to it any com- 
 mentary or any canons to govern its exegesis. It is therefore 
 reasonable to assume that the true meaning of this clause is 
 its historical meaning—that is, the meaning which it bore in the 
 minds of those who first drew it up. Now it is well known that 
 this clause does not occur in the original Nicaenum, which 
 ended with the words ‘and in the Holy Ghost’ and the anti- 
 Arian anathemas. According to the generally accepted theory of 
 Hort, it is of Jerusalemitic origin, as indeed is the main body 
 of our ‘Nicene Creed’; which represents the baptismal creed of 
 
 1 God and the Supernatural (1920), p. 285. 
 2 See Lecture V, p. 345, 
 
554 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 the Mother Church of Christendom, revised (perhaps by Cyril of 
 Jerusalem in A.D. 362-364) by the insertion into it of phrases 
 drawn from the real Nicene Creed (1.e. that actually approved 
 by the Council of Nicaea). The true meaning of this clause 
 must, then, be the meaning which it would have borne for Cyril 
 and for the Church of Jerusalem in the middle of the fourth 
 century. And there can be no reasonable doubt that the thought 
 in their minds was that of baptism as administered to adults 
 according to Apostolic and primitive usage, preceded by 
 ‘Repentance’ and immediately followed by ‘Confirmation ’ 
 and first Communion: a glance at Cyril’s catecheses tlluminan- 
 dorum and catecheses mystagogicae is enough to show that 
 adult baptism was for him and his flock the normal form of 
 baptism. When, therefore, we repeat this clause in the Creed 
 as a part of the Eucharistic Liturgy, what we affirm is our belief 
 in baptism as anciently administered to adults, for the washing 
 away of actual sins, and as still so administered, habitually in 
 the mission field to converts from heathenism, and rarely in 
 Christian countries: we neither affirm nor deny the legitimacy 
 of infant baptism, which is a collateral development from the 
 original idea and institution of baptism, and which depends for 
 its authority not upon any credal or conciliar formula, but upon 
 the actual practice of the Church and the semi-articulate instincts 
 of the general body of Christendom. 
 
 ADDITIONAL NOTE H 
 
 PASSAGES BEARING ON THE FALL-DOCTRINE FROM 
 PRE-AUGUSTINIAN WRITERS NOT MENTIONED IN LECTURE IV 
 
 (1) Latin Writers 
 NOVATIAN (flor. c. A.D. 250) 
 de trinitate1. [PL III. 914 A] 
 (physical mortality the result of the Fall) 
 
 post quae hominem quoque mundo praeposuit et quidem ad 
 imaginem Dei factum: cui mentem et rationem indidit et 
 prudentiam, ut Deum posset imitari: cuius etsi corporis terrena 
 primordia, caelestis tamen et divini halitus inspirata substantia : 
 quem, cum omnia in servitutem illi dedisset, solum liberum esse 
 voluit. et ne in periculum caderet rursum soluta libertas, 
 mandatum posuit, quo tamen non inesse malum fructu arboris 
 doceretur, sed futurum, si forte ex voluntate hominis de con- 
 temptu datae legis praemoneretur. nam et liber esse debuerat, 
 
 1 See A. E. Burn, Introduction to the Creeds (1899), pp. 104 ff, 
 

 
 PRE-AUGUSTINIAN PASSAGES 555 
 
 ne incongruenter Dei imago serviret: et lex addenda, ne usque 
 ad contemptum dantis libertas effraenata prorumperet: ut et 
 praemia condigna et merita poenarum consequenter exciperet, 
 suum iam habens illud, quod motu mentis in alterutram partem 
 agitare voluisset: ex quo mortalitas, invidia utique, in ipsum 
 redit ; qui cum illam de obedientia posset evadere, in eamdem 
 incurrit, dum ex consilio perverso Deus esse festinat: cuius 
 tamen poenam nihilominus indulgenter temperavit, dum non 
 tam ipse quam labores eius maledicuntur super terram. 
 
 COMMODIAN (? ¢c. A.D. 250) 
 
 instructiones adversus gentium deos. [PL V. 201-262] 
 XXXV. de ligno vitae et mortis 
 
 Adam protolapsus, ut Dei praecepta vitaret, 
 
 Belias tentator fuit de invidia palmae ; 
 
 contulit et nobis seu boni seu mali quod egit, 
 
 dux nati [ ? ] nativitatis, morimur indeque per illum, 
 ex divino ipse ut recedens exsul a verbo. 
 
 XLVI. catecuminis 
 in baptismo tibi genitale solox lavatur 
 
 [‘ genitale solox’ means ‘ancestral filth,’ 7.e., presumably, 
 ‘original guilt.” For the word ‘solox,’ v. PL, footnote 1m loc., 
 or Du Cange, Glossarium med. et inf. lat. (Henschel-Favre), s.v. 
 But B. Dombart, Commodiant carmina, in Corp. eccl. script. 
 Lat., 1887, p. 66, emends the line so as to read— 
 
 in baptismo tibi genitalia sola donantur. ] 
 
 PACIAN OF BARCELONA (flor. A.D. 360-390) 
 
 sermo de baptismo. [PL XIII. 1089 c ff.] 
 
 accipite ergo, dulcissimi, homo ante baptismum in qua morte 
 sit positus. scitis certe illud antiquum quod Adam terrenae 
 origini praestitutus sit : quae utique damnatio legem illi aeternae 
 mortis imposuit; et omnibus ab eo posteris quos lex una retinebat 
 haec mors in genus omne dominata est, ab Adam usque ad 
 Moysen ... interea nos omnes sub peccato tenebamur, ut 
 fructus essemus mortis: siliquarum escis et pecorum custodiae 
 destinati, id est, operibus immundis, per malos angelos, quibus 
 dominantibus nec facere licuit nec scire iustitiam. .. . 
 
 Adam postquam peccavit, ut retuli, dicente tunc Domino, 
 terra es, et in terram tbis, addictus est morti. haec addictio in 
 
556 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 genus omne defluxit. omnes enim peccaverunt, ipsa iam urgente 
 natura, sicut apostolus dicit: quia per unum hominem peccatum 
 introivit, et per delictum mors, et sic in omnes homines devenit, in 
 quo omnes peccaverunt. dominatum est ergo peccatum, cuius 
 vinculis quasi captivi trahebamur ad mortem, mortem scilicet 
 sempiternam. 
 
 AURELIUS CLEMENS PRUDENTIUS (A.D. 348-Tafter 405) 
 apotheosis, 909-931 
 
 (A strongly ‘ Western’ or ‘ twice-born’ view of the Fall and its 
 results is expressed, but ‘ traducianism ’ 1s repudiated.) 
 
 haec prima est natura anima, sic condita simplex, 
 decidit in vitium per sordida foedera carnis. 
 
 exin tincta malo peccamine principis Adae 
 
 infecit genus omne hominum, quod pullulat inde, 
 et tenet ingenitas animarum infantia in ortu 
 primi hominis maculas, nec quisquam nascitur insons, 
 vitandus tamen error erit, ne traduce carnis 
 transfundi in sobolem credatur fons animarum 
 sanguinis exemplo, cui texta propagine vena est. 
 non animas animae pariunt, sed lege latenti 
 fundit opus natura suum, quod parvula anhelent 
 vascula vitalisque adsit scintilla coactis. 
 
 quae quamvis infusa novum penetret nova semper 
 figmentum, vetus illa tamen de crimine avorum 
 ducitur, inluto quoniam concreta veterno est. 
 inde secunda redit generatio et inde lavatur 
 naturae inluvies, iterumque renascimur intus 
 perfusi, ut veterem splendens anima exuat Adam. 
 quae quia materiam peccati ex fomite carnis 
 consociata trahit, nec non simul ipsa sodali 
 
 est incentivum peccaminis, inplicat ambas 
 
 vindex paena reas peccantes mente sub una 
 peccandique cremat socias cruciatibus aequis. 
 
 (2) Greek Writers. 
 
