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Sin original- 1) the same as the sin of the ancestor: violation by the first people, and, the commandment of fidelity to Him (), which entailed their fall from the state of godlikeness, immortality and communion with God into sensuality, decay and slavery; 2) sinful corruption that struck human nature as a result of the fall, expressed in the fact that all their descendants (exception - the Lord) are born damaged in soul and body, with a tendency to evil; passed on in a hereditary way.

In relation to the descendants of Adam and Eve, i.e. to all mankind, original (ancestral) sin can be more accurately called . Thus, under the original sin is understood both the offense of the forefathers and its consequences.

Liberation from the power of original sin (an unbaptized person, by virtue of original sin, in essence cannot but sin, and a baptized person, although he can sin, is powerful and not sinning) occurs in Baptism - spiritual birth.

The fall of the first people led to the loss of man's primordial blissful state of being with God, falling away from God and falling into an inferior sinful state.

The word fall means the loss of a certain height, the loss of an exalted state. For man, such an exalted state is life in God. Man possessed such an exalted state before the fall into sin. He was in a state of blissful well-being due to participation in the highest Good - the all-blessed God. The bliss of man was connected with the presence in him from the very creation of the Holy Spirit. From the very creation, grace was present in him in such a way that he did not know the experience of a graceless state. “Just as the Spirit acted in the prophets and taught them, and was inside them, and appeared to them from the outside: so in Adam the Spirit, when he wanted, stayed with him, taught and inspired ...” (St.). “Adam, the father of the universe, in Paradise knew the sweetness of God’s love,” says St. . – The Holy Spirit is the love and sweetness of the soul, mind and body. And whoever has known God by the Holy Spirit, those insatiably day and night yearn for the living God.

To preserve and develop this blissful state of grace, the first person in paradise was given the only commandment not to eat the fruits of the forbidden tree. The fulfillment of this commandment was the exercise through which a person could learn to obey God, that is, to harmonize his will with the will of his Creator. Through the preservation of this commandment, a person could multiply the gifts of grace and achieve the highest gift of grace - deification. But, being endowed with free will, he could also fall away from being with God, be deprived of Divine grace.

The fall of man occurred in the realm of will or volition. Adam could not have sinned. The progenitor of mankind had autocracy. It was expressed in the fact that he could “have his mind always elevated and clinging to the one Lord God” (St. Simeon the Theologian). Like the All-Holy God, he could become completely unyielding to evil. Having embarked on the path of disobedience to the commandment, Adam betrayed his destiny - he fell away from the blissful union with God, lost the Divine grace dwelling in him.

The consequence of falling away from God was. As far as a person has moved away from God, so much has he come closer to death. The ancestors of mankind themselves prepared death for themselves and the entire human race, for God is the true Source of all life and those who move away from Him will perish (). Being in God, Adam, according to St. , had Life in him, which supernaturally gave life to his mortal nature. When he departed from unity with Life, that is, with God, he passed from supernatural incorruptibility to disintegration and corruption. The death of the body was preceded by the death of the soul, for real death occurs when the human soul is separated from Divine grace (St.). Having departed from God, Adam tasted, first of all, spiritual death, for “just as the body dies when the soul is separated from it, so when the Holy Spirit is separated from the soul, the soul dies” (St.

Fall of Adam and Eve. Sophia Cathedral in Novgorod. XIX century.

