‘O happy fault,…’: original sin and its consequences (1)

For many church communities the Season of Lent started again a week ago on Ash Wednesday. Lent is the main penitential season of the Church's year and in a series of articles Fr Ian discusses the Catholic view of human nature as it was originally created by God and as it became after the fall of Adam and Eve. 

A lantern slide depicting the original harmony that existed between God, humanity and creation

There are mistaken ideas that we can easily form about God, especially today, in our modern culture, which tends to treat all religious opinions as equally valid and maintains that no one has the right to tell anyone else what to think and believe. We easily fall into misinterpretations of God’s nature when we rely on our own thoughts, tastes and preferences, instead of submitting to God’s revelation of himself, interpreted by the Church’s teaching authority, guided by the Holy Spirit.

The foundation for our union with God, or the first and necessary step towards it on our part, is to foster an attitude of reverent love towards him.

This means recognising God’s holiness, his majesty and authority, his perfect love, goodness and truth. It means growing in our understanding of, and our participation in, the mystery of God’s life. It means acknowledging our dependence on him and our need, as creatures, to offer him adoration and praise and worship.

I. ‘In the beginning...’

But there’s one fact of experience which hits us hard from the earliest point of our spiritual pilgrimage, if we’re honest with ourselves: a reverent love for God, with everything that it implies, doesn’t come easily or naturally to us. Nor does the urge to show love and concern for our fellow human beings. Advancing in holiness is an uphill struggle.

The truth is that we’re held back from reaching our goal by weaknesses and resistances within ourselves, tendencies which lead us away from Christ’s commandment to love God wholeheartedly and to love our neighbour as ourselves. We suffer from a stubborn self-centredness which we find very difficult to eradicate, an inclination to seek our own comfort and pleasure, and sometimes to pursue our own glorification by diminishing others.

We discover that we’re susceptible not only to temptations that arise from within ourselves, but also to temptations that come to us from outside.

In Catholic liturgy Jesus' temptation by the devil before the start of his 

public ministry is always the Gospel Reading for the 1st Sunday in Lent 

Like Jesus himself at the start of his public ministry, we face temptations put to us by our adversary, the devil, especially once we’ve passed the point of first conversion and have definitely decided to embark on the path of holiness. At that point an alarm bell goes off somewhere in Hell, so to speak, and the devil springs into action, to try and deflect us from our goal.

We also soon discover that there are influences in our environment, in the moral climate of the society we live in, which hamper our efforts to grow in faith and to take our spiritual lives seriously.

In short, we come up against the reality of sin, in its various manifestations. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it: ‘Sin is present in human history; any attempt to ignore it or to give this dark reality other names would be futile’ (CCC 386).

The origin of everything

The authors of the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, were also well aware of this ‘dark reality’. They regarded sin as a profound and inescapable impulse affecting every individual, and they sought to describe the way that sin damages and thwarts our relationship with God and with each other. But this wasn't their starting-point.

Big Bang theory: modern science versus the Book of Genesis?

Genesis, as the word implies, deals with origins: the origin of the entire cosmos and the origin of the human race, including the purposes God assigned to human beings from the moment of their creation and then the origin of the moral evil which perennially besets humanity.

But it’s not an exercise in cosmology or anthropology in the modern scientific sense. We don’t have to conclude that the authors of Genesis believed that God created the universe in six days; that ‘in the beginning’ there existed such things as a talking snake or a strange, mythical-sounding ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’; or that God appeared in physical form strolling around the Garden of Eden so as to enjoy the cool breeze of the evening. This is figurative, not literal, language.

The authors of Genesis, guided by their faith in God, and choosing to write in parable-style about the origins of everything, were reflecting on the world and the human condition as they actually are, or how human beings actually experience them. They weren’t offering theories about how things came to be like this and we won’t grasp the authors’ real message unless we approach the book of Genesis as the type of writing it was intended to be.

So what is their real message? According to the book of Genesis, God - who is himself eternal, that is, without a beginning or an end - created the universe out of nothing. He created the world, not as some dead lump of stone suspended in a barren universe, but as a fertile environment capable of supporting an abundance of organic life. He created vegetation, animals and - as the summit of this living world -humankind.