 EPIPHANIUS (c. A.D. 315-1403) 
 GET A a IL Le reT S| 
 
 [Adam before the Fall was innocent and simbple.] 
 
 amAobs Te Hv Kal dkakos, odK Gvoud TL KeKTNMLEvos Erepov, od Sdéns, od yroduns, 
 od Biov diaxpicews erixAnow Kexrnpévos, } ’Adau pdovov KAnbels, 76 épunvevdpevoy 
 avOpwros, 
 
 
 

 
 PRE-AUGUSTINIAN PASSAGES 557 
 
 haer. lii. 2. [PG XLI. 957 A] 
 
 [Against the Adamian sect, who held their meetings in hypocausts 
 or subterranean heating-chambers.—Adam and Eve before the Fall 
 were not tormented by heat or cold. | 
 
 "Addu yap Kai Eva odx év broxavorw olkw tiv Slarav elyov, obre ev droypd 
 Twt vremelovto, ote Kpvos adrods eddprov’ Hv Sé adrois djp Kxabapdraros, 
 Kal mdons evxpacias edrdxtws ex Oeod pepepnuévos, ovre amnvdrnre wuxplas 
 TETOVMMEVOS, OUTE andeoTaTH EeKmUpwmcer Kavawvos emnypTynuevos’ Siaira Se 
 duBpoola pdda ex Beod wemompevn’ 6 xa@pos éréraxto, Oupndias Kal edlwtas 
 mEeTONpevos. Kal ove plyet UmémiTTOV OvTE KavawnL, ws Edy. 
 
 haer. \xix. 52. [PG XLII. 282 D, 284 a] 
 
 [free choice the source of sin, both in Adam and in ourselves.] 
 
 [fhe Word co-operated with the Father and the Spirit in the 
 creation of the universe] iva Setéy, 671 76 attiov THs T00 "ASdp, mapaBdcews 
 ovK a6 TOD TETAAKEeVvaL, OVSE ATO TOO TETOLNKEVaL TO GpapTés 7) TO THS TapaKohs 
 €axev, add’ amo idlas mpoawpécews . . . od yap & yéyovey ev 7H avOpadmw, eis 
 Tobro ex Tod Snpwoupyod Tob avaitiov THs TOO Aday dpuaprias Tod apaprety yéyove, 
 kat 61a todro qpaptrev’ GAda 76 abrefovoiov adr emédwxe, Kal aitios éavT@ 
 
 Exacros yiverat dpaprias. 
 haer. Xxxvii. I, 3 (ed. K. Holl, ap. Gr. Chr. Schr., ii. p. 51) 
 
 [A vague connexion between the disobedience of Adam and Eve 
 
 and the idolatry of their descendants seems to be implied. | 
 , \ 3 e ~ A A ” A A > A 3 / 4 A 
 Kalamep yap €& vbrapxis tos wept Evav cai rov "Adap Hadtyoev, ovTw Kal 
 viv, KpUTTwY €auToV ev TE TH TapovTe Kal ev TH ypovw THv "lovdaiwv aype tis 
 ~ “A ~ / 
 tod Xpiotob mapovoias. elta Kal mpoBawdvtrwy tav xpdvwv Aixvous Gvras Tods 
 avOpwmmovs TH Sv adrob ex ths mapaxons AndOcion Bpwoes Ett brovofevwv Kai 
 A A / 
 epeOilwy eis mepiccotépay amdarnv amd Tod Ovtos Oeod ddiorynot. ... amd yap 
 A ~ Aa , A 
 Tob €vods Kat GAnOiv0d Oeot amoorjcas avtrovs <vexiconce mada THY THs 
 > , \ , Ye / > ea A 4 , 
 eldwdrodarpeias Kal moAvOetas BAdogynpov Kevodwvriav. . . . ovK Tv O€ alTLos povos 
 © pavopevos TOTE Odis, GAA 6 ev TH Oder Odus AadArjoas (dypi Sé 6 SiaBodros) Kai 
 lo A ; ¢ 
 THY axonv Tob avOpwmov tapdéas Sia THs yuvatkds. Kal ovdé TO EvAoV Hv Guaprtia 
 (Beds yap ovddév movnpov durever), yrdow dé éverroince 7d EvXov Tod cidévat 
 > /, ‘ ~ A chee, | A \ 2 , e 7 3 A A A t4 
 ayalov re kal datAov. Kal odyt dia 70 eidevar 6 Oavaros, aAAa dia THY TapaKojr. 
 A A A ¢g A / > 
 kal yap 4) 7aca Tob €xOpod tére avoKevi ovx Evexev TO Bpwparos yéyovev, adda 
 Aa A , A 
 €vexev TOO epydoacba avrots tiv mapaxonyv. Oley mapaKxovaarTes TOTE TOD pev 
 / 
 mapadeloou Ewer yivorrat, émitiyunbevres SixaioTaTa. .. . 
 
 haer. \xx. 3. [PG XLII. 344 4] 
 [Adam did not lose the image of God by his Fall.] 
 
 tA / > ‘ > >? , >? a >? \ 4 
 GAdoe . . . O€dovar A€yeww Tore pev elvar TO Kar elkdva ev TH “Addy, Ews 
 eo b] a / \ / > ‘ ~ 5A \ > , 4] A E.) > bo be 
 Gre ev mapaxoh yéyove Kal Bexpwxev amo rob EvAov, Kal e€ewabn ad’ od dé 
 ? , > 4 \ > bee A \ AXA , bd \ a > Q , Q pats 
 e£ewaOn, amwdAece TO KaT ElKOva. Kat TOAAH Tis EoTl THY avIpwrwv pvooToOLa 
 $ ” rua ¥2 a ¢ ” ¢ 
 ols ov xpi) ovdé mpos wpav el€at, ovTE ToUToLS, OUTE ExELVOLS TOis OVTWS 7 OUTw 
 ~ > ‘ > >? /, cA A 
 Aéyovaw aAN elvar pev morevew ev TH avOpwmmw TO Kat’ Eikova, €v TavTt dé 
 
 padora, kat ody adds. 
 
558 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Joun CuRYSOSTOM (A.D. 344-1407) 
 in c. i. Genes. hom. xvi. [PG LIII. 126 f.] 
 
 ; ; ; ; 
 [Man’s paradisal state was devoid of pain.] 
 > , ld / e 4 ~ > , ~ aA 
 evvonady por paKapiorntos v7epBodny, mAs avatepor Hoav TOV owpaTiKdv 
 ~ ~ A 4 
 amdvrwy, THs Kabamep Tov ovpavoy OUTW THY YHV @kovuy, Kal Ev O@paTL TUYXAVOVTES 
 ~ , ‘ / MM > 7 wv € , 
 Ta TOV cwpdtwv ovx Uiéuevov’ ovTE yap oTéyns, OTE Gpddgov, ovTE ‘partion, 
 ~ +) , \ > € aw b} , A ~ 
 ovre dAdov ovdevds Tav ToLovTwy edéovTo. Kal ovxY amTADs, OVSE Elk ToObTO 
 € ~ 7 , € , 4A > 7 6 A AA b) ~ , 
 Hiv emeonunvatro 4 Oeia ypady, GAX’ iva pabovres tHv dAuTov avtav Tavrnv 
 , A > A e > aA , 
 Siaywyiv, Kal Tov avwduvov Biov, Kal tHv ayyeAuKny, ws eEimeiv, KaTaoTaOL, 
 nw ¢€ A > > A / A 
 €reoav LOwpev pera TatTa TovTwWY amavTwWY EpHuovs adTods YyeEvopévous, Kal 
 a ? > , tA 4 
 Kabamep amo troAAfs mAovTov mepiovaotas eis eAaxtoTny meviay KatevexOevras, 
 lol , A “a / 
 TH padupia avray 70 wav emuyparbwpev. 
 
 ep. ad Olymp. ii, 3. [PG LII. 574] 
 (The Fall of Adam condemned the whole human race.] 
 
 i A 4 C.F A A € ld 3 Ud A A A A 4 
 Ore yap Huaprev 6 Adda Tv GpapTiay exeivny THY xadeTV, Kal TO KOLVOV 
 / / / / , li 
 
 andvrwy avOpwmmwv Katedixace yevos, WOXOw TOTE KaTEdiKaleToO. 
 
 in c. 1. Genes. hom. ix. [PG LIII. 79] 
 
 [As a result of the Fall man lost his empire over the animals.] 
 