1) personal transgression by our forefathers of the will of God about not eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; 2) the law of sinful disorder, which has risen into human nature as a result of this crime. When it comes to the heredity of original sin, what is meant is not the crime of our forefathers, for which they alone are responsible, but the law of sinful disorder that struck human nature as a result of the fall of our forefathers.

image of the fall of our ancestors

Moses describes how the fall of our first parents happened. Having spoken about the blessed dwelling of the first man, about the commandment given to him by God in Paradise, about naming animals by Adam, about the creation of a helper by God and about their innocent state, the sacred Writer continues:

The serpent is the wisest of all the animals that exist on earth, the Lord God created them. And the serpent said to the woman: what is it that God says: let not you eat from every tree of paradise? And the woman said to the serpent: from every tree of paradise we will eat: from the fruit of the tree, hedgehog is in the middle of paradise, God said, don’t eat from him, touch him below, but you won’t die. And the serpent said to the woman: you will not die a death: for God knows, as if in the same day you will take away from him, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like a god, leading good and evil. And the woman saw, like a good tree for food, and as you like to see with your eyes and eat red, understand: and take poison from its fruit, and give it to your husband with you, and poison.

It can be seen from this description that -

1. The first cause of the fall of our first parents, or the cause of their fall, was the serpent. Who is meant here by the name of the serpent? Moses calls him "the wisest of all the beasts that are on the earth"; therefore, refers to the number of terrestrial animals. But, judging by the fact that this serpent speaks, argues, slanders God, tries to lure Eve to evil, we see that here in the natural serpent the spiritual serpent, the devil, the enemy of God, is hiding. And Scripture leaves no doubt about that. The wise one says that “because of the envy of the devil, death (following and sin) entered into the world” (Wisdom 2:24); The Savior himself calls the devil "a murderer from the beginning" and "the father of lies", and all sinners are "sons of the devil" (John 8:44); finally, St. John the Theologian testifies twice and with all clarity that “the great serpent, the ancient serpent is” precisely “the devil and Satan, flatter the whole world” (Rev. 12:9; 20:2). This is how the Holy Fathers and teachers of the Church constantly looked at the serpent of the tempter, for example:

A) Irenaeus: “the devil, being a fallen angel, can only do what he did at the beginning, that is, to perturb and captivate the mind of a person to the transgression of the commandments of God and little by little darken his heart”; b) John Chrysostom: “those who follow the Scriptures should know that the words (of the serpent of the tempter) are the words of the devil, excited to such a deception by his own envy, and he used this animal only as a suitable tool (ὀργάνω)”; c) Gregory the Theologian: “due to the envy of the devil and the deceitfulness of the wife, to which she herself was subjected as the weakest, and which she produced, as skillful in persuasion (oh my weakness! For the infirmity of the ancestor is also my own), the man forgot the commandment given to him and defeated by bitter taste"; d) Augustine: “so (the most cunning) the serpent is called because of the cunning of the devil, who in him and through him performed his deceit”; e) John of Damascus: “man is overcome by the envy of the devil; for the envious hater of goodness - the demon, overthrown for the exaltation of the valley, could not endure that we were honored with heavenly blessings, ”and others.

2. The second cause of the fall of our first parents, the cause in the proper sense, was themselves. The tempter turns to the wife (perhaps because she heard the commandment not from God directly, but from her husband, and therefore, it was more convenient to hesitate), and begins his speech by slandering God: paradise" (Gen. 3:1). According to this beginning alone, St. Chrysostom, the wife should have already understood that craftiness is hidden here, should have turned away from the serpent, which says the opposite of what God commanded, and turned with a question to the husband for whom she was created. But, due to extreme inattention (άπροσεξίαν), Eve not only did not turn away from the serpent, but even revealed to him the very commandment of God, to her own destruction. And the wife said to the serpent: “We will eat from every tree of paradise: from the fruit of the tree, hedgehog is in the middle of paradise, God said, don’t eat from it, touch it below, lest you die” (2.3). Then the tempter, with even greater impudence, began to assert the complete opposite of what God had said, and tried to make God Himself look like an envious and ill-wisher to people. “And the serpent said to the woman: you will not die a death: for God knows, as if in the same day you will take away from him, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like a god, leading good and evil” (4.5). The more conveniently the wife could now recognize the evil one and the more strongly not to believe his words. But she believed the serpent more than her Creator and Master, was carried away by the dream of becoming equal to God, and after that, a triple lust, the root of all iniquity, was born in her (1 John 2:16): (lust of the flesh) and as it pleases the eye to see (lust of the eyes) and eat red, understand it (pride of life): and take poison from its fruit ”(6). This means that although Eve fell through the seduction of the devil, she did not fall out of necessity, but completely freely: the words of the seducer were not such that they could involuntarily lead her to sin, on the contrary, they contained a lot of things that should have enlightened her and kept her from crimes. How did Adam fall? Moses is silent about this; but from the words of God the judge to the fallen Adam: “for thou hast listened to the voice of thy wife, and thou hast eaten from the tree, of whose commandments thou shalt not eat this alone, thou hast eaten from him” (17), we can conclude that Adam fell due to the convictions of his wife and addiction to it, which means that he also fell not out of necessity, but of his own free will. Whatever these convictions of the wife and Adam's love for her, he had to remember the commandment of God, had the mind to decide whom to obey more, whether his wife or God, and he himself is guilty of listening to the voice of his wife.

