‘O happy fault,…’: original sin and its consequences (3)

By Fr Ian 

The consequences of the first sin

It would be a huge mistake to read chapter 3 of Genesis with a purely legalistic mentality that sees the original sinful action of Adam and Eve as mainly the breaking of a rule or a commandment. The real essence of their sin was the breach of their personal relationship with God, the rupture of their harmonious friendship.

Jesus' portrait of a loving parent: The Prodigal Son by Nikolay Losev (1855-1901)

Loving parents issue rules and prohibitions to their children as an expression of their desire to protect and care for them, not to exercise power over them by imposing irksome, arbitrary constraints.

When a child disobeys its parents, the most important thing isn’t that a rule has been broken, or even that the authority of the ‘rule-maker’ has been defied; the important thing is that the parents’ protective, covenantal love has been rejected, the relationship of mutual trust and love refused.

There’s a mysterious element in every such refusal of love which marks and damages the relationship in question, a sense in which after the first act of rejection, and every subsequent act, the relationship can never go back to what it was before.

And there’s a further aspect: acts of childish disobedience often do the parents no harm; it’s the child who is exposed to danger and suffers harm as a result.

This is how the authors of Genesis describe the fall of Adam and Eve. The consequences of their choice were profound. Catholic spiritual theology describes these consequences in two ways: first, in terms of loss, or deprivation; and second, in terms of damage, or woundedness.

(a) Loss/deprivation

As a result of their rebellion Adam and Eve immediately lost the supernatural gifts God had given them, the sanctifying grace which had enabled them to live in intimate knowledge of God and harmonious love for God. They become fearful instead, and try to hide from God, overcome with shame and guilt. Their attempt to cover their nakedness symbolises their panicked desire to conceal what they’ve done.

Their eyes have been opened, and they do possess a new knowledge which they didn’t possess before - but not, of course, in the beneficial way the serpent promised.

Another major consequence of the loss of original holiness is that the resentment against God and the desire for self-determination is passed onto all Adam and Eve’s descendants and becomes a constant temptation and an abiding, underlying disposition of fallen human nature.

That’s really what the Christian tradition means by original sin as distinct from the first sin.

Deprived of God’s grace it becomes easy for men and women to experience a lack of awareness of God and a lack of love for God. We feel indifferent - or hostile - to his call to enter into union with him, beginning now and eventually moving into eternity. Born in a condition of separation from God, we suffer a further consequence: we become self-enclosed and so prone to isolation and anxiety. This wasn’t the case for Adam and Eve before the Fall.

(b) Damage/woundedness

Original sin also entails that our natural faculties are no longer in harmony with each other. They’ve become damaged, or wounded.

(i) First of all, our intellect is clouded. There’s a confusion in our reasoning ability, a fallibility and a tendency to error in our moral judgements about what is objectively good and true.

Many of our deepest motivations remain unknown to our conscious minds and we engage in the intellectual vices of self-deception, rationalisation and sophistry, as, for example, when unacknowledged jealousy causes us to feel antipathy towards someone, disparage his or her character, and even wish him or her harm.

We become absorbed in trivialities and distractions, a tendency described by spiritual theology as ‘vain curiosity’ - a feature of fallen human nature which our vast modern entertainment industry caters for very expertly.

And yet, paradoxically, another symptom of mankind’s darkened mind is that we constantly suffer from an over-confidence in our natural intellectual abilities, fail to recognise our ignorance and limitations, and fall into boastfulness and pride.

(ii) The second wound which we’ve sustained as a result of original sin is a weakening of our will. In our fallen state we find morally virtuous actions difficult and burdensome. Love and self-sacrifice for the sake of God or for the sake of other people go against the grain, and often seem to demand more willpower than we’re able to muster. We feel we have to force ourselves against our natural inclinations - or else we just give in.

At the same time, our will finds it much easier to consent to pleasurable activities or actions which result in personal gain, even when they might involve a lack of love and care towards others. This weakness of will only became a feature of human nature after the Fall.

(iii) The third effect of original sin is that we suffer from a positive inclination towards evil.

‘Evil’ is a strong word, easy to misunderstand, but we don’t have to apply it only to actions that are profoundly morally wrong or large-scale in their impact, like mass murder or the embezzlement of billions of pounds. Our tendency towards evil can, and maybe for most of us does, express itself in actions that are trivial and banal. The important thing isn’t the scale or the depth of our wrongdoing but the constant presence of the inclination, which every one of us possesses to a greater or lesser extent.

Concupiscence

On this subject, classical Catholic spiritual theology talks about the extensive influence of concupiscence. Concupiscence can perhaps best be understood as a kind of strong gravitational pull towards pleasure, comfort and satisfaction which our natural, physical appetites and desires exercise on us.

Concupiscence isn’t evil in itself but again, in our fallen condition, it has been knocked out of balance and become disordered, so that it easily leads us into sin - especially as it’s usually aided by our clouded reasoning and our weakened will.

Saint John the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos by Diego Velázquez (1599 - 1660)

In his first letter Saint John lists three principal forms of concupiscence – the ‘lust of the flesh’, the ‘lust of the eyes’, and ‘the pride of life’. (1 Jn 2:16) In classical spiritual theology this remark of Saint John’s has been taken to refer to: desire for the pleasures of the senses, desire for goods and possessions (including money) and the desire to assert ourselves and exercise power over others.

There are legitimate boundaries within which we can act on the basis of these appetites or motivations, but they can very easily get out of control and lead us into sin. 

In fact there’s something inherently overpowering about them which we always need to be vigilant about and keep in check - it’s not difficult to think of instances where disordered sexual desire, a love of food, alcohol or drugs, greed for money and possessions or an excessive ‘will to power’ have come to dominate an individual’s existence, eroding his or her moral character and leading him/her to commit grave evil. This is why Sacred Scripture often refers to men and women as being trapped in a condition of slavery or bondage to sin.

Solidarity in sin

There’s also a certain quality inherent in these motivations, arising, as Jesus taught, from the depths of the human heart (Mk 7:21) that can create a solidarity in sin among groups of individuals and even whole societies. 

Babel Tower by Joos de Momper II (1564-1635); figures attributed to Frans Francken II (1581-1642)

Then a general climate can take shape in which evil thoughts and actions become normal and acceptable - a reality vividly described in chapters 4-11 of Genesis and by Saint John’s phrase ‘the sin of the world’ (Jn 1:29). The way that our modern secular society tends to elevate ‘money, sex and power’ into worthy life-goals, and to deny their corrupting effect, is an example of a community blinded by its solidarity in sin.

Final part, IV, Punishment and Promise to follow