 Tapa yap THv apxnv ody oUTW Ta TMpaypaTra SLeKELTO, GAA’ eSedolKer Kal Erpepe 
 7a Onpia, kal Uméxumte TH SeamdTH. €7rE1d7) Sé THs Twappyoias efémece Sia THY 
 mapaKkory, Kal TA THS GpxAs HKpwrnpiacbyn ... . Ews pev yap elxe THY Tpos TOV 
 feov mappnatav, doBepos Kat trois Onpiois Fv émerd7) 5é mpocéKpovae, Kal Tovs 
 €axdtous Ta&v auvdovrAwy ededoixer AouTov. 
 
 in Matt. hom. xxviii. 3. [PG LVII. 353] 
 [The souls of children are not evil, and are in the hand of God. 
 
 ? 4 \ ” 4 > a¢ a ~ Wa cd aA aA , 
 ovdé€ yap ev uxynv amoppayetcay Tob awpartos evtat0a mAavGabar Aowrov. 
 7, A A € ~ /, e aA 
 Sixatwy yap yuxal ev yeipt Oeod' ef Sé at Tay Sdixalwy, Kal at tov waldwr 
 Q > A / 
 ovde yap exetvat Tornpat. 
 
 in Matt. hom. lviii. [PG LVIII. 569] 
 
 [Our Lord’s calling a child to Him proves that child-nature, and 
 therefore human nature as such, 1s not an evil thing. | 
 
 eldes ms aAw Huds mpos Ta Pvoixa KatopOwpara exkadeirar, Serxvds Ort 
 €K Tpoaipecews Tatra KaTopOoby Suvarov, Kal tv Tovynpav Maviyaiwv émoropiler 
 Avtrav; ef yap movnpov 4» vais, Tivos evexev exetOev THs didocodias Ta 
 mapadelypata €Aket; mardiov dé por doxet ofddpa tradiov é€v TH pwéow orhoat, 
 TOv raddv andvrwy TovTwv amynAAaypevov. 70 yap ToLwodTov madiov Kal amovolas 
 kal dofopavias Kai Backavias Kai didoverkias Kal mavrwy THY ToLvovTwY amHAAaKTAL 
 maddy x. T. A. 
 

 
 PRE-AUGUSTINIAN PASSAGES 559 
 
 in ep. ad Hebr. c. vil. hom. xii. [PG LXIII. 99] 
 [The human will, though free, 1s prone to evil.] 
 
 2. ... mpoatpeois, moAAds Seyouevn petaBodAds, kal viv pév trodro, viv dé 
 €xeivo aipovpevn’ o€uppemis yap adtn mpos Kakiay. 
 [Grace co-operates with, but does not ‘ prevent,’ our wills.) 
 
 3. ov mpopOdver Tas juerépas BovdArjaers, tva pi AvpHnvytat 70 adte§ovorov Hyadv. 
 Grav dé ypeis EAdpeba, tote TOAARY elodyer Tiv BojnPeay wiv (the position 
 later known as ‘ semi-Pelagianism’: cf. de verb. apost. habentes eundem 
 spiritum, i. 5 [PG LI. 276]). ovre yap 6 Beds, odre 4 Tob mvevparos xdpis THY 
 HuETEpav mpopOaver mpoaipecw* aAda Kael peév, avapever S€ Wore ExovTas Kal 
 BovdnOévras oixobev mpocedbciv’ elra emerdav mpoceAPwpev, tore THY Tap’ 
 €avTod mapexer ovuppaylav dmacap. 
 
 in ep. ad Rom. hom. x. 2,3. [PG LX. 477 1.] 
 
 (A ‘ minimising’ discussion of the classical N.T. Fall-passage. 
 St. Paul says ‘ As through the one man’s disobedience the many 
 were made sinners,’ etc. [Rom. v. 19]. But it seems unreasonable 
 that one man should be deemed to have sinned, because another has 
 disobeyed: therefore, by ‘ sinners’ the Apostle must mean ‘ liable 
 to the penalty of sin,’ 1.e. death. Even so, however, it 1s difficult 
 to see why mankind should be liable to death for Adam’s sin: the 
 A postle states the fact, but is silent as to the reason for 1t.) 
 
 @otep yap dua THs mapaxoys Tod évos avOpdrov apaptwdAol KateotdOynoav ot 
 moAAot x.7.A. Kat Soxet pev Enrnua od puxpov Exew 7 elpnuevov’ dv dé Tis 
 axpiB@s mpooexn, Kal totro edKoAws AvOyoeTrar. ti mor odv €ore TO CyrHpa 5 
 70 Aéyeww 81a THs mapaKkohs TOO évds GpapTwdAods yevéaBar ToAAOVs. TO per yap 
 dpaptorros exeivov Kal yevopevov Oyntod, kal todvs €€ avrob Tovovrous elvar, oddev 
 dmeukos’ TO O€ €k THS mapaKoys exelvou ETrepov dpaptwdAdv yevécbar, moiay av 
 dxodovbiay axotn ; evpeOjoeTar yap ovTw unde Sixnv ddetAwy 6 ToLobToS, Et ye [7) 
 olkobev yéyovev duaptwAds. 
 
 ti ovv €otw evtadda 76 “Apaptwadot ; eyot dSoxet 7O brevOvvor KoAdoer Kal 
 KaTadedixacpevor Oavarw. Ore pev odv Tob "Ada amobavdvTos martes eyevopueba 
 Ovntol, cadds Kal dra ToAADY EderEe* 70 SE CnTovpevor, Tivos Evexev TOOTO yEeyorver. 
 GAN’ otKétt TodTO mpooTibnaw: ovdé yap a’T@ mpos TO Tapov aurTEdct mMpds 
 yap *Iovdatov 7 payn tov apdiBddAdrovta Kal KatayeAdvra THs 81a Tob Evods 
 Sixacoovrys’ . . . . Sidmep adinow dAvrov. [In any case, our mortality 
 is not such a very great evil: for the thought of death restrains 
 us from many sins, and, if there had been no death, the martyrs 
 could not have won their crowns. ] 
 

 
 
 
 
 Sen 
 
 
 
 
 im 
 
 a “Kath, ' a, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 INDICES 
 
 I. 
 
 SCRIPTURAL, PSEUDEPIGRAPHIC, AND 
 RABBINICAL REFERENCES. 
 
 (a) OLD TESTA- 
 
 MENT 
 GENESIS 
 : PAGE 
 1. 20-27 AlN. 2 
 any. 272 
 3, 31 Ag as 3: 
 li. 18-25 eat? £! 
 a»? IQ, 20 - 361 f: 
 iia. : - 40-51 
 NE Gibson | PEQCI 2 
 LV. 2-Sa) Eh eae 
 Eee : z 49 
 vi. 1-8 . 20-23 
 ae 2 23.1 
 eS j f 60 
 Viil. 21 A : 60 
 Exopus 
 vil. 3 : 16 7”. 2 
 xxil. 16 LXX 122 n. 2 
 LEVITICUS 
 Mie: : 224 
 NUMBERS 
 MAN OOZe uh ares 
 xxi. 6-9 I7i %.2 
 JUDGES 
 1Xq, 29 iG”: 2 
 t SAMUEL 
 li. 25 16. 2 
 xix. 9 16”. 2 
 2 SAMUEL 
 XXiv. I 16 ”.2 
 NEHEMIAH 
 176.67 4 Ae B00 
 
 Jos 
 PAGE 
 1V 717 : eee? 
 XIV. 4 : oleae ty: 
 »? 4, 5 224, 304, 
 378 
 XV. 14, 15 Py, 
 XXV. 4 : : LZ 
 XK VIL 21”. 1 
 PsALMS 
 Vili. 5 ; 21 n. 4 
 muax.53 LXX Zoe 
 li. 5. 19, 224, 304, 378 
 1b 9. vb P72 ae am 503 
 ix, 22 A s 65 
 Cxix. 67 213 
 (ie. @ 6, oh, ee An fe) 
 Gxt 2. bs , I9 
 PROVERBS 
 XV Gedy hl eke 1 OF, 
 ECCLESIASTES 
 i. 18 2 SSO 
 ISAIAH 
 Xi. I-9 159 7”. 2 
 pO. 2.4 Keg 16 7. 2 
 ES Fy 2 ; 16 
 JEREMIAH 
 XVii. 9 15 ”.1 
 Keel eso +: 3 15 
 EZEKIEL 
 Vill ae 15”. 2 
 2? 20 I5 
 XXVili. II-I9Q . 50 
 DANIEL 
 1x:'20 A 14 $90 
 