And from this it follows that the fault of the fall of our first parents does not fall in the slightest on God. Having created man free, God gave him a commandment, and, moreover, the easiest one, expressed it with all clarity, protected it with terrible threats, gave man all the means to fulfill it (for in addition to the perfection of the natural forces of the primordial man, the grace of God constantly dwelt in him) : and the man did not want to fulfill the will of his Creator and Benefactor, - he listened to the first voice of the tempter ... But “why, they ask, did God give this commandment to Adam when he foresaw that he would violate it?” Then, that such or another commandment (and it is impossible to think of anything easier than this one), only a certain commandment, as we have already seen, was necessary for primitive man to exercise and strengthen his will in good, and so that he himself could earn fame and glory for himself. attain supreme bliss. “Why didn’t God prevent Adam from falling, and why does the devil tempt him when he foresaw both?” Then, that in order to do this, He had to restrict their freedom, or even take it away from them; but God, infinitely wise and immutable in his determinations, having once granted freedom to some of his creatures, can neither restrict nor take it away again. “Why didn’t God communicate to man in the very structure of his sinlessness, so that he could not fall, even if he wanted to, in the midst of all temptations?” Therefore, let us say with Basil the Great, why do you not recognize the servants as good when you keep them bound, but when you see that they are voluntarily fulfilling their duties. Therefore, God is pleased not with compulsion, but with virtuous action. Virtue, on the other hand, comes from will, and not from necessity; and the will depends on what is in us; and what is in us is free. Therefore, whoever reproaches the Creator for not having made us sinless by nature, he does nothing more than prefer unreasonable nature to rational nature, to nature endowed with volition and self-activity, immobile and having no aspirations. “Why would God create us when He knew in advance that we would fall and perish? Wouldn’t it be better if He didn’t communicate to us neither being nor freedom at all?” But who dares to unravel the plans of the Infinitely Wise One? Who will explain to us that the creation of man, as a sensual-spiritual being, was not necessary in the composition of the universe? And besides, if God foresaw our fall, then He also foresaw our redemption. And at the same time, as He determined to create a man who had a mouth, He also predestined to restore the fallen through His only-begotten Son. “Not only, I say, God foresaw,” writes St. Chrysostom - that Adam will sin, but also that He will raise the fallen through dispensation. And he did not know about the fall before, as he foresaw the uprising. He knew that he would fall, but he also prepared medicine for rebellion, and allowed a person to experience death in order to teach what he can achieve by himself, and what he used by the goodness of the Creator. Knew Adam would fall; but I saw that Abel, Enos, Enoch, Noah, Elijah would come from him, prophets, marvelous Apostles, an adornment of nature, and God-bearing clouds of martyrs, exuding piety.

the importance of the sin of our first parents

The sin of Adam and Eve, consisting in eating by them from the fruit of the tree forbidden by God, may seem unimportant. But we will understand its importance and magnitude if we pay attention:

