In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, One God, Amen!
Our problem is not that we will be punished for sin, it is that we are born into a state of physical, moral and spiritual death. This is why, to jump ahead of ourselves, all the souls of the departed before Christ were in Hades, a gloomy place of waiting. The bodies of the departed had returned to dust because of their mortality. Their souls had been separated from their bodies because of their mortality. And these souls did not experience the complete blessedness that God intended because they were also without the divine life that had been lost by Adam. Even these, the most righteous men and women before Christ, could do nothing by their own actions, to restore the state of their human nature to that which Adam had lost. All the grace which the most righteous undoubtedly received and experienced was not the same as that indwelling of the divine life which Adam had sold so cheaply.
We need to note that the word guilt does not appear at all in the work On the Incarnation by St Athanasius. The condition which we found ourselves in because of Adam’s sin was not one in which mankind was guilty, certainly not guilty of Adam’s sin, even if we become guilty of our own. Therefore, the incarnation is not a matter of dealing with man’s guilt, but with death and separation from God. Since every one of us is born into this state of death and separation, it would never be possible for any man or woman to restore the state of life and union with God which Adam enjoyed, even if they never committed any sin at all. St Athanasius says,
For this cause, then, death having gained upon men, and corruption abiding upon them, the race of man was perishing; the rational man made in God’s image was disappearing, and the handiwork of God was in process of dissolution. For death, as I said above, gained from that time forth a legal hold over us, and it was impossible to evade the law, since it had been laid down by God because of the transgression, and the result was in truth at once monstrous and unseemly.
We can see here that the problem is especially that of death and corruption, not sin. Sin is a symptom, an outworking, of the state of death and corruption. Our problem is not so much that we sin, but that we are dead and corruptible and are becoming corrupted. It is death which has a hold over us, because the sentence of God, given the force of a divine law, was that when Adam ate of the fruit of the tree he would surely die, and experience death in the fullest sense as separation from God who is our life. It is because of this separation from God that we enter into a life of sinful acts of the will. But we are already dead to God, and therefore experience death already in the most comprehensive sense.
The case of unborn infants who are not born alive or are miscarried is an opportunity to consider what the church teaches. St Gregory of Nyssa has a few words to say on this subject. He says that a life of blessedness belongs to the one whose spiritual sight is clear, and that in mankind this requires great effort and the grace of God to overcome sin, but it belongs already to the infant and is lost by us as we grow into sinfulness. He says…
The innocent babe has no such plague before its soul’s eyes obscuring its measure of light, and so it continues to exist in that natural life; it does not need the soundness which comes from purgation, because it never admitted the plague into its soul at all.
He goes on to suggest that the soul of an unborn infant, and even the infant reposing not long into their life, could not possibly suffer any torment because there is nothing in them at all deserving of it, and their infant soul is still turned towards God. Yet there is this difference. The soul of one who has spent his life in overcoming sin, and in hard-won repentance and many experiences of God’s grace, will participate in the blessedness of Paradise and of Heaven with a different character than the one who never sinned, never needed to repent, and has no experience of the grace of sanctification. Yet the blessedness is one, even if the participation is different.
And the dear and saintly Pope Timothy of Alexandria, addressing a woman who had lost three of her children, says…
I was in great grief, mourning and lamenting, as though I saw your small children, and at the same time I heard he voice of the Creator of us all admonishing me, saying, ‘Do you suppose, O man, that your tender mercy is greater than mine? Do you suppose I have no compassion equal to your own, and that I do not say, “Let the children come unto me, for to such belongs the Kingdom of Heaven”.
Do we doubt the mercy of God towards all those he has made, and especially those who have not drawn breath before passing away. St Timothy encourages the bereaved woman to remind herself when she feels her pain the most…
After a short time I will not be left separated from my child, if I am also worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven, then I will not be far from them forever.