 561 
 
 Amos 
 PAGE 
 
 lil. 6 16 ”. 2 
 
 MicaH 
 14”. 3 
 2 ESDRAS 
 
 v. wmfra, under (c), 
 Pseudepigrapha, 4 Ezra 
 
 JUDITH 
 X11. 16 122”. 2 
 
 WISDOM 
 
 xs ‘ 
 
 ECCLESIASTICUS 
 XV. II-I7 a8) 02 
 <a kaey ; 63 
 XXV. 24 
 XXVIl. 5, 6 O38 
 SXOCULLIES ire 
 
 (b) NEW 
 TESTAMENT 
 
 St. MATTHEW 
 VAL : ar 
 
 v. 28 ° Mine ai. 
 
 ai 80 ¢ TiO #1 
 
 VIALS IIo”. 1 
 
 Vil. II : Be ae 
 
 ” 16-19 97 n.2 
 
 ix. 13 ¢ on OO 
 20 
 
562 
 ip PAGE 
 x. 33, 34 eA 
 > 43-45 Ti0”.1I 
 KU SSi3oy LL... 1 
 xXVersiir 107 
 ” 19 °, 97 
 XV. 23-35 OO 
 MIA 98 n. I 
 ee < OO 
 xxii. 29 ff. 107 
 xxiv. 28 252: 4 
 St. MARK 
 a. 15 96 2.1 
 iv. 15 TIO N. I 
 Wilsod ts 107 
 Aes din 97, 482 
 Vlil. 33 Ito ”, I 
 <6 98 2.1 
 xii. 24 ff bike 9 
 XV. 45 294 
 St. LUKE 
 
 Vl. 43-45 - 97 %. 2 
 
 x. 18 495 
 > 4 a + on OF 
 »» 24-36 IIo”. 1 
 xiii. 2-5 Bapvne a) 
 XV. 7 g6 
 A iis 107 
 KUL 244 Wot, 
 Pi a 
 A030 106 
 MNS Las a uteent LO. d 
 ST. JOHN 
 ill. I-2I. 08 ff. 
 2? 5 ‘4 378 
 iv. 44 103 ”. I 
 vi. 63 at ALO# 
 vlil. 44 TIO #%. 1 
 TK 719 98, 214 
 xii. 25 Se LOS Hk 
 TAY ot 110 ”. I 
 xiii. 16 103 2.1 
 ee 230 103 ”.1 
 xiv. 30 IIO 2.1 
 XV. 20 103 ”.1 
 XVIEL eae ALO tis S 
 », 2-14 eLOF 
 XVii. 15 IIo”. 1 
 Acts 
 Vin TS G57 220, te 1 
 Pb Oyen Gs. 137 2. 3 
 ROMANS 
 
 WEG Me. i) ZOOM A 
 iil, 12-15 128”. 1 
 a T5 491 
 AM ek Le he it 322 
 
 PAGE 
 Vv. I2-21 124-134, 
 335 ”. I 
 », 12 364, 379 
 ee Bs) A SL eS 
 vi. I-II 134-138 
 Zo 369 
 vii. 5 139 
 ry 725 140-1 46, 
 327, 481 
 ” 8 459 n.1 
 », 18-24 335 2. I 
 >? 19 * > 31 
 EX eg ee 
 Vili. 3 153, 154 
 Oy, : tab 
 2» 9 : 147 
 », 18-22 157-159 
 IX 213”. 5 
 », 20, 21 437 
 Tee 381 
 Nay! eat S10 %. 2 
 xi033 381 
 Xill.v2¢, La 325 
 XIV. 23 375, 431 
 I CORINTHIANS 
 i. 16 220 ”. I 
 li. 8 160 
 Vv. 5 Se LOO 
 7 328 Nn. 3 
 vi. 13 148 
 2 819 148 
 Vil. 5 Ae OO 
 See | 220 n. 2, 
 233%. 1 
 SaeeO 21 CeEOO 
 Xl. 10 ieeks 
 Sap as4 kl oO 
 XV. S122 (t23 1, 
 » 22 335 ”. 1 
 An Zo 220 nm. I 
 ones Aude . 148 
 aE 211 
 »» 45-49 123 
 » 47 9 
 2 CORINTHIANS 
 li. II 160 
 iv. 4 160 
 <Poez, ie Savino 
 Ri? 301 2. 6 
 »» 2-4 192, 251 
 aS | e 160 
 GALATIANS 
 ii. 15 96 ”%. 2 
 Vv. 16-24 146 f. 
 sew ae 218 
 vi. II 125”. 1 
 
 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 EPHESIANS 
 x PAGE 
 i. IO t 198 
 ” 23 198 
 shake 161 
 ao LES sea 
 379, 462 
 9:15 Hf. - 198 
 V1, I2 160 
 PHILIPPIANS 
 123 244. 2 
 ne EES Be Ah - 486 
 COLOSSIANS 
 i. 15 a a? 
 », 19, 20 163 ”. 1 
 ii. 16 ff. 183 
 
 1 THESSALONIANS 
 li. 18 160 
 t TIMOTHY 
 ii. 14 
 Hy. £ 
 v1. 20 
 
 ize 
 244 
 183 
 
 HEBREWS 
 
 iv. I5 
 
 vii. 9 
 
 9? 9, Io. 
 
 JAMES 
 Halt ge pe 118”. 1 
 
 2 PETER 
 TLA, 72; 20! 
 114,172 
 
 352 
 200 
 
 197, 373 
 
 1A ue 
 
 il. 4 
 I JOHN 
 
 ili. 4 o  RS7 seae 
 
 » QO 135 n. 5 
 
 Vo 1O; at 7 357 
 JUDE 
 
 O47 ik SEL A: 
 
 Ti vur : Be 6 
 
 REVELATION 
 alt hot : - 495 
 Leber fet 453 
 
 (c) PSEUDEPI- 
 GRAPHA 
 
 APOCALYPSE OF 
 ABRAHAM 
 Xxiii., xxiv. . 58 
 2 BARUCH 
 XViil. vee 4 : 78 
 re ath be : ye 
 xlvill. 42,438" “pea 
 
 
 

 
 INDEX OF REFERENCES 
 
 PAGE 
 
 liv. 15, 19 snl ees 
 TVEta 0° |. 77, 
 Leth Cet ee nad TT 
 
 Book oF ADAM 
 AND EVE 
 Lass 57 nN. 1 
 I ENocH 
 
 iv. 13 24 N. 3 
 Bat hy i DAMES 
 23 ; RAVES 
 Vi.—xi. 24-26, 161 7.3 
 vi. 6 : 24 
 Vil. 4 ’ oe5 
 120 ‘ ‘ 25 
 7 Yost = ae So ee) 
 Ves . 26, 161 2. 3 
 Xvi. I6I 7. 3 
 XK IS; 4 > eG 
 Ixv. 6-8 . d 2 
 ERA 5 1617%.°3 
 pee O40 ee 7, 
 » I! 57 %. 3 
 Ixxxv.—xc. AO Tee 
 Ixxxix. I0 rd eee 
 GVit ; I6I 7. 3 
 
 2 ENOCH 
 
 PAGE 
 viii. P TO2/%.. 1 
 Xviil. (A text) 24 7. 3 
 oe abd AA oie LOL 
 XENIAG wee 57 
 REX (AS Texty ae 5 7 
 xiae. : : 55 
 4 EZRA 
 lll. 2I-23 . 80 
 lv. 30 80 
 Vil; Lin 2 80 
 », 16-118 80 
 LLU Cumin 252 2. 4 
 JUBILEES 
 iil. 17-35 . Mit eo 
 vii. 26-39 Tiled. 
 Des He <1 ed 
 TEsT. ASSER 
 i.-iv. 6 150 2. 4 
 Lest. Lev. 
 XVill. IO, II fal eX 
 Test. NAPTH. 
 EBS : he A 
 TEST. REUB. 
 Vv. 5-7 : we O 
 
 563 
 (d@) RABBINICAL 
 DOCUMENTS 
 BABA BATHRA 
 PAGE 
 16a . ; uM OT 
 17a) - - OS 
 BERAKHOTH 
 Olaw 652.1 
 GEN. RAB. 
 
 Cyan, . Sa OT 
 S40 : 2 OF 
 ECCLES. RAB. 
 see Bip : ae OF 
 LEV. RAB. 
 