Our ‘original holiness’

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden by Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-1678)

In many ways the most important fact about human beings, at least in the Christian understanding, is contained in verse 26 of the first chapter of Genesis: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness’”.

This resemblance to God, which is fundamental to our identity as human beings and distinguishes us from every other creature, consists firstly in being a person and not a thing, an object. As the Catechism says, ‘Being in the image of God the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just something, but someone. He is capable of self-knowledge, self-possession and of freely giving himself and entering into communion with other persons’ (CCC 357).

Of all the creatures God made human beings are unique, because God not only gave us the capacity consciously to know and love him, and to dedicate ourselves to one another in self-sacrificing love, but because he made us for that purpose, to derive our ultimate happiness or fulfilment through a conscious participation in his own life.

In Genesis this is illustrated by the close collaboration that God and man exercise over the rest of the created world, the perfect friendship and trust that exists from the outset, and by the companionship and mutual dedication that exists between Adam and Eve from the moment of their first creation.

Although the human person uniquely resembles God, this isn’t the same as being identical with God. God is uncreated and purely spiritual; we’re created beings, and partly material as well as spiritual. The authors of Genesis stress this truth by describing the way that God created human beings ‘from the dust of the ground’ (Gen 2:7) - sometimes translated even more pithily as ‘mud’ or ‘slime’.

It’s meant as a reminder that we’re not purely spiritual beings, that we share a common origin with the rest of physical, material reality, and so it’s a reminder of our humble ‘earth-bound’ origins and of our human finiteness and limitations.

It’s also important for us to understand that in Genesis, as in the whole of the Bible, there’s no sense of mankind being made of two principles, material and spiritual, body and soul, which are somehow opposed to each other. The Bible never implies that only our spiritual dimension, our soul, is good while evil comes from our physical aspect, our body.

Similarly, the Genesis account of the creation of humankind isn’t an account of God planting a soul inside a body, but of breathing physical and spiritual life together into inanimate matter. Our material and spiritual aspects aren’t opposed or contrary to one another, but part of an indivisible unity.

And of course, finally, the biblical and Christian belief about our ultimate destiny isn’t that the soul separates from the body after death and leaves the body behind. Rather, each person is an inseparable unity of body and soul, and it’s as this unity that we’re destined to know and love and serve God in this present world and live with him forever in the next. This truth comes over very clearly in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection.

Our original faculties and gifts

Catholic spiritual theology has drawn various lessons from the opening chapters of Genesis and one of the most central lessons is that, as originally created, i.e. before the first sin, our natural human faculties were in perfect balance with each other. That’s to say, there was no inner turmoil, no conflict between our reason, our emotions, our will, our appetites; no sense of these elements of our nature pulling against each other in all kinds of different directions.

According to Catholic spiritual theology, human beings in the beginning also possessed supernatural gifts, over and above our natural faculties. Adam and Eve lived, to begin with, in a state of sanctifying grace. This means that there was no element of resistance to friendship with God, no inclination to choose other objects of love and worship. An easy, effortless harmony between God and humanity, undisturbed by any hint of disagreement or suspicion, was present from the outset.

One such supernatural gift, or gift of grace, which God imparted to Adam and Eve was a clear, direct vision of himself, a deep, intimate knowledge of his nature. There was no confusion about God’s character, no need to search for a God who often appears distant and obscure, such as we experience now. An intimate knowledge and love, a participation in God’s own life, was present right from the beginning.

Last of all, as originally created, human beings lived in a state of moral innocence or integrity (wholeness). We were free from all self-indulgent or exploitative, predatory motives, either in relation to God or to each other.

The authors of Genesis express this state of affairs in the picture of complete harmony and balance that they paint - harmony within the human person; harmony between Adam and Eve and God; harmony between each other; and harmony between themselves and the rest of the creation.

Another way to refer to this state of integrity that existed before the first sin is to use the terms original holiness (referring to Adam and Eve’s relationship with God, their sharing in God’s own life) and original justice (the harmony they possessed within themselves, with each other and with their material environment).

(Part II, The nature of the first sin, to follow soon)