This is a blessed truth, of which I am convinced. That our Lord has not created any to be condemned because left without the possibility of baptism in the womb. And that each one who passes to life even before breath is sinless and innocent in the eyes of God. He will unite to himself those he has made and called to himself before birth. And of the blessed state in which they wait, St Timothy recounts a miracle he heard from the mouth of St Dioscorus, in which a young boy had been bitten by a poisonous snake and died, and being restored to life by Abba Longinus, the young boy said…
O father, I am burned by the love of the greenery which my soul saw, I have never eaten anything like it, nor is the eye of man able to look at it, or the mouth of man to describe it. I saw a man of shining appearance, and he took me into the Garden of Eden, and I saw trees which bear many fruits. Then he took me to the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he commanded that they take me to the children who are like me…
In this happy and blessed place the souls of all infants wait in peace and joy. God has made them and called them to himself. Gathered up those who are especially loved by him. The words of St Timothy are a comfort…
Your child was living, and now God has taken her to himself, where there is no death, so that they might live with him forever… their souls fly due to the greatness of the taste of their happiness.
From the experience of love to an experience of even more overwhelming and unceasing love. From the experience of blessedness to even greater experience of blessedness. The pain of loss and separation tempered by the hope and expectation of reunion and of the fulfillment of love in eternity. The mercy of God knows no bounds, and those fragile, innocent, sinless souls created in love to participate in his love are preserved in love now and forever, and wait to greet us and embrace us in love.
Many of the Fathers considered that a child did not become responsible or liable for sin until some years after birth, because sin is an act of the will, and the unformed will of an infant is therefore not considered to be able to consent or adopt any deliberate act of sin. The status of a child seems to very easily and clearly describe the views which were held about the nature of each human born into the world, or dying before birth and any human activity had taken place.
St Gregory Nazianzus says in one of his homilies,
For this is how the matter stands. At that time they begin to be responsible for their lives, when reason is matured, and they learn the mystery of life (for of sins of ignorance owing to their tender years they have no account to give), and it is far more profitable on all accounts to be fortified by the Font, because of the sudden assaults of danger that befall us, stronger than our helpers.
The issue being considered in this unit is not so much that of the means of salvation, and what it means to be baptized. Rather it is to consider the state into which each of us is born, whether we are baptized soon after our birth or not. In this passage from St Gregory we see that he does not teach, and nor do other Fathers, that an infant is able to be considered as committing sin, because they have not yet become responsible and their reason has not yet matured. Of course, this does not simply do away with the question of what God might do in the life of a small infant, or an unborn child dying in utero. But these Eastern Fathers seem clear that the infant does not have a problem of sin, and has not inherited any sort of guilt because of the sin of Adam. The problem is one of death and being born into a mortal and corruptible state, but the small infant is not sinful. And this is entirely the teaching of St Cyril and St Severus who state that we are “born mortal of mortal parents, but not sinful of sinful parents”.
This positive attitude towards humanity, even in a state of mortality, death and corruption is represented by statements from the Fathers such as St Severus, who says,
Adam did not lose a single natural blessing, neither did our race because of him. However, the rule is as follows. [St Cyril] For we have lost nothing of that which we possessed by nature.
Of course, this does not mean that man is not in a desperate plight, but it insists that the humanity we receive from our parents is essentially that nature in which Adam was created. What has been lost is grace and the gift of divine life by the Holy Spirit. Indeed, St Severus continues,
That it is by grace indeed that Adam possessed incorruptibility from the beginning – which consists in immortality and impassibility – enriched as he was with a blessing that was beyond nature by the liberality of Him who had created him, we have learned from the word of the Fathers instructed by God. If he had conserved the grace then the mortal character conforming to nature, would have remained hidden along with the corruptibility of the human body.
Our mortality and corruptibility are natural to us, they are not a punishment, but a consequence of being created beings. All that we have lost, and all that has plunged us into death and the habitual commission of sin, as turning away from God in the will, is the result of the loss of grace. Adam wanted to go his own way, and this is what it looks like. But his nature, becoming mortal and corruptible, did not become sinful, because sin is an action of the will and of a person, not of a nature.
This is also the teaching of St Cyril, who says,
Man is a rational animal, but composite, meaning of a soul and of this earthly and temporal flesh. Because he has been made by God, and has come into being, without holding in his own nature either incorruptibility or indestructibility – these indeed belong by nature to God alone – he had been marked with the spirit of life, enriched, by an intimate relationship with God, with a blessing which surpassed nature.