 2 Ola 65”. 1 
 NUM. RAB. 
 
 Ty 3 : i OF 
 PIRQE ’ABOTH 
 ill. 24 86 n. I 
 QIDDUSHIN 
 30b . 62, 67 
 YEBAMOTH 
 78a . 220 nN. 2 
 
 202 
 
AUTHORS. 
 
 AALL, A., 234 ”. 2 
 
 Abaelard, Peter, 398 
 
 Adeimantius, 293 
 
 Aeschylus, 35, 235 ”. 6 
 
 d’Ailly, Pierre, 418 
 
 d’Alés, A., 231 ”. I 
 
 Allen, W. C., 98 1. 2 
 
 Ambrose, St., 299-307, 373 ”. 3 
 
 ‘ Ambrosiaster,’ 307-310, 328, 
 379 %. 2 
 
 Anastasius Sinaita, 191 
 
 Androutsos, M., 543 
 
 Anselm, St., 294, 397 
 
 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 9 u. 5, 234 
 nN. 4, 400-408 
 
 Aristotle, 625) nse) 180, \145 /-1., 
 235 2. GO, 254 #. 5, 277 %. 3 
 
 Athanasius, St., 257-262 
 
 Athenagoras, 177 ”. 3 
 
 Augustine, St., 170, 234 ”. 4, 293, 
 300, 309, 314, 317 ff., 430f. 
 
 BACHER, W., 65 ”. I, 67 un. 4, 5, 6 
 
 Baius, Michael, 360 7. 3, 363, 422 
 
 Barnabas, Epistle of, 150 ”. 4, I71 
 
 Basil, St., 254 ”. 3, 264-269, 276 ”.1, 
 293 
 
 Bensly, R. L., 75 ”. 1 
 
 Bergson, Henri, 484 ”. 1, 523 
 
 Bernard, St., 416 ”. 2 
 
 Bethune-Baker, Dr. J. F., 237 n. 3 
 
 Bevan, Dr. Edwyn, 160 x. 9 
 
 Beza, Theodore, 436 n. 1 
 
 Bigg, Dr. C., 203, 205 ”. 1, 207 ”. I, 
 208, 215 . 2, 219, 487 
 
 Bindley, T. H., 351 2. 3 
 
 Bonaventura, St., 415 
 
 Bonwetsch, G. N., 58 2. 3, 250 . I 
 
 Bousset, W., 64 ”. I, 140 ”. 2, 147, 
 183 ”. 3, 215 4. 1 
 
 Box, Dr. G. H., 75 . 1, 80 mu. 1, 
 252 n. 4 
 
 Bradley, F. H., 465 ”. 3 
 
 Bright, "Dr. »W., 332 %. 12, 4996. 
 353 Nn. 2, 4 
 
 Brightman, Canon F. E., x 
 
 Brown, Dr. W., 485 ”. 1 
 
 Brown, Driver and Briggs, 252 n. 4, 
 277 %. 3 
 
 Buchler;*Dr. A.,°277 7..3 
 
 Bull, Bishop, 361 
 
 Buonaiuti, E., 330 . I, 366 ”. 3 
 
 Barkitt, Dro F.C. (1Sjng02 wee 
 324 %- 3 % 
 
 Burn, Dr. A. E., 5547.71 
 
 Burney, Dr. C. F., 100 u. I 
 
 Bury; J: B...332) 2a 
 
 Butler, Samuel, 381 
 
 CaLvin, John, 322, 426, 431 f., 434, 
 436 f. 
 
 Casartelli, L. C., 6 ”. 1 
 
 Caspari, C. P., 357 ”. 1 
 
 Cassian, John, 350 x. 3 
 
 Chapman, Dom John, O.S.B., 99 
 
 Nn. 2 
 
 Charles, Dr. R. H., 24 . 1, 64 . 1, 
 75 %. I, 139 %. 3, 495 ”. 1 
 
 Chemnitz, Martin, 435 . 2 
 
 Chrysostom, St. John, 558 f. 
 
 Church, Dean, 440 
 
 Clement of Alexandria, 202-208 
 
 Coleridge, S..1.,.47°%. 2, Sig caren 
 
 Commodian, 555 
 
 Cooke, Dr. G. A., 41 2. 1 
 
 Coulton, G. G., 419 ”. I 
 
 Coustant, P., 385 nn. 2, 3 
 
 Cumont, F.,.6 #. 1;7 2". 2,38 
 
 Cyprian, St., 295 f. 
 
 Cyril of Alexandria, St., 351 #. 3 
 
 Cyril of Jerusalem, St., 263 
 
 DANTE, 406 f. 
 Deissmann, A., 124 ”. I 
 Delavigne, Casimir, 464 n. 2 
 
 504 
 
 ee a oe a ee ee 
 

 
 INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 Delff, 100 
 
 Deussen, P., 5 ”. I 
 
 Didache, 150 n. 4 
 
 Diekamp, Fr., 319 u. I 
 
 Diognetus, Epistle to, 177 n. 3 
 
 Dositheus, 542 
 
 Draguet, R., 254 ”. 5, 388 n. 3 
 
 Driver, Dr. S. R., 14 . 2 
 
 Du Cange, 233 ”. 4, 240 ”. 2, 555 
 
 _ Duchesne, L., 319 ”. I, 347 ”. I, 
 348 nn. I, 2, 354 2%. 3, 385 nN. 4. 
 
 Dyobouniotis, M., 543 
 
 EDERSHEIM, A., 96 7. 2, IIQ 7”. 2 
 Ellis, Havelock, 468 
 
 Epiphanius, 556 f. 
 
 Erichson, Alfred, 444 
 
 Erigena, Scotus, 397 
 
 Esser, G., 231 ”. I 
 
 Eucken, R., 320 u. I 
 
 Everling, O., 159 7. 3 
 
 FAIRBAIRN, A. M., 434 ”. 4 
 Farquhar, J. N., 5 ”. 1 
 Formby, Dr. C. W., ix 
 Frazer, Sir James, 48, 56 7. I 
 
 GALEN, 235 7. 6 
 
 Gavin, F., 543 
 
 Gibbon, 297 ”. I 
 
 Ginzberg, Louis, 74 ”. 4, 307 n. 3 
 
 Gloucester, Bishop of (Dr. A. C. 
 
 be Headlam), 108 ”. 3, 119 ”. 2 
 
 Goethe, 465, 523 ”. I 
 
 Goodricke, A. T. S., 29 ”. 4 
 
 Gore, Bishop, 99 ”. 2, 350 
 
 Goudge, Dr. H. L., 40 n. 1 
 
 Gratian (decretum of), 408 n. I 
 
 Gray, G. Buchanan, 22 7. 1 
 
 Green, Canon Peter, ix 
 
 Gregory of Nazianzus, St., 282-292, 
 293, 345 . 2, 552 m. I 
 
 Gregory of Nyssa, St., 260, 269-282, 
 301 f., 343, 389, 526 
 
 Gregory of Rimini, 415 
 
 HARNACK, A. von, 97 ”. I, 171 %. I, 
 194,) 108, #2.) 6," 219, (258,200, 
 347 %. I, 382 ”. 2, 416 
 
 Hawkins, Sir John, 97 n. I 
 
 Hegel, 503-506 
 
 Hermas, 150 #. 4, 172 
 
 Herodotus, 25 7. 3 
 
 Hilary of Poitiers, St., 24 m. 4, 
 298 f. 
 
 Hilgenfeld, 171 ”. I, 252 ”. 4 
 
 Hilt, Fr., 269 ”. 2 
 
 565 
 
 Hippocrates, 233 7. 6, 235 n. 6 
 Hippolytus, 252 7. 4 
 
 Holmes, S., 29 ”. 4 
 
 Hooker, Richard, 220 n. 2, 440 n. 2 
 Howorth, Sir Henry, 180 n. 2 
 Hubert, Fr., 443 
 
 Huet, P. D., 215 ”. 2, 219 ”. I 
 Higel, Baron F. von, 464 n. 1 
 
 IenaTius of Antioch, St., 261 2. 6 
 
 Inge; WK. 4G%. 1-3) 51019.) Ly 
 528 n. I 
 
 Irenaeus, 9 ”. 3, 177 ”. 3, 188 un. 2, 
 189-199, 247, 293, 305 
 
 Jackson, A. V. Williams, 6 2. I 
 
 James, Dr. M. R., 75 m. I, 311 u. 2 
 
 James, W., 155, 169 
 
 Jerome, St., 295 ”. 2, 31I ”. 2, 376 
 
 John of Damascus, St., 277 x. 3, 
 293, 388 . 
 