A) Not on appearance, but on the very spirit of the commandment, violated by our forefathers. What did this commandment require of them? It was an artificial commandment, not a natural one; our forefathers could not by themselves, according to the voice of the natural law inscribed in their conscience, come to the conclusion that they should not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and explain to themselves why they should not, but accepted this commandment already outwardly from God and pledged to fulfill it only because God commanded it. Therefore, in her spirit, she demanded from them unconditional obedience to God, she was given to test their obedience. This means that having violated it, they fell into the sin of disobedience to God or “disobedience”, as the Apostle expresses it (Rom. 5:19), and thus violated the entire moral law, which in general is nothing but the will of God, and requires man only obedience to this will. Therefore, and said a blessing. Augustine: “Let no one think that the sin (of the first people) is small and light because it consisted in eating from the tree, and, moreover, not bad and harmful, but only forbidden, obedience was required by the commandment, such a virtue, which is in a rational creature like a mother and guardian of all virtues. b) The lightness of this commandment. “What could be easier than her? asks St. Chrysostom - God granted man to live in paradise, enjoy the beauty of everything visible, enjoy the fruits of all the trees of paradise, and forbade eating from only one: and the person did not even want to fulfill this ... For this, the divine Scripture says: paradise) even from the earth every red tree for a vision, and good for food "(Gen. 2:9), so that we may know, using what abundance, a person violated, through great intemperance and negligence, the commandment given to him ". c) On stimuli to the fulfillment of this commandment. On the one hand, such motives were and should have been for man the greatest, special blessings to him of the Creator, who created him with his own hands, adorned him with his own image, made him king over all earthly creatures, settled sweets in paradise, called him to communion with Himself, endowed him with immortality. in soul and body, destined for eternal bliss, and for all these favors he demanded only one obedience from the beneficiary. And on the other hand, there are terrible threats for violating the commandment: “If you take away a day from it, you will die the death” (Genesis 2:17). Is it possible to think of stronger motives, and, moreover, to the fulfillment of such an easy commandment. d) For the means to fulfill it. It must be remembered that Adam and Eve were still completely pure and innocent, with fresh, strong forces, undamaged by sin, and that, moreover, the all-powerful grace of God constantly dwelt in our forefathers. Consequently, they had only to want to resist the deceiver and stand firm in goodness, and they would stand firm: everything depended on their will alone, and their strength was sufficient in abundance. e) The number of private sins, which consisted in the sin of the forefathers. Here were: a) pride: because the forefathers were first of all carried away by the promise of the serpent: “you will be like a Bozi”; b) unbelief: because they did not believe the words of God: “you will die the death”; c) apostasy from God and going over to the side of His enemy, the devil: because, having disobeyed God, they obeyed the deceiver, and believed his impudent slander that God, out of envy or ill will, forbade them to eat from a famous tree; d) The greatest ingratitude to God for all His extraordinary graces and bounties. Or let's say bliss. Augustine: “here and pride: because a person wanted to be in the power of his own rather than God's; and desecration of the sacred: because he did not believe God; and homicide: because he subjected himself to death; and spiritual fornication: because the innocence of the human soul is violated by the conviction of the serpent; and tatba: because he used the forbidden tree; and covetousness: because he desired more than he should have been content with. And Tertullian in the violation of the first commandment by our forefathers saw the violation of the entire Decalogue. f) Finally, to the consequences that came from the sin of our forefathers. If this sin had not been great, it would not have produced those terrible consequences that came from it; and God, the righteous judge, would not have subjected our first parents to such punishment. “The commandment of God, says the blessed. Augustine, it was forbidden only to eat from the tree, and therefore the sin seems to be easy; but how great He who cannot err considered him, is quite evident from the severity of the punishment.

consequences of the fall of our forefathers

These consequences were first of all revealed in the soul of the ancestors, then extended to the body and to all their external well-being.