He agrees here, that the nature of man does not possess incorruptibility and immortality by nature because it is created, and depends on God for existence, but he had received a blessing which surpassed nature, which was more than natural, in his intimate relationship with God and which was the divine spirit of life. We have suffered a loss, by the sin of Adam, but this has not changed our nature and made it sinful. We are certainly much more easily and universally led into sin, and do so with energy and imagination, making ourselves lower than animals. But our sin is a matter of reason and choice and will, and so the infant and the unborn are without sin, even though they are in the same state of mortality and corruptibility. We become sinful and corrupt ourselves, we are not born in such a state.
St Severus says,
.. the sin of Adam was not mixed naturally with our substance…; but it is because they had lost the grace of immortality.
This is an important point. If sin is a matter of the use of the will to turn away from God, and therefore requires some reason and determination, then a small infant cannot be said to sin. If sin is not a thing, not a substance, and so is not mixed in with our humanity, then I am the one responsible for my sin, for my turning away from God. This seems to me to illustrate two aspects of the Christian message. In the first place, even living without sin does not provide for a human person the renewal of the grace of the indwelling Holy Spirit and the intimate relationship with God which was lost by Adam’s sin. Such a way of life may be commendable, and may be the object of blessing in many ways, but it cannot restore all that was lost. This is beyond us as human beings who now experience separation from God as mortality and corruptibility.
In the second place, our own personal sins, which are a turning away from God, lead us to a deeper participation in death, in non-being and darkness, however attractive they seem. The judgement of God will be considered in due course, but it seems to me that sin is already its own punishment, if we wish to speak in such a manner. If sin is turning away from God, then what greater punishment could be imagined than for this to become our experience? We imagine, perhaps, that sin is a matter of legal offences against God, and we hope that various ways can be used to mitigate our offence, but if sin is an act of the will in turning away from God, who is life and light, towards death and darkness, then it already carries its own, often unnoticed and unrecognized, penalty.
What can we propose as the Orthodox view of these things? It is that Adam and Eve were created with that mortal and corruptible nature which belongs to all created beings, but that they received a divine gift and grace at their creation which made possible every blessing God intended for them. When they sinned, they exercised their free will to turn away from God and they immediately lost the grace and gift which was a divine life within them. They were left in their natural mortal and corruptible state, and without the strengthening grace of the Holy Spirit both they and their children turned away from God more and more often, and with greater and greater energy and imagination, as the effects of the divine grace were increasingly diminished. There was no essential change in the nature of humanity, but it had lost the grace of God. The children of Adam were not responsible for his sin, nor did they bear any guilt of it, but they were born into the condition of mortality and corruptibility he had created. Therefore, an infant is without sin at all, since sin is the exercise of the free will against God. But an infant is nevertheless born mortal and separated from God in corruptibility, though not corrupt. Our sinfulness and our corruption are our own responsibility, and being a choice for death, darkness and non-being, they already constitute their own penalty.
The situation of man, which God willed from the beginning to restore in love, is therefore not the punishment of sin, but the reconciliation and renewal of mortal man, already bound by physical, moral and spiritual death. Salvation is not essentially the freedom from some future punishment, since Adam and all of us born of him are already dead and separated from God. There is no greater consequence of sin. Adam received this judgement at the moment he turned away from God, and God himself had said, in Genesis 2:16,
You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.
He did not physically die at the moment he turned away from God in sin, but he certainly became mortal according to his nature, and he certainly lost the grace of the divine life at that moment, and certainly and immediately experienced the separation from God, which is true death. Therefore, the consequence of sin was already its own penalty and it occurs in the moment of sin, in the act of will that turns away from God. And experiencing this total death, this separation from God who is life, we find that it becomes easier and easier, more and more attractive, to turn away from God again and again, until the world becomes as at the time of Noah, as recorded in Genesis 6:5,
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.
This is not the state of man as God intended. It is not the state of man experiencing the gift and grace of divine life. But it is the condition of man living without the divine life, seeking the fulfillment of his desire for God in the desire for the created order and for temporal satisfaction. Man’s problem is not that he sins, but that being dead to life with God he finds himself incoherent and disintegrating in the darkness into which he is born, and turns away from God in his instability and corruptibility.