 Johnson, H. J. T., 513 2. 2 
 
 Josephus, 30 ”. 4, 161 
 
 Jowett, Dr. Benjamin, 115 
 
 Julian of Eclanum, 341 mn. 1, 2, 
 343 ”. I, 356 
 
 Jung, C. G., 68, 470 f. 
 
 Justin Martyr, 105 m. I, 173-175, 
 456 
 
 Justinian, the Emperor, 210 %. 2, 
 232 
 
 KANT, 497-503 
 
 Keats, 284 n. 3 
 
 Kennedy, Prof. H. A. A., 135 ”. 1 
 Khayyam, Omar, 532 
 
 Kidd, Dr.) Be}. say ient 
 
 Kirk, K. E., 65 2. 3 
 Krafft-Ebing, 468 
 
 Krampf, A., 269 ”. 2 
 
 Lacey, Canon T. A., x, 320 ”. 4 
 
 Lactantius, 188 n. 2, 297 f. 
 
 Lake, Prof. Kirsopp, 105 m. I, 
 115 ff., 135 
 
 Langdon, S., 48 ”. 1 
 
 Laski, John, 444 
 
 Leporius, 350 ”. 3 
 
 Lidzbarski, 41 x. I 
 
 Lightfoot, J., 98 ”. 3, 222 n. I 
 
 Lightfoot, Bishop, 171, 183 ”. I 
 
 Ljunggren, G., 398 nv. 3, 413 1. 2 
 
 Loewe, Hi Mf... %)73 nig 
 
 Lombard, Peter, 411 
 
 Loofs, Prof. F., 250 ”. 1, 254 ”. 4, 
 824 n. I, 347 nN. I 
 
566 THE FALL AND 
 
 Lucretius, 235 ”. 6 
 Luther, Martin, 426, 428 f., 433 f. 
 
 McDovea.t, Dr. W., 472 f., 479 
 
 McTaggart, Dr. J. E., 504, 505 
 
 Maldonatus, 307 x. 3 
 
 Mansel, H. L., 382 n. 1 
 
 Marett,( Dr. iK- R13 
 
 Marius Mercator, 349, 385 f. 
 
 Martindale, C. C., S.J., 553 
 
 Martyrium Polycarpi, 222 n. 3 
 
 Maximus Confessor, 388 . 1 
 
 Melancthon, Philip, 435 
 
 Methodius of Olympus, 188 n. 2, 
 249-2560, 277, 280 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 382 
 
 Milton, John, 39, 45 wm. I, 
 27I nN. 3 
 
 Moberly, Dr. R. C., 305 
 
 Mogila, Peter, 541, 543 
 
 Mohler, J. A., 428 ”. 1 
 
 Molinos, 461 ”. 3 
 
 Moller, E. W., 269 n. 2 
 
 Monceaux, P., 231 ”. I, 245 
 
 Montefiore, C. G., 98 x. 2 
 
 Morfill and Charles, 57 ”. 5, 161 n. 1 
 
 Morin, Dom Germain, O.S.B., 309 
 n. 1 
 
 Moulton, J. H., 6.1 
 
 Mozley, J. B., 362 . 3, 370, 374 f. 
 
 Miller, F. Max, 5 un. 1, 2 
 
 Miller, J., 507-509 
 
 47> 
 
 NEWMAN, Cardinal, 261 
 Nicephorus, 273 7. 2 
 Norden, E., 320 n. 2 
 Novatian, 554 f. 
 
 Occam, William, 413 x. 2 
 
 Oesterley and Box, 73 n. 3 
 
 Olympiodorus, 388 x. I 
 
 Origen, 208-231, 247 ”n. I, 2, 266f., 
 209,° 271 RAZi2IO MN 4) ZO5 A250, 
 293, 304, 371, 453, 5°97 
 
 PAcIAN of Barcelona, 555 
 
 Papias, 99 
 
 Parkman, F., 551 ”. I 
 
 Pascal, 9 
 
 Pelagius, 334 f., 337-346 
 Petavius, 323 ”. I 
 
 Pfleiderer, ‘0.7147 
 
 Philo Judaeus, 30 7. 4, 81-84, 524 
 Photius, 210 ”. I, 349 ”. 2 
 
 Plato, 84, 214, 525 
 
 ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Plotinus, 280 n. 5, 326, 526, 528 
 Plutarch, 7 ”. 1 
 
 Pohle-Preuss, 309 7. 2 
 Porphyry, 209 n. 3 
 
 Porter; -F.\G., 65 #.°15163 
 Porteus, Bishop, 442 f. 
 
 Prosper of Aquitaine, 350 n. 3 
 Prudentius, 556 
 
 Pullain, Valerand, 444 
 
 QUENSTEDT, J. A., 429 n. 4 
 
 RASHDALL, H., 293 mn. I, 2, 3, 4 
 
 Reuter, H., 321 n.2;322 "ig 
 
 Ritschl, A., 293 ”. I, 427 ”. I, 438 
 
 Riviére, J., 269 ”. 2, 293 ”. I 
 
 Robertson, Dr. A., 261 2. 3 
 
 Robinson, Dr. J. Armitage, 113 n. 1, 
 T9O #%. 1, 198 ”. 6 
 
 Rottmanner, Dom O., O.S.B., 328 
 nN. 3 
 
 Rufinus, 210 ”. 2, 211 ”. 4 
 
 Russell, Bertrand, 482 
 
 SABATIER, A., 293 ”. I 
 
 Sanday and Headlam, 124 mn. I, 2, 
 127 N. I, LAI ”. 3,258, 37514 
 
 Schechter, S., 74 ”. 4 
 
 Schechter and Taylor, 62 n. I 
 
 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 438 
 
 Schopenhauer, 524 
 
 Schouppe, F. X., S.J., 309 ”. 2 
 
 Schirer, E.; 1199.12 
 
 Scotus, Duns, 176, 408-418 
 
 Seeberg, R.; 226 2325347 not 
 
 Shakespere, 277 ”. 3 
 
 Singer, S.,.67 ”. I 
 
 Skinner,.,J., 23.1, 41 %u2/A2 sek 
 45:-%. 2, 48 2.1 
 
 Smith, G. A., 159 ”. 2 
 
 Smith, W. Robertson, 24 n. 4 
 
 Sophocles, 14 
 
 Soranus, 233 7. 6 
 
 Souter, Prof. A., 125 ”. 2, 307 #. 4, 
 334 %. 1 
 
 Stawley, «Dr: *]. *H:,/;220uaee 
 269 n. 2 
 
 Stanton, V., 100 ”. 2 
 
 Stewart, J. A., 47 
 
 Stone, Dr. Darwell, x, 278 n. 3 
 
 Streeter, Canon’-B. 0Ha107# sme, 
 00 %..1, IOI #.£1,°106 92 
 
 Suicer, 277 n. 3 
 
 swete, Dr. H..B., 349 niepegsr 
 nn. I, 2 
 
 Symmachus, 30 #. 3 
 
 
 

 
 INDEX OF AUTHORS 
 
 TANSLEY, O., 485 7. 2 
 
 Tatian, 175 f., 198 . 5 
 
 Taylor, C., 61 ”. I, 98 n. 2 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy, 441 f. 
 
 Tennant, Dr. F. R., ix, 10, 57-7. 5, 
 FACRLO Zou 21h 227) M2, 297) eas; 
 539-537 
 
 Tertullian, 231-245, 293, 295 
 
 Thackeray, H. St. John, 122 2. I 
 
 Theodore of Mopsuestia, 349, 351 
 
 Theodotion, 24 ”. 3 
 
 Theophilus, 176 
 
 Thompson, Francis, 284 n. 3 
 
 Thucydides, ror 
 
 Tillemont, 273 n. 2 
 
 Mixcront, | :, 232. %%.'1,13,,292 #r 2} 
 363 Nn. 3 
 
 Tollinton, R. B., 208 n. 1 
 
 Turmel, J.; 231 #.'1, $23 4. 1, 363, 
 416 nu. 2 
 
 VENANTIUS Fortunatus, 9 ”. 3 
 Victorinus Afer, 252 n. 2 
 
 567 
 
 Vincent of Lérins, 11, 187, 384 
 n. 1 
 
 Violet and Gressmann, 252 ”. 4 
 
 Vossius, G: 3777329) 7.°5 
 
 WARNER, J. H., 399 u. 1 
 
 Waterworth, J., 540 
 
 Watkins, O. D., 137 
 
 Weber, F., 69 n. 2, 73 
 
 Westcott, Bishop, 209 m. I, 416 
 n. I 
 
 Westermarck, E., 520 m. I 
 
 Wicksteed, P. H., 211 n. 2 
 
 Wied, Hermann von, 445 
 
 YELVERTON, E., 446 
 
 ZAHN, Dr. Theodor, 205 n. I 
 Zosimus, Pope, 348, 385 
 Zwingli, 436 . 1 
 
III. 
 SUBJECTS. 
 
 ABSOLUTE, the, 5, 505 
 
 actus concupiscentiae, 367 
 
 Adam and Christ, parallelism of, 9, 
 126 ff. 
 
