Chapter VIII: The Effects of Original Sin.
CHAPTER VIII: ON THE EFFECTS OF ORIGINAL SIN
§ 122. Now that we have set forth the propagation of original sin, its effects or punishments must be discussed. But we say that some effects of original sin are only punishments and that some are simultaneously punishments and sins.
The punishments are temporal and eternal. The following must be assigned to the class of punishments: (1) The multiple calamities and miseries of this life. Thus it was announced to Eve and all her daughters, Gen. 3:16: “I shall multiply many times your pain and your conceptions; with pain will you bear children,” etc. It was declared to Adam and all his sons, vv. 17–19: “Cursed is the earth because of you; in toil you will eat from it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles it will produce for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. You will eat your bread in the sweat of your face.”
(2) Various ailments and, finally, bodily or temporal death. Gen. 3:19: “You are dust, and to dust you will return.” Wisdom 2:24: “Through the devil’s envy death entered the world,” namely, through sin, as it is explained in Rom. 5:12.
(3) The wrath of God and eternal damnation. Eph. 2:3: “We were all by nature the children of wrath.” John 3:36: “Whoever does not believe in the Son, the wrath of God rests upon him.” Rom. 5:16 and 18: “The judgment following one trespass brought condemnation. One man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men.”
§ 123. In regard to this Iliad1 of punishments, the ancient fathers speak as follows.
Justin (Tryph.): “Through Adam the human race fell into sin.”
Ambrose (De vocat. gent., bk. 2, ch. 3): “We have all lost the wholeness of our nature because of the trespass of the first man. From it mortality is drawn, and from it the manifold corruption of body and soul has come.”
Augustine (Letter 28 ad Hieronymum): “If I should wish to count the punishments” (introduced into the world as the result of the first sin, and not only eternal but also temporal), “time would give out before examples did. They” (infants) “languish because of illnesses; they are tormented by pains, tortured by hunger and thirst; their members are weakened; they are deprived of their senses and are vexed by unclean spirits.”
Bernard (Medit., ch. 2, col. 1190): “According to the outer man, I come from those parents who caused me to be condemned before I was born.”
§ 124. The punishments that are at the same time sins are: the corrupt impulses of concupiscence, corrupt thoughts, damnable affections, and all actual sins. Matt. 15:19–20: “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are what defile a person.” Matt. 12:35: “The evil man out of his evil treasure brings forth evil things.” Rom. 7:8: “Sin worked in me all kinds of concupiscence.” Verse 23: “I see another law in my members at war with the law of my mind.” Rom. 8:7: “The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile toward God.” Gal. 5:17 and 19–21: “The flesh lusts against the Spirit. The works of the flesh are evident: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, the service of idols, sorcery, enmity, contentions, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, sects, envy, murder, drunkenness, carousing, and the like.” James 1:14–15: “Each one is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own concupiscence. Then concupiscence, when it has conceived, gives birth to sin.”
Ambrose (De vocat. gent., bk. 2, ch. 3): “We have lost the wholeness of our nature because of the trespass of the first parent,” etc. “From that have come ignorance and difficulties, useless worries, unlawful desires, sacrilegious errors, empty fear, harmful love, unjust joys, thoughts needing repentance, and no less a multitude of miseries than of crimes,” etc.
Chrysostom (Homily de Adam et Eva): “From this very sin of transgression sprout all other sins.”
Cassiodorus (on Psalm 118): “The fault of original sin always draws us, prone as we are, toward vice.”
Observations regarding the effects of original sin.
§ 125. Observe: (I) Although the guilt of original sin, about which we have spoken earlier [§§ 79–80], appears to be the very same thing as the punishments which we have listed, especially the wrath of God, nevertheless between them there is a distinction such that guilt, properly and accurately speaking, is not the punishment for sin itself but the obligation for punishment by which (obligation) a person is made guilty, that is, subject to the wrath of God and to temporal and eternal punishments, unless remission is made for Christ’s sake.
(II) Observe also this: although believers obtain forgiveness of this and of other sins through Christ and because of Christ, nonetheless they remain no less subject to the calamities of this life and to temporal death, something which is quite obvious from just the one example of our first parents. Although they were accepted into grace because of the promised Seed of the woman, yet to them were announced the multiplication of grief and hardship and, finally, even reversion back into dust.