This is certainly the view of the Fathers such as St Athanasius, St Cyril and St Severus. Man’s problem is that he is dead, not that he sins. Sin is a consequence of this death, and this state of death is the disease we inherit. This death is the separation from the grace and gift of God. Until the 4th century this was the view in the Church. There was an Ancestral Sin, which Adam had committed, and which had consequences for us all. But there was no sense that we inherit any responsibility for, or guilt of that sin. If my ancestor had been very wealthy, and had spent all of his money on gambling, then I would be born poor, as my parents had been born into poverty, but I would not be at all guilty of my ancestor’s prodigality and wastefulness.
But with Augustine of Hippo a rather new idea was introduced, which was that human nature itself was made sinful, and so each human being born into the world was already guilty of sin, and liable to the judgement of God. Tertullian, writing in North Africa some time before Augustine, still spoke of “the innocent period of life” belonging to infants. And he distinguished between infants and children, saying,
This antithesis is impudent enough, since it throws together things so different as infants and children, an age still innocent, and one already capable of discretion.
The consideration for Tertullian in Latin North Africa was still one, shared in the East, of the use of reason and will with discretion. An infant is not liable to be considered sinful because she lacks such a developed rational power, but as the infant grows into childhood there comes a time when increasingly what is chosen and committed can be considered deliberate and willful and therefore sin. Even Cyprian, a rather hard line bishop of North Africa, who absolutely rejected the value of the baptism of anyone outside of the formal bounds of the Church, spoke about infants, and therefore describes the nature of humanity we receive, saying,
For, with respect to what you say, that the aspect of an infant in the first days after its birth is not pure, so that any one of us would still shudder at kissing it, we do not think that this ought to be alleged as any impediment to heavenly grace. For it is written, “To the pure all things are pure.” Nor ought any of us to shudder at that which God hath condescended to make. For although the infant is still fresh from its birth, yet it is not such that any one should shudder at kissing it in giving grace and in making peace; since in the kiss of an infant every one of us ought for his very religion’s sake, to consider the still recent hands of God themselves, which in some sort we are kissing, in the man lately formed and freshly born, when we are embracing that which God has made… how much rather ought we to shrink from hindering an infant, who, being lately born, has not sinned, except in that, being born after the flesh according to Adam, he has contracted the contagion of the ancient death at its earliest birth.
This is a rather beautiful passage, which describes the new born baby as not having any sins, but having entered into that state of mortality to which Adam’s sin dooms us all. This remains consistent with the Eastern view it seems to me.
But Augustine introduces a new opinion. It is that the infant just born into the world, and even the one in the womb, is already sinful and already guilty of Adam’s sin. Rather than considering that a child inherits the consequences of Adam’s sin, and becomes responsible and guilty of only his own sins, Augustine taught that the child was already guilty of Adam’s sin and was to be considered as having participated in it, and therefore to be already sinful. It is not surprising that Augustine’s view of the state of those infants who might die before baptism or in utero is a negative one. He says,
Even if there were in men nothing but original sin, it would be sufficient for their condemnation. For however much heavier will be their condemnation who have added their own sins to the original offence (and it will be the more severe in individual cases, in proportion to the sins of individuals); still, even that sin alone which was originally derived unto men not only excludes from the kingdom of God, which infants are unable to enter (as they themselves allow), unless they have received the grace of Christ before they die, but also alienates from salvation and everlasting life, which cannot be anything else than the kingdom of God, to which fellowship with Christ alone introduces us.
What he says here is that even if a person were not to commit any sin at all, and even in the case of infants and we may say those who die before birth, there is a such a condemnation due to every person because of the guilt of the sin of Adam which we all inherit according to his understanding, that it must exclude all from any participation in eternal life. This is not because of the separation from God due to the loss of the divine grace and life, but it is because, says Augustine, each person, even a new born infant, is already guilty of sin.
He says,
By the generation of the flesh only that sin is contracted which is original.
