15.

 Summarize your understanding of the difference between the Orthodox and the Augustinian doctrines of the fall and the first human sin. Be sure to discuss the two concepts of the fate of unbaptized children.

            Up to a point, Orthodoxy, Rome and classical Protestantism are all in fairly close agreement concerning the ancestral sin (or what Western Christians call the original sin). God gave Adam a free will either to accept or reject his calling to live in union with divine law and rule over all creation. Adam was seduced into thinking that he could become like God solely by his own effort and will, and he rejected his calling and turned aside from the path marked out for him by God. The fall lay in Adam's disobedience to the will of his Creator; he elevated his own will against God's, and in so doing, he separated himself from God.

            Adam's rebellion resulted in a new form of existence: disease and death entered in. In turning away from God, Who is immortality and life, man defiles his humanity with evil and puts himself in a state contrary to nature. This unnatural condition eventually led to the disintegration of Adam's physical being and to his physical death, and the same consequences extended to all his descendants, to the whole human race. As St. Paul repeatedly insists, we are all members of one another, and if one member suffers, the whole body suffers. Thus, by virtue of this mysterious unity of all mankind, not only Adam, but the whole human race becomes subject to mortality.

            The disintegration also goes beyond the mere physical level: since man was cut off from God, Adam and his descendants were brought under the rule of evil and death. All humans share the same tragic fate: all are born into a world that “lies in wickedness” (1 Jn 5: 19), one “groaning in travail” (Rom 8:22); all are born into a devil's princedom where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good. Man's will is weakened and perverted by what the Greeks call desire and the Latins concupiscence. All human beings are subject to these spiritual effects of the ancestral sin.

            Beyond this juncture, East and West are not in complete agreement as Blessed Augustine of Hippo's teaching on grace and free will is not in harmony with the consensus Patrum, the consensus of the Fathers. Blessed Augustine was the only main theologian in the early Western Church had, whereas in the Eastern Church there were many. Thus, theology in the East was more balanced, including the theology on salvation. The Orthodox Church holds a less exalted view of the state of man prior to the fall, and it also sees the consequences of the fall in less severe terms than the West. Where Augustine (and thus the West) held that man fell from a state of all wisdom and knowledge, Orthodoxy believes that Adam fell from a state of undeveloped simplicity. Thus the East is less severe than the West in its judgment of Adam's transgression.

            Undoubtedly the fall resulted in the darkening of man's mind and the impairing of his willpower so that he could no longer hope to attain the likeness of God. However, Orthodoxy does not teach that Adam's fall deprived man completely of God's grace (although after the fall, grace acts on man from the outside rather than from within). Orthodoxy rejects Calvin's view that after the fall man was completely depraved and entirely lacking in good desires. Orthodoxy likewise rejects Augustine's view that man is under “a harsh necessity” of committing sin, and that “man's nature was overcome by the fault into which it fell, and so came to lack freedom” [On the Perfection of Man's Righteousness, IV-9]. This pessimistic view came from the belief that the human race was not only wounded by Adam's transgression, but also inherited his guilt and thus was deprived of God's grace. (At the end of his life, Augustine wrote an entire book of retractions, in which he deferred to the judgment of the Church all he had ever written). Even though God's likeness can be distorted by sin, man still remains created in the image of God, and that image can never be destroyed. In the words of a hymn sung at the Orthodox funeral service for the laity: “I am the image of Thine inexpressible glory, even though I bear the wounds of sin.” And because man still retains the image of God, he still retains a free will, however restricted in scope it becomes because of sin. St. Dositheus, Patriarch of Jerusalem, explained that even after the fall, God “takes not away from man the power to will — to will to obey or not to obey Him” [Confessions, Decree iii]. Upholding the idea of synergy, Orthodoxy rejects any interpretation of the fall which discards the idea of human freedom.

            The idea of original guilt taught by Augustine (and which is still accepted in a mitigated form by the Roman Church) is rejected by the vast majority of Orthodox theologians. An occasional Augustinian view on the fall would creep into some Orthodox literature in times past, but it usually took place as a result of Western influence, such as the Scholastic influence on Kievan Russia at the time of Peter of Moghila. Most Eastern theologians hold that men automatically inherit the corruption and mortality of Adam, but not Adam's guilt. Men are guilty only insofar as they choose to imitate Adam.

            Most Western Christians hold that nothing a man does in his fallen and unredeemed state can be pleasing to God since all actions are tainted by original guilt. The Anglican Church teaches that works before justification have the nature of sin and cannot be pleasing to God, and likewise the Latin Church speaks of justificatio prima and justificatio secunda, and the impossibility of man's actions being pleasing to God before Baptism and justification. All Orthodox would be very hesitant to think in these terms, for Orthodoxy's view of fallen mankind is nowhere near as harsh and condemnatory as the Augustinian or Calvinist view.

            Also, Orthodoxy has never taught that unbaptized infants, because of their taint of original guilt, are condemned to hall (a view advocated by Augustine and many others in the West), nor has Orthodoxy ever maintained that they go to limbo. According to Roman Catholic theology, limbo, from limbus infantum or puerum, is a place where babies are consigned who died without actual sin (personal sin), but who did not have their original sin washed away in Baptism. The word limbus first appeared in Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, which declares that unbaptized infants are “excluded from the full blessedness of the beatific vision.” This teaching was declared de fide by the Second Council of Lyons (1274) and confirmed by the Council of Florence (1439), and the teaching is generally accepted by Roman theologians.

            St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote a treatise entitled Concerning Infants Snatched Away Prematurely. In it, this Father states that infants departed from life neither find themselves in a painful state nor become equal to those who have struggled to be purified by every virtue. They are in God's providence. St. Gregory adds that anyway, the journey to God and participation in the uncreated light constitute a natural state of the soul, and infants cannot be deprived of these things. He concludes by noting that by the power of divine grace, infants can attain deification.

            Even though Orthodoxy believes that man retained a free will after the fall and still was capable of good works, the East would certainly find common ground with the West in the belief that man's sin has set up a barrier between God and man, a barrier that man can never break down by his own efforts. Sin stood in the way of union with God, and man needed to be saved. Because man could not draw near to God, God came to man. As Bishop Alexander of Buenos Aires and South America of the Russian Church in Exile instructs in this regard: “Inasmuch as people, having sinned out of thoughtlessness and having fallen away from God, turned out to be too weak to repulse the onslaught of the powers of darkness, the Son of God was obliged to come into our world and to raise up a war against them.”