The causes of this are many, and we shall list them in their own place. The more significant ones are these: First, Rom. 6:6: “In order that the sin which still adheres to the flesh might be mortified and the body of sin destroyed.” 1 Cor. 11:32: “When we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord so that we may not be condemned along with the world.”
Second, in order that, having recognized the seriousness of sin, we may always remember our forgiveness gratefully. Jer. 30:11: “I shall chasten you in judgment, lest you seem to yourself to go unpunished.”
Finally, in order that exercises of faith, patience, and obedience on the cross may be set before us. Heb. 12:11: “For the moment, all discipline seems to be painful rather than pleasant, but afterward it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” Meanwhile, there is a great difference between the punishments owed to the impenitent and unbelieving who have not yet been reconciled to God and those paternal chastisements imposed upon the devout and reconciled. For the former come from an angry Judge, but the latter, from a very kind Father. They are the bitter arrows from the sweet hand of God. The former are the beginning of eternal punishments, but the latter end with this life.
The effects of original sin according to Bellarmine.
§ 126. When Bellarmine (De statu peccati, bk. 6, ch. 1) is about to discuss the evil consequences of original sin, he distinguishes them in this way: “People suffer some of them if they happen to die as infants before receiving the forgiveness of sins. But they are compelled to endure others if they lead a rather longer life, whether their sin has been forgiven or not.”
He makes his argument regarding the punishment of infants who depart from this life without Baptism in chs. 1–8, which question we treat in our article On Baptism [Commonplace XXIII, §§ 235–45].
In ch. 7 he divides the punishments of original sin which people are forced to endure in this life in this way:
Some evils of this life are internal; others are external. The internal ones, which are within man himself, include ignorance, concupiscence, etc. The external ones, which are outside of man, are having an angry God, being under the power of the devil, etc. Some internal evils are in the superior part of the soul, some in the inferior part, others in the body. In the superior, intelligence and the will are harmed; in the inferior, both the internal and external senses and both appetitive faculties.2 In the body are very many disadvantages and, at the end, death itself.
In ch. 8 he composes a “special explanation of those evils,” and, in the first place, he lists the various wounds or ailments of the human mind. These are:
(1) Such a great ignorance of necessary things in infants as is not seen even in beasts. (2) Foolishness, with which some are born. (3) Difficulty in learning. (4) Ignorance of the ultimate end, in the achievement of which blessedness consists. (5) Ignorance of the means to the end. (6) A difficulty in understanding the natures of things. (7) Ignorance of one’s own mind. (8) The fact that the human mind is hindered in its understanding by the body. (9) An almost natural curiosity. (10) The fact that we think on many foolish, frivolous, and unsuitable things in our mind either unwillingly or even at a very inopportune time.
In ch. 10 he lists “the ailments and wounds of the will,” which are:
(1) Φιλαυτία, or self-love. (2) A difficulty in overcoming sins and in cultivating virtues. (3) An incredible negligence in those matters which pertain to blessed living. (4) An immoderate solicitude concerning the making of temporal wealth. (5) The fact that the will is very slow to worship the true God and very prompt to worship false gods. (6) Fickleness, instability, a warfare and strife of the human will. (7) Unhappiness with one’s status. (8) The fact that no one, unless he be renewed by grace, can avoid all mortal sins and, on the other hand, that not even the renewed can avoid venial sins.
In ch. 11 he lists “the wounds of the inferior part,” and they are:
(1) The fact that many are born blind or deaf or dumb, etc. (2) The illusion of dreams. (3) That interior sentiment hinders and confuses the intelligence in a strange way. (4) Weakness in the irascible appetite.3 (5) Concupiscence, which wars against the Spirit.
In ch. 12 he lists “the miseries of people which are related to the body.” These are:
(1) A variety of diseases. (2) That the very means of diseases are often torments. (3) That sometimes the lack of food and drink drives people to madness. (4) That such hard work is necessary to earn food. (5) Brevity of life. (6) The continuous fear of an imminent death.
In ch. 13 he enumerates “the miseries which occur to man externally.” These are:
(1) Having an angry God. (2) Being under the power of the devil. (3) That people often take advantage of each other. (4) The disobedience of the animals devoid of reason toward people. (5) Calamity which often occurs from sky, earth, and sea. (6) The tribulations of chance accidents.