This proposes a view which is the opposite of St Cyril and St Severus. They insisted that we are not born sinful but mortal. Here, Augustine insists that we are all born sinful. But both St Cyril and St Severus teach that we cannot inherit any guilt or condemnation for sin from another’s sins, we are guilty only of our own. But Augustine’s views, followed to their conclusion, require him to state, as he does, that those infants who die before baptism, must find themselves in Hell and subject to condemnation, even if it is a light condemnation. He says,
That person, therefore, greatly deceives both himself and others, who teaches that they will not be involved in condemnation.
This is a novel idea which Augustine develops and which then has a great influence on the history of Western theology, leading it further away from Orthodoxy. We may certainly be sure that even an unborn child is mortal and without the gift of the divine life, but our Orthodox Fathers have not taught that such a child is condemned by God, either for her own sins or those of Adam. Rather such an infant is in a condition which entirely moves the love and mercy of God. If it was while we were yet sinners that Christ, the Son and Word of God, was incarnate and suffered and died for our sake, and if it was because God loves the world so much that the mystery of our salvation has taken place, how much does he love those he has created, and as Cyprian says, are fresh from the hands of God and are without any sin, though undoubtedly in need of the grace of God.
He says elsewhere,
For sins alone separate between men and God; and these are done away by Christ’s grace, through whom, as Mediator, we are reconciled, when He justifies the ungodly.
This seems to me to be a significantly different teaching. The Orthodox Fathers speak about death as the real issue, and that sin is an expression of this death. But since we are born into a state of death, which is separation from God, we need a reconciliation to take place, and for the Holy Spirit to be renewed in man. But Augustine views sin as the problem, and so he has to propose that even infants are sinful, and share in Adam’s sin. He doesn’t understand the problem as one of life and relationship, but of legal guilt and justification. The Orthodox teaching is that even is a person never sinned, they would still lack the divine life which was a gift to Adam. They would still lack immortality and incorruptibility. But the Augustinian approach is that all are guilty of sin, and therefore liable to judgement and punishment, but God has provided a way for us to escape this punishment in Christ. These are not the same ideas at all.
It is not surprising that the Augustinian model was further developed in the West. In the Middle Ages, Anselm described our situation as one in which God, who is infinite, had been infinitely offended by our sin, and therefore required an infinite satisfaction. This is simply a model taken from the feudalistic society in which Anselm found himself. The more important a person was who had been harmed or offended in some way, the more costly it was to satisfy their honour. This is not the Orthodox understanding at all, and is unknown until Anselm introduced it in the 11th century. None of the Fathers understand God as being offended by sin, on the contrary, the incarnation and the whole salvation history is always described as being rooted in the love of God for mankind. If there is ever a consideration of God’s honour, as in St Athanasius for instance, it is in the context of it being unworthy of God to allow his creation to fall into corruption.
To some extent these different views, the Orthodox and the Western, can be categorised as understanding our situation as one in which mankind needs healing and restoration, and one in which mankind needs to be able to escape a deserved punishment. These produce different views of the incarnation and of salvation as we shall see in later units.
In summary, then. Orthodoxy teaches that sin is a matter of the will and not the nature of man. It is a choice of that which is not God, for that which is not-life and light and being, however much it might appear desirable. Adam was created naturally mortal and corruptible but given at his creation a gift of divine life, the indwelling Holy Spirit which would have preserved him in immortality and incorruptibility. When he sinned he lost this gift and divine life, which remained as a spark, and he found himself immediately mortal, separated from God, and without any moral or spiritual constancy or strength. We inherit this state of mortality and separation from God, but we are not born sinful in any sense, or guilty of any sin. Indeed, an infant is not able to sin, since sin is a matter of reason and will. Nevertheless, all of us need the mercy and grace of God, because even if we never sin, we are still in this state of death. Augustine and those who followed him, introduced a new idea, that each of us are born sinful and guilty and therefore condemned by God. This distorts the Orthodox understanding and produces ideas of an angry God. But Orthodoxy is convinced that God is love, and in love he has acted to restore the intimate relationship which Adam once enjoyed and which he call us all to participate in.
Glory to God