Consequences in the soul: it is -

2) Bewilderment of the mind (right. Confessions, part 1, answers to questions 23, 27). This was revealed immediately after the fall of Adam and Eve, when they, having heard “the voice of the Lord God, walking in paradise at noon,” thought to hide from him among the trees of paradise (Genesis 3:8). “There is nothing worse than sin,” remarks St. Chrysostom; having entered into us, it (sin) not only fills us with shame, but also makes people insane, formerly reasonable and distinguished by great wisdom. Look how unreasonable now is the one who hitherto was distinguished by so much wisdom, who by the very deed showed the wisdom bestowed upon him, and even prophesied ... How much madness is that they are trying to hide from God, the omnipresent, from the Creator, Who created everything from nothing, Who knows hidden, “he created the hearts of people on one basis, understands all their deeds” (Ps. 32:15), “tests hearts and wombs” (Ps. 7:10), knows the most secret movements of the heart!

3) The loss of innocence, the subversion of the will and its inclination more to evil than to good (right. Confessor part 1, answers to questions 23, 27). This can be seen: a) from the fact that as soon as the forefathers sinned, “they opened the eyes of both, and became wise, as if they were a demon” (Gen. 3:7), which was not noticed before; b) from the fact that to God, their Father, the Benefactor, instead of the former filial love, they suddenly felt slavish fear: “And the Lord God called Adam and said to him: Adam, where are you; And he said to him: I heard the voice of You walking in paradise, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and hid myself ”(9:10); c) finally, from the fact that, giving an account to God of their sin, they decided, instead of repentance, to bring a crafty justification. Adam laid the blame on his wife and even on God who gave her: “and Adam said: wife, thou hast given me with me, she gave me from the tree, and poison” (12); and the woman laid the blame on the serpent: "And the woman said, 'Deceive me of the serpent, and poison'" (13). The Holy Fathers and teachers of the Church expressed that through the fall, Adam lost the garment of holiness, became evil, strayed into vicious thoughts, and that the devil affirmed the law of sin in his nature. We find such expressions, for example: a) in Irenaeus: “and Adam said: through disobedience, I lost the garment of holiness that I had from the Holy Spirit”; b) Basil the Great: “Soon Adam became outside of paradise, outside of this blessed life, having become evil not out of necessity, but out of recklessness”; c) in Athanasius the Great: “transgressing the commandment of God, Adam fell into sinful thoughts, not because God created these thoughts that entrap us, but because the devil sowed them by deceit in the rational nature of man, who fell into crime and moved away from God, so that the devil established in the nature of man both the law of sin and death, which reigns through sin.

4) Distortion of the image of God. If the image of God is inscribed in the soul of a person and mainly in its forces, mind and free will, and these forces lost much perfection and were distorted through the sin of Adam, then the image of God in man was distorted along with them. This idea is confirmed by: a) Basil the Great: “Man is created in the image and likeness of God; but sin has distorted (ήχρείωσεν) the beauty of the image, dragging the soul into passionate desires”; b) Macarius the Great: “if a coin bearing the image of kings is damaged; then gold also loses its value, and the image does not use anything: Adam also experienced it ”; c) Theodoret: "Adam, desiring to be God, destroyed even that which was the image of God."

Consequences for the body:

1) Illnesses, sorrows, exhaustion (Last Eastern Patr. On the Holy Faith, part 6). Having damaged all the forces of the soul, the sin of the forefathers, as an unnatural action, inevitably produced a similar disorder in their body, introduced into it the seeds of all kinds of illnesses, fatigue in labor, relaxation and suffering. “And to the woman [God] said, I will multiply thy sorrows, and thy groanings, in pain thou shalt bear children” (Genesis 3:16). “And he said to Adam: for thou hast heard the voice of thy wife, and thou hast eaten from the tree, whose commandments thou shalt not eat this alone, thou hast eaten from him: Cursed be the earth in thy deeds, in sorrow shall she bear all the days of thy life” (Gen. 3: 17). “In the sweat of your face you shall bring forth your bread” (19). All this was recognized as the consequences of ancestral sin and the teachers of the Church, for example: a) Theophilus of Antioch: “out of sin, as if from a source, sickness, sorrow, suffering poured out on a person”; b) Irenaeus: “in condemnation for sin, the husband accepted sorrows and earthly labor, and that in order to eat bread in the sweat of his face ...; likewise, the wife accepted sorrows and labors, and sighs, and birth pains ... "

