On the Virginal Conception, and On Original Sin: Chapter 2
BASIC WRITINGS
every human being there is both the nature by which he is a human being, just as all other human beings are, and the person by which he is distinguished from others (as when someone is called 'this fellow' or 'that man', or is called by his own name, such as 'Adam' or 'Abel'), and although each one's sin is in both the nature and the person—for Adam's sin was in both the human being, that is, in the nature, and in the particular man named 'Adam', that is, in the person—nonetheless, there is both the sin that everyone receives along with his nature in his own origin and the sin that someone does not receive with his nature but commits himself once he is a person distinct from other persons. That which is received in one's origin is called 'original'; it could also be called 'natural', not because it derives from the essence of the nature, but because it is received along with the nature on account of the nature's corruption. By contrast, the sin that all human beings commit once they are persons can be called 'personal', since it is done by the vice of a person. Justice can be called 'original' and 'personal' on the same grounds.Thus,Adam and Eve were
'originally' (that is, at their very beginning, as soon as they were human beings) and without delay just together. Justice, however, can be called 'personal' when someone unjust receives a justice that he did not have from his origin.
Chapter 2 How human nature was corrupted So if Adam and Eve had preserved their original justice, those who would be born from them would have been originally just, in the same way that Adam and Eve were just. But since they sinned personally, even though they were originally strong and uncorrupted and had the power always to preserve justice without difficulty,everything they were became weakened and corrupted: after their sin, their bodies were like those of brute animals, subject to corruption and carnal appetites, while their souls were infected with carnal affections from the corruption of the body and its appetites, as well as from the lack of the goods that it lost. And because the whole of human nature was in them, and nothing of human nature was outside them, the whole of human nature was weakened and corrupted.
What was left in human nature, therefore, was the debt of the justice, whole and sound and without any injustice, that human nature had received, and the debt of making recompense for having abandoned justice, along with the corruption that it had incurred on account of sin. If it had not sinned, it would have produced offspring that were such as God had made human nature to be; but since it did sin, it produces offspring that are such as it has made itself by sinning. Therefore, since by itself it can neither make recompense for sin nor recover the justice it has abandoned, and since "the body, which is corrupted,