Part Seven: The Biblical Diagnosis of Human Misery

Let’s pick up where we left off last time: with the summary statement about the fall of Adam and Eve in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, entry 390:

The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.

Notice that the Catechism says that this is a truth that we can know with “the certainty of faith,” and that it involves a historical claim: that our “first parents” fell from grace by a deed committed “at the beginning of the history of man.” The great Christian traditions have understood somewhat differently some of the details of the “knock-on effects” of Adam and Eve’s sin upon the whole human race. Nevertheless, whether those effects were termed “the inherited condition of original sin” (in western parlance) or “the ancestral curse” (in eastern parlance) they were always said to originate from our first parents, and were always said to be grave and universally destructive. We see this already in the Genesis account, where Adam and Eve are driven from the Garden, told that they will now be subject to suffering and death, and soon thereafter, within their own nuclear family, they suffer the first homicide: Cain kills his brother Abel. From those first transgressions, according to the Bible, the whole human race was increasingly inundated with sin and corruption. The Catechism sums up the fallen human condition passed down by Adam and Eve to all their descendants in entries 403-404:

Following St. Paul, the Church has always taught that the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination to evil cannot be understood apart from their connection with Adam’s sin, and the fact that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted, a sin which is “the death of the soul.”…

How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? ... By [the] unity of the human race all men are implicated in Adam’s sin. … Still, the transgression of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all of human nature. By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would transmit in a fallen state (cf. Council of Trent, DS 1511-1512). It is a sin that will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. And that is why original sin is called “sin” only in an analogical sense: it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed” — a state and not an act.

All of Adam and Eve’s descendants, therefore, are born into this world with a broken and wounded human nature, strongly inclined to sin. This “ancestral curse” includes a clouded mind, a weakened will, disordered desires, and a liability to suffering and death. Clearly, the loss of the gift of supernatural life within us, that privation which Adam and Eve passed down to us, does not mean we are born in some kind of “neutral” state, with our human nature otherwise unharmed. Rather, the way that legacy was lost has a deleterious effect on all of Adam’s descendants. Just as a mother who is a drug addict can unintentionally pass on her addiction to her unborn children, so Adam and Eve lost their legacy of supernatural life by trying a kind of “drug” — namely, sin — that is addictive after only one dose, and they subsequently passed down that broken condition, that sin-addiction to all their descendants. In other words, the loss of divine and supernatural life within us — the loss of that “legacy,” that free gift from God —leaves us all addicted to what originally caused its loss: namely, the “drug” of sinful mistrust and rebellion against God.

In other words, as a result of the addictive drug that Adam and Eve took — the drug of sin — we, their ancestors, are all born sin-addicts, and subject to suffering and death.

Of course, this also means that the fall of humanity from grace is not our Creator’s fault, but ours (with some responsibility also shared by the serpent in the story…). This also means that human efforts to rectify the situation, however well-intentioned, are doomed to fall far short of their goal. Individual and collective attempts at personal and social reform, while often laudable and sometimes necessary, are always undertaken by people crippled by the very same wound of original sin that lies at the root of every human personal and social problem. At best, even prayerful, intelligent, well-meaning social reformers are “sinners not yet fully cured.” This is why the doctrine of original sin has always been seen as essential to the Gospel message. It shows us one of the main reasons why we need God to send us a divine “Savior,” and not just an inspiring moral teacher and exemplar. Only a divine Savior can rescue us from the guilt and power of sin, with all of its destructive effects upon human life. In other words, the Gospel is “good news” about the Savior that presupposes the “bad news” that we desperately need to be saved. The depth of our plight was revealed at least implicitly in Genesis, and explicitly in the epistles of St. Paul, but it is corroborated in our own experience with ourselves, and with others every day.

Who can look at the world as it is today — and as our history books show, it has always been — and not ask: “What is wrong with the human race?” The Bible and the classical Christian Tradition offer us an answer: the fall of our first parents, and the wound of original sin that we inherited from them, lies behind it all.

What all this means, of course, is that in Genesis God has revealed to us the main reason why there is so much human suffering and misery in His world: because we are all members of a fallen race. We all arrive in this world as “damaged goods” from the very moment of our conception: inclined to sin, broken and vulnerable to suffering and death in a way we were never meant to be.

Nevertheless, as we have already seen, God has not just revealed “the bad news” to us. He has also revealed the “Good News,” the Gospel of the Savior, and the center of that Gospel message is the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of His Son.

Robert Stackpole, STD

Mere Christian Fellowship

Next Time: The Heart of the Gospel