2. Death “In the sweat of your face, God said to Adam, bring down your bread until you return to the ground, from which you have been taken; Bodily death became a necessary consequence of the fall of our forefathers, on the one hand, because sin brought into their body the destructive principle of disease and exhaustion; and on the other hand, because God removed them forever from the tree of life after their fall: “and God said: behold, Adam was as one of us, to understand good and evil: and now let not when he stretch out his hand and take from the tree life, and he will demolish it, and he will live forever” (22). This is how the holy Fathers and teachers of the Church looked at death, in particular: his death"; b) John Chrysostom: “although the forefathers still lived for many years, but as soon as they heard:“ you are the earth, and you will depart to the earth, ”they accepted the sentence of death, they became mortal, and since then, it could be said that they died ; to denote this, it is said in Scripture: “on the same day you will take away from him, you will die a death,” that is, hear the verdict that from now on you are already mortal”; c) Bliss. Augustine: “among Christians who contain the true catholic faith, it is recognized as undoubted that even bodily death has befallen us not according to the law of nature: because God did not create death for man, but because of sin.”

Consequences in relation to the external state of man:

1. His expulsion from paradise. Paradise was a blissful dwelling for an innocent man, and was prepared for him solely by the infinite goodness of the Creator; now that a person has sinned and angered his Lord and Benefactor, the guilty person has become unworthy of such a dwelling and is justly expelled from paradise: “and the Lord God drove him out of paradise to make the earth sweet, from which it was taken” (Gen. 3:23), - thought , which was often repeated by the teachers of the Church.

2. Loss or reduction of power over animals (Right. Isp. Part 1, answer to question 22). This authority was based on the fact that man was created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26); consequently, as soon as through sin the image of God was darkened in man, his power over animals was bound to weaken. "Look, says St. Chrysostom, while Adam had not yet sinned, the animals were slaves to him and obedient, and he, as slaves, gave them names; but when he defiled his appearance with sin, then the animals did not recognize him, and the slaves became his enemies ... While Adam kept his appearance pure, created in the image of God, the animals obeyed him like servants; but when he darkened this view by disobedience, they, not recognizing their master, hated him as a stranger. “However, the same teacher adds in another place, although Adam violated the entire commandment and transgressed the entire law, God did not deprive him of all honor and did not take away all his power from him, but removed from his subordination only those animals that were not very suitable for him. the needs of life; but those who are necessary and useful and can serve us a lot in life, I left them all in our service.

3. The curse of the earth in the works of man: "Cursed is the earth in thy works... thorns and thistles shall increase thee" (Genesis 2:17-18). “And this curse is just, says St. Chrysostom, for just as the earth was created for a person so that he could enjoy everything that comes from it, so now for the sake of a person who has sinned, she is cursed, so that her curse would harm the well-being and tranquility of man. From the words of the Writer, we can conclude that this curse primarily concerns the fruitfulness of the earth: “thorns and thistles will increase you”; but the Apostle extends his curse much further: “To vanity, he says, I obey the creature, not by my will, but for the one who obeyed; we know that the whole creation (with us) sighs and sympathizes even to this day” (Rom. 8:20-22). What exactly this vanity consists of, which the creature obeyed as a result of the fall of man, we cannot determine with accuracy.

the transfer of the sin of the forefathers to the human race: preliminary remarks

The sin committed by our forefathers in paradise, with all its consequences, passed from them to all their offspring, and is known in the language of the Church under the name of the sin of the original or ancestral (Right Confessor, part 1, answer to question 24).

