What Is Original Sin?

What Is the Question?

Original sin is the inherited moral corruption traced, in the Christian theological and philosophical tradition, to the first humans' disobedience to God. The doctrine holds that the first sin damaged human nature, and that the damage is transmitted to all descendants, so that we are born with a disordered will that tends toward evil and that cannot be healed without grace. The doctrine is central to Christian theology, and it has shaped the Western moral imagination, but it also raises deep philosophical questions. Can guilt be inherited? Is it just for God to punish descendants for the sin of their ancestors? Can a disordered will be free? The philosophical work is to articulate the doctrine and to assess its coherence.

The SEP entry on original sin sets the philosophical discussion within the theology of the Christian tradition, especially in the work of Augustine, who developed the doctrine in his debates with Pelagius in the early fifth century. The doctrine is one of the most contested in Christian theology, and its philosophical assessment touches on questions of freedom, responsibility, and the justice of God.

Historical Background

The roots of the doctrine are in the Hebrew Bible, especially in Genesis 3, the story of the fall of Adam and Eve. The story tells of the first humans, created in the image of God, who disobeyed God's command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and who were expelled from the Garden as a result. The Hebrew prophets and the wisdom literature treated the story as a paradigm of human disobedience, but they did not develop a doctrine of inherited guilt or corrupted nature.

The doctrine of original sin was developed by Augustine in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, in his debates with Pelagius. Pelagius, a British monk, held that human beings are born free of the taint of the first sin, and that they can choose the good by their own powers, with the assistance of grace but not as a necessity. Augustine, drawing on his own experience of moral failure, as recorded in the Confessions, argued that the first sin damaged human nature, and that the damage is transmitted to all descendants, so that we are born with a disordered will that tends toward evil. The will, on Augustine's view, is not free in the sense of being able to choose the good without grace, but is in bondage to sin, and the healing of the will requires the grace of God.

The Augustinian position was affirmed at the Council of Carthage in 418, and it became the dominant position in the Western church. Aquinas systematized the Augustinian account in the Summa Theologica, distinguishing original sin as a state of the soul from actual sin as a particular act, and tracing the transmission of original sin to the act of generation. The Reformers, especially Calvin, developed the Augustinian account in the doctrine of total depravity, the view that the damage of the first sin extends to all the faculties of the soul, so that no part of the human being is unaffected.

Augustine's Account

Augustine's account of original sin is the classical form of the doctrine, and it deserves a closer look. Augustine's central claim is that the first sin was a free choice of the first humans, who were created with the power to choose the good or the evil, and who chose the evil. The choice, on Augustine's view, was a turning away from God, the highest good, to a lesser good, and the turning was a disorder of the will that damaged the will itself. The damage, on Augustine's view, is transmitted to all descendants, so that we are born with a disordered will that tends toward evil, and that cannot be healed without grace.

The transmission of the damage, on Augustine's view, is through the act of generation. Augustine held that the sexual act, since the fall, is accompanied by concupiscence, the disordered desire that is the mark of the fallen will, and that the concupiscence transmits the disorder to the offspring. The view has been criticized, both within the tradition and without, as tying the doctrine too closely to a particular theology of sexuality, and the modern theology has tended to separate the doctrine from the Augustinian account of transmission.

The deeper claim of the Augustinian account is that human nature is damaged, and that the damage is not a matter of individual choice but of the condition in which we find ourselves. We are born, on Augustine's view, into a condition of moral disorder, and the disorder is not something we chose, but something we inherit. The claim is both a piece of theological anthropology and a piece of moral psychology, and it has shaped the Western understanding of the human condition.

The Pelagian Controversy

The Pelagian controversy, in which the doctrine was forged, is worth examining, because the questions Pelagius raised are still live. Pelagius held that human beings are born free of the taint of the first sin, and that they can choose the good by their own powers. The view has a number of attractions. It preserves the freedom of the will, it makes God just, since God does not punish descendants for the sin of their ancestors, and it makes moral responsibility straightforward, since each person is responsible for their own choices and not for the condition in which they find themselves.