 Adam, alleged intellectual powers 
 of, 361; allegorised as universal 
 of ‘ Man,’ 203, 229, 306; colossal 
 stature ascribed to, 71; mortal 
 by nature, 53; perfect sanctity 
 ascribed to, 362; said to have 
 been buried on Calvary, 307; 
 said to have been ultimately 
 saved, 198 n. 5 
 
 Adam-story, adoption as Fall- 
 narrative, 29 f., 51 f.; original 
 significance of, 40-51 
 
 African theology, harsh character 
 of, 330 
 
 Ahura Mazdah, 6 
 
 Albigenses, the, 399 
 
 ‘am ha- ave¢, 59, 70, 119 
 
 ‘ Ambrosiaster,’ identity of, 309”. I 
 
 Anachronisms, 533 
 
 ‘ Ancestral sin,’ 388, 542 
 
 Angels, pre-mundane Fall of, 161 f., 
 453, 495 
 
 Angel-story of Gen. vi., 20-29, 30, 
 77, 114 
 
 Angra Mainyu, 6 
 
 Antioch, Christology of, 349 ff. 
 
 Aphthartodocetic controversy, 254 
 n. 5 
 
 amokatdoracs, 279 ”. 4 
 
 Apollinarianism, 282, 291, 292 2.1,2 
 
 Apologists, Fall-doctrine in, 173- 
 177 
 
 Appetite, hypertrophy of, 156, 288; 
 moral neutrality of, 60, 153, 276, 
 
 343 
 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 400-408 
 Archetypal Man, the, 271, 526, 536 
 Arts, origin of the, 25, 35, 49 
 Augustine, St., ancestor both of 
 Latin Catholicism and of the 
 
 568 
 
 Reformation, 321 f.; conversion 
 of, 325; life of, 323-326 ; person- 
 ality and achievements of, 319 ff. 
 Augustinianism, 360-384 
 Aureole of light, would have been 
 bestowed on Adam but for the 
 Fall, 269 
 
 BAPTISM, 99, 104, 134 ff., 306, 
 3606 f., 421 
 
 Baptism of infants, 219-226, 241, 
 279, 289, 295, 344, 379, 412, 
 559-554 
 
 Bar Kokhba, 81 
 
 Birth-stain, conception of, 224 ff. 
 
 CAELESTIUS, 333, 337, 347; 353, 
 357 %. 3, 385, 387 
 
 Canon of the New Testament, 181 
 
 Carthage, Synod of (A.D. 411), 347 
 
 Carthage, Synod of (A.D. 418), 348, 
 391 
 
 ‘ Categorical imperative,’ 498 
 
 Celestine I., Pope, 387 
 
 ‘Censorship,’ the, 471 
 
 ‘Coats of skins,’ allegorised by the 
 Greek Fathers, 229, 251, 275, 285 
 
 Complexes, 471, 474, 491 
 
 ‘Concupiscence,’ 34, 137, 154, 240, 
 243 £., 342, 351, 365, 402, 4II, 
 422, 432, 458 
 
 Congregational Confessions of 
 Original Sin, 419 ”. 2, 443-446 
 
 Consciousness, 470 
 
 Conversion, instantaneous, 155, 331, 
 426 
 
 Corruption (see also ‘ Disintegra- 
 tion ’), 254 
 
 Council 7m Trullo, the, 385 n. I 
 
 Creed, Nicene, 314, 553 
 
 Creed,‘ Niceno-Constantinopolitan,’ 
 
 314, 345, 412, 553 
 
 
 
 Ca: ae 
 
 : 
 : 
 
 
 

 
 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 
 
 da quod iubes, 336 
 
 Damnation, eternal, 
 original guilt, 372 f., 486 
 
 ‘Deification’ through the Eucharist, 
 201, 202itae. 295; 202 
 
 Deism, 356, 535 f. 
 
 Deposit of Faith, the, 313 f., 317 
 
 Determinism. See Free-will 
 
 Devils, personal, belief in, 108-112, 
 159 ff., 175, 527 
 
 ‘ Devil’s rights, the,’ 292 ff. 
 
 ‘ Disintegration,’ 277, 288, 388 
 
 donum indebitum, 401, 427 n. 1 
 
 donum superadditum, supernaturale, 
 363, 422 
 
 Peas +O, 147. 1..° 253; .20T,7 320, 
 398 
 
 exmTa@ous (see also ‘ Fall,’ the term, 
 history of), 268 
 
 élan vital, 523, 534 
 
 Entelechies, 523 
 
 Ephesus, Council of, 353 f., 385, 389 
 
 ‘ Ethico-physical’ theory of salva- 
 tion, 255 
 
 Eucharist, the, 278. See also ‘ Deifi- 
 cation’ through the Eucharist 
 
 Eugenics, 477 
 
 ‘Eve,’ origin of name, 41 ”. I 
 
 Evil, anhypostatic theory of, 255, 
 ZOO 260002955" 87t57. 405) at 
 tributed to God’s appointment, 
 16, 17, 435, 532 
 
 Evolution, 530 f. 
 
 “exemplarist ’ soteriology, 352 
 
 Exorcism, 379 
 
 Exsufflation, 379 
 
 Fatt and Redemption, mutual 
 implication of, 8, 131, 208 
 
 Fall, Anglican doctrine of the, 437- 
 443; Hegelian interpretation 
 of, 503 ff.; collective pre-natal, 
 228, 513 ”. 1; individual pre-natal, 
 theory of the, 84, 208-219, 266, 
 508-512; inferred from existence 
 of evil, 18, 19; infinite malice 
 of, 364; of man, the, compara- 
 tively venial, 195, 410, 4560; the, 
 source of bodily death, 123; the, 
 source of physical evil, 76 f.; 
 the term, history of, 252 . 4, 
 275, 455; the ultimate, 524 ff. ; 
 timeless conception of, 501 
 
 Fall-doctrine, the, crucial issues 
 implicit in, 168, 246, 359; 
 ‘ Hellenic ’ and ‘ African ’ 
 
 versions of, 200 f., 246 ff.; its 
 
 penalty of 
 
 569 
 adoption by the Church, 118-121 ; 
 
 residual minimum of, formu- 
 lated, 452-461 
 Fall-story, allegorical interpreta- 
 
 tion of, 192, 216, 269 f., 285, 360 
 Flesh, the, 139 f., 145, 146-149 
 Flesh, the mind of the, 150 ff. 
 fomes peccatt, 218, 403 
 Foreknowledge, Divine, 271 
 Fourth Gospel, the, 98-105 
 Free-will, 176, 218, 256, 263, 264, 
 
 274, 281, 328, 341, 355 £., 368 ff, 
 
 404, 433 ff., 467 ff., 483 ff. 
 
 GALILEE, 119 
 
 Gnosticism, 182-184 
 
 Gospels, Apocryphal, 311 ”. 2 
 Grace, 138 ”. I 
 
 HAaBit, tyranny of, 341 
 
 Heart, the, as seat of the yécer, 
 65, 152 
 
 Heathen, good works of the, 374, 
 414, 439, 432, 441 
 
 Herd-complex, the, 476 
 
 ‘ Herd-instinct,’ 479, 514 
 
 Heredity, believed to operate 
 through the father only, 235 f. 
 
 ‘ Heredity, social,’ 51, 343, 467 
 
 Hexateuch, critical theory of, 
 Ig”. 5 
 
 hominidae, 518 
 
 Honorius, the Emperor, 348 f. 
 