Judgment.
§ 127. We do not altogether disapprove of this philosophical dissertation of Bellarmine, but we do note an imperfection in it.
(1) Although in chs. 14 and 15 he demonstrates against the Pelagians and some of the Scholastics that concupiscence is evil and has developed not from a condition of nature but from the merit of sin, nevertheless with great effort he denies that this, as well as the rest of the wounds of the mind, will, and inferior part (as he calls it), are sins. We shall prove the contrary position from the Scriptures in its own place [On Actual Sins (Commonplace XIII), §§ 36–79].
(2) Bellarmine calls these things “ailments” and “wounds of the inferior and superior parts,” but Holy Scripture uses far more severe language. Eph. 2:1, 5; Col. 2:13: “We were dead in trespasses and sins.” Rom. 8:6–7: “The mind of the flesh is death. The mind of the flesh is enmity against God.” Rom. 7:14: “I am carnal, sold under sin.” John 8:34: “Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.” Eph. 5:8: “You were once darkness,” etc.
(3) Bellarmine himself (ch. 16 and the last chapter) makes it clear that his discussion is incomplete when he disapproves [various statements] among us “as heretical”: First, the fact that we claim that “the free will has been destroyed by the fall of Adam” (that is, in spiritual things, for we are not at all unwilling to concede that in external things some powers of the mind and will survive). Second, that we “deny that man, though reborn and justified, can fulfill the Law of God perfectly and earn eternal life.” (There will be a place for each of these controversies to be discussed [On Free Choice (Commonplace XIV), §§ 80–101; On Good Works (Commonplace XX), §§ 62–133].)
Finally, [he calls “heretical”] that among the fruits of original sin we include “the hatred of God, fleeing divine judgment, doubt, and despair.” Bellarmine attacks this with a twofold argument: “First, such impulses do not exist in man except by means of the power of the will; therefore the proper cause of those things is the human will.”
We respond. Those impulses are not always commanded by the will (as they say) but sometimes develop in us though we are unwilling and even fight against them. Thus the cause of those impulses is the will corrupted by sin, not only as the impulses are commanded but also as they are elicited.
Second, “those impulses are found in many people in whom there is no original sin, as in demons, and are not found in many in whom there is original sin, infants, for instance.”
We respond. Although demons lack original sin—that is, the corruption of nature propagated into them through the mode of carnal generation—nevertheless they do not lack sin itself and the terrible corruption of the nature which sin has introduced. Therefore what is so strange if such impulses are found even in them? As far as infants are concerned, though that corruption does not yet reveal itself in them in actuality before the use of reason comes, as far as we can sense, nevertheless God sees the hidden evil of the heart which, like poisoned seed, produces a great crop of those impulses with the passage of time, something we explained in greater detail in its own place [§§ 59, 65].
1 See above, p. 25 n. 1.
2 That is, the intellectual appetite and the sensitive appetite. The sensitive appetite is the faculty by which a sensing being desires what it perceives as good and avoids what it perceives as bad. It is subdivided into the concupiscible appetite and the irascible appetite (see the following footnote). The intellectual appetite, on the other hand, is the faculty by which a human being desires the good or avoids the bad that he has known by his intellect; it is the same thing as the “will” (Thomas, ST, 2.2., q. 18, a. 1).
3 The sensitive appetite is subdivided into “concupiscible” and “irascible.” The concupiscible appetite (ἐπιθυμία) is the faculty by which someone desires what seems good to him and avoids what seems bad. For example, a person desires food and avoids poison. The irascible appetite (θύμoς), on the other hand, is the faculty by which someone desires to give up what seems good or undertake what seems bad in order to obtain a greater good or avoid a greater evil. For example, someone may desire to fight in order to obtain food or may desire to abstain from a pleasant, though poisonous, drug in order to retain health. (See Nuntio Signoriello, Lexicon peripateticum philosophico-theologicum in quo scholasticorum distinctiones et effata praecipua explicantur, ed. novissima [Naples: Apud officinam Bibliothecae Catholicae Scriptorum, 1893], 19; Johann Micraelius, Lexicon philosophicum terminorum philosophis usitatorum, 2nd ed. [Stetini: Mamphrasius, 1661; repr., Düsseldorf: Stern Verlag Janssen, 1966], s.v. “appetitus.”)