Augustine's reply was that the Pelagian view does not take seriously the fact of moral failure, the persistence of the gap between what we know and what we do. The gap, on Augustine's view, is not a matter of ignorance or weakness, but of a disorder of the will that is deeper than any particular choice. The disorder, on Augustine's view, is the inherited damage of the first sin, and the healing of the disorder requires grace, the divine assistance that reorders the will. Without grace, on Augustine's view, we cannot choose the good, and the freedom of the will is not the freedom to choose the good but only the freedom to choose among evils.

The controversy was settled in Augustine's favor at the Council of Carthage, but the questions Pelagius raised have persisted. The modern philosophical debate has reopened the questions, both from the side of moral philosophy, which asks whether inherited guilt is coherent, and from the side of the philosophy of religion, which asks whether the doctrine is compatible with the justice of God.

The Philosophical Questions

The doctrine of original sin raises three deep philosophical questions. The first is whether guilt can be inherited. The ordinary moral intuition is that guilt is a matter of what one has done, and that one cannot be guilty of a sin one did not commit. The doctrine of original sin seems to violate this intuition, since it holds that we are guilty of the first sin, which we did not commit. The defender of the doctrine has several replies. The first is that the guilt is not the guilt of the act, but the guilt of the condition, the disordered will that we inherit. The second is that the condition is the just punishment for the first sin, since the first sin damaged human nature, and the damage is the natural consequence of the act.

The second question is whether the doctrine is compatible with the justice of God. The doctrine holds that God punishes descendants for the sin of their ancestors, and the punishment, on the face of it, seems unjust. The defender of the doctrine can reply that the punishment is not arbitrary but the natural consequence of the act, and that God's justice is not violated by allowing the natural consequences to follow. The reply pushes the debate into the theology of divine justice, and into the question of how God's justice and mercy are related.

The third question is whether the doctrine is compatible with freedom. If the will is disordered, and the disorder is inherited, then the sinner is not free, and the question arises whether the sinner is responsible for the sin. Augustine's answer was that the sinner is responsible, because the disorder is the result of the original free choice of the first humans, and the inherited disorder is a just punishment for that choice. The Augustinian account has been criticized, both within the tradition and without, as making God the author of evil, but it has shaped the doctrine and the account of the human condition that the doctrine expresses.

Original Sin and the Problem of Evil

The doctrine of original sin bears directly on the problem of evil, especially in its moral form. The moral problem of evil asks how God, if perfectly good and omnipotent, could permit the moral evil of human sin. The doctrine of original sin offers a partial answer, by tracing the moral evil to the free choice of the first humans, and by holding that the evil is the result of the choice, not of God's creation. The free will defense, developed most fully by Alvin Plantinga, uses the doctrine of original sin as a part of the defense, by holding that the moral evil is the result of free choices, and that the freedom is a greater good that justifies the evil.

The theodicy of John Hick, developed in Evil and the God of Love, uses the doctrine of original sin in a different way. Hick holds that the world is a "soul-making" place, designed by God to produce moral and spiritual maturity in free creatures, and that the evils of the world, including the inherited disorder of the will, are part of the soul-making process. The doctrine of original sin, on Hick's view, is the doctrine that we are born into a condition that requires soul-making, and that the condition is part of God's plan for our maturation.

Contemporary Relevance

The doctrine of original sin remains a live topic, both in theology and in philosophy. The persistence of moral failure, the recognition that we are not as we should be, and the search for ways to name and to address the failure, are as pressing in the secular age as they were in the age of faith. The philosophical question is whether the doctrine of original sin, with its theological framework, is still useful, and whether the modern language of harm, preference, and dysfunction can carry the moral weight that the doctrine carried.

The deeper lesson is that the doctrine of original sin names a real feature of the human condition, the inherited moral disorder that we did not choose but that we find ourselves in. The honest philosophical stance is to take the doctrine seriously, to engage with the modern critiques, and to ask what the doctrine names that the alternatives do not. The work of philosophy is not to dismiss the doctrine by procedural fiat, but to do the careful work of comparison and assessment that the question deserves.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Original Sin" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-sin/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Sin" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sin/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Augustine" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The Problem of Evil" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/

Related Topics

• What Is Sin? — the act of moral failure.
• What Is Salvation? — the response to sin.
• What Is Grace? — the divine assistance.
• What Is the Problem of Evil? — the moral challenge to theism.
• What Is Theodicy? — the defense of God's goodness.
• Philosophy of God — the wider domain.