 Human nature, sin of, 305 
 
 ‘IMAGE and likeness’ of God, 194, 
 262 
 
 Incarnation, absolute purpose of, 416 
 
 ‘Incontinence,’ Aristotle’s concep- 
 tion of, 145 
 
 ‘Infancy,’ man’s primitive state 
 one of, 41, 176,193; 1900 %a) G, 
 242, 252, 286, 409 
 
 Infants dying unbaptised future 
 destiny of, 279, 376 ff., 405 ff., 
 415 f., 440 
 
 ‘Infirmity, hereditary,’ 458, 461, 
 465, 480 
 
 inquinamentum, legend of the, 57 f., 
 ay, 
 
 Instinct, 471 ff. 
 
 JEALousy of man, attributed to 
 God, 25, 43 
 
 Jerome, St., 376 
 
 Jesus Curist, teaching of, 95-112 
 
B79 
 
 Karma, 6, 215 
 Kingdom of God, the, 106 
 
 lapsus, 303, 514 
 
 Law and sin, 127 f. 
 
 Law, Mosaic, a remedy for the 
 yecer, 62, 79 
 
 libido, 68, 153, 472, 480 
 
 Life-force, the, 523 
 
 Limbo, 279, 290, 346, 348 n. 2, 
 385 ”. 3, 405 ff., 415, 464, 486 
 
 Livania, 338 
 
 Logos, the, 252, 258, 259 ”. 4, 292, 
 529 
 
 ‘Logos Spermatikos,’ 523, 533 f. 
 
 Maat, the, 6 
 
 Man’s moral weakness due to his 
 creaturely nature, 17, 297, 532 ff. 
 
 Mana, 13, 224, 355 
 
 Manicheism, 256, 274, 301, 324f., 429 
 
 Marcion, Marcionism, 183, 189 
 
 Marriage, regarded as inferior to 
 virginity, 156, 245 
 
 Mary, the Blessed Virgin, Immacu- 
 late Conception of, 370 ”. 2, 417; 
 parallelism between Eve and, 9, 
 174, 190; sinlessness of, 370 
 
 massa, 308, 310 
 
 massa peccati, perditionis, etc., 328, 
 3390 
 
 Mazdeism, 6 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 382 
 
 Missions, foreign, 486 f. 
 
 Mithraism, 7 
 
 Monism, unmoral, 5, 84, 183, 437 
 
 Monnica, 323 
 
 Monophyletism, 516 
 
 natura natuvans, 534 
 
 Nature, sub-human, evil in, 157 ff., 
 519 ff. 
 
 ‘ Nature and grace,’ 371, 400 
 
 ‘ Nature and supernature,’ 400 
 
 Neanderthal man, 195, 514 
 
 nephilim, the, 21 f. 
 
 Nestorius, 353 f. 
 
 Neurosis, 475 
 
 Nicodemus, 98 
 
 Nominalism, 413 
 
 non posse peccare, 362 n. 2 
 
 Noimenal self, the, 502 
 
 ‘“OccuLT justice,’ ascribed to God, 
 329 NH. 2, 381, 436 
 ‘Once-born ’ temperament, 169 
 
 THE FALL AND ORIGINAL SIN 
 
 Origen, life of, 209 f. 
 ‘ Original Guilt,’ 72 ff., 207, 289 f., 
 295, 304, 307 f£., 372, 411, 440, 
 
 551 
 
 ‘Original Righteousness and Per- 
 fection,’ 56 f£., 71; 258, 300) 85 
 360 ff., 409, 420 f., 453, 513 ”. 2 
 
 ‘ Original Sin,’ 73, 433, 457; as de- 
 fect of Original Righteousness,’ 
 170,307 1. 41Owaro 
 
 ‘ originale peccatum,’ 327 
 
 oviginalis veatus, 327 
 
 Orosius, 348 
 
 mapapaots, 171, 227, 455 
 
 Paradise, extra-mundane concep- 
 tion of, 192, 250 f., 267; meta- 
 physical conception of, 230, 267, 
 285 
 
 Patricius, 323 
 
 Paul, St., teaching of, 123-162 
 
 Pelagian controversy, the, 347-354 
 
 ‘ Pelagian Paradise,’ the, 340 
 
 Pelagianism, 332-347 
 
 Pelagius, his commentary on the 
 Pauline Epistles, 334 ”. I, 335 ”. 1 
 
 Penance, Sacrament of, 137 
 
 Phaedrus, myth of, 84,214,271 7.2 
 
 Philo, yéc¢er in, 82 f. 
 
 d0opa, 254, 388. See also ‘Disinte- 
 gration’ 
 
 dvpapa, 83 n. 2, 264 N. 1, 310 %. 2 
 
 pithecanthropus erectus, 514 
 
 Platonism, 83, 148, 254, 371 
 
 posse non peccare, 362 
 
 praevaricatio, 227, 302, 455, 514 
 
 Pre-conscious, the, 470 
 
 Predestination, 329, 434 
 
 Prophets, Hebrew, 14 f. 
 
 Psychotherapy, 485 
 
 pura naturalia, 259, 363, 422 
 
 Q, 97 ”. I, 105 
 
 ‘RADICAL evil,’ Kant’s conception 
 of, 499 f. 
 
 Realism, logical, 413 
 
 veatus concupiscentiae, 367 
 
 ‘Recapitulation’ in Athanasius, 
 262; in Gregory of Nazianzus, 
 291; in Gregory of Nyssa, 280; 
 in Irenaeus, 197 f. ; in Methodius, 
 252 
 
 Reformation, the, 423-426 
 
 Revelation, modes of, 89 f. 
 
 Rigorism, Pelagian, 357 
 
 Rufinus, 339 
 

 
 INDEX OF 
 
 SCHLEIERMACHER, 438 
 
 Scotus, Duns, 408-418 
 
 Selfishness, 521 
 
 “Seminal identity,’ 197, 237, 299, 
 395, 372, 421 
 
 Sentiments, the, 470 f., 473 
 
 Serpent, the, in Gen. ili., 44 f., 48, 
 I9I 
 
 Sex-motif in Fall-speculation, 45, 
 50) 177, 100; 204, 220, 227, 271- 
 273, 304, 340 #. I, 366, 411 nm. 2 
 
 Sin, actual, universality of, 17, 19, 
 96; foetal, 98 ». 3; ‘ medical’ 
 and ‘ forensic ’ ways of regarding, 
 133, 292, 296, 365; cf. 73 
 
 Sinless saints in the Old Testament, 
 262, 342 
 
 “Sons of the gods.’ 
 story of Gen. vi. 
 
 Soul, materialistic conception of, 
 234 f.; structure of, 469 ff. 
 
 splendida vitia, 375 
 
 Stars, believed to be animate, 211 
 
 ‘ Sublimation,’ 475, 485 
 
 “ Suppressed sinfulness,’ 132 f., 142 
 
 Supra-lapsarianism, 436 
 
 See Angel- 
 
 Tannaim, 73 
 
 Theodicy, 265, 525 
 
 Thirty-Nine Articles, 10, 439 
 
 Time, reality of, 523 . 2 
 
 ‘ Total depravity ’ of human nature, 
 428 ff. 
 
 SUBJECTS 
 
 tvactoria, epistula, 348, 385 f. 
 
 Traducianism, 233 ff., 280, 368 
 
 tradux, 240 n. 2 
 
 Tree of Knowledge, the, 43 
 
 Tree of Knowledge and Tree of 
 the Cross, parallelism of, 9, 191 
 
 Trent, Council of, 419-421 
 
 “Twice-born’ temperament, 
 169, 331 
 
 571 
 
 155, 
 
 UNconscious, the, 471 
 
 VINCENTIAN Canon, the, 11, 184- 
 188, 310 ff., 384, 396 
 vitium originis, 239, 245, 299 
 
 ‘WATCHERS,’ the, 24 
 
 ‘Watcher - story.’ 
 story of Gen. vi. 
 
 Will, the, 277; weakness of, 256, 
 460, 465 
 
 World-Soul, the, 525 fff. 
 
 Wrath, God’s, 113 ”. 1, 462 f. 
 
 See Angel - 
 
 yerer ha-va‘, 59-70, 97, 150, 343, 
 517; created by God, 69; in 
 what sense evil, 66 f. 
 
 Zosimus, Pope, 348 
 
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 SPOTTISWOODE, BALLANTYNE & Co. Lrp. 
 Colchester, London & Eton 
 

 
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