1. The doctrine of original sin, which spread from Adam and Eve to the entire human race, is extremely important in Christianity. If there is no original sin in people and their nature is not damaged, if they are born pure and innocent before God, as the first man came out of the hands of the Creator, then there is no need for redemption for them; The Son of God came to earth in vain and tasted death, and the Christian Faith is undermined at its very foundations. That's why he proved a blessing. Augustine, that the sin of Adam and the redemption accomplished by Christ the Savior are, as it were, two centers around which all Christian doctrine revolves.

2. In its teaching on original sin, the Orthodox Church distinguishes, firstly, between sin itself and, secondly, its consequences in us. Under the name of original sin, she means actually that transgression of the commandment of God, that deviation of human nature from the law of God, and consequently, from its goals, which was committed by our forefathers in paradise and from them passed on to all of us. “Original sin, we read in the Orthodox Confession of the Eastern Catholic and Apostolic Church, is the transgression of the law of God, given in Paradise to the ancestor Adam. This ancestral sin passed from Adam into all human nature, since we were all then in Adam, and thus through one Adam sin spread to all of us. This is why we are conceived and born with this sin” (part 3, answer to question 20). The only difference is that in Adam it was a deviation from the law of God and, consequently, it was free, arbitrary from its destiny, but in us it is hereditary, necessary - with nature that deviated from the law of God, we are born; in Adam it was a personal sin, a sin in the strict sense of the word - in us it is not a personal sin, not actually a sin, but is only the sinfulness of nature, which we receive from our parents; Adam sinned, i.e. freely violated the commandment of God, and through that became a sinner, i.e. deviated his whole nature from the law of God - and we personally did not sin with Adam, but became sinners in him and through him (“by disobedience to the one man, many were sinners” Rom. 5:19), receiving from him a sinful nature, and we are on light "by nature the children of the wrath" of God (Eph. 2:3). In short, under the name of the ancestral sin in the ancestors themselves, we mean both their sin and, at the same time, the sinful state of nature with which and in which we are born. The Orthodox Church inspires such a notion when she says in her confession: “because in a state of innocence all people were in Adam; then as soon as he sinned, they sinned in him, and they all fell into a state of sin” (part 1, answer to question 24).

Under the consequences of original sin, the Church understands the very consequences that the sin of the forefathers produced directly in them, and which pass from them to us, which are: clouding of the mind, subversion of the will and its inclination to evil, bodily diseases, death, and others. “And the burden and consequence of the fall, say the Eastern Patriarchs in their epistle on the Orthodox faith, we call not sin itself ... but indulgence to sin, and those disasters with which Divine justice punished a person for his disobedience, such as: exhausting labors, sorrows, bodily infirmities, illnesses of birth, a difficult life for some time on the land of wandering, and finally bodily death ”(ch. 6). “Although the will of man, it is also said in the Orthodox Confession, is damaged from original sin, but for all that, even now it is in the will of every person to be good and a child of God, or evil and the son of the devil” (part 1, answer to the question .27); and here the damage of the will, i.e. its inclination to evil differs from original sin and is recognized as its consequence in us.

This distinction between original sin and its consequences must be firmly remembered, especially in certain cases, in order to correctly understand the teaching of the Orthodox Church. For example, the Church teaches that baptism blots out, destroys original sin in us: this means that it purifies the actual sinfulness of our nature, inherited by us from our ancestors; that through baptism we come out of a sinful state, cease to be by nature the children of God's wrath, i.e. guilty before God, we become completely pure and innocent before Him, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, as a result of the merits of our Redeemer; but it does not mean that baptism destroys in us the very consequences of original sin: inclination towards evil more than towards good, sickness, death, and others, because all these aforementioned consequences remain, as experience and the Word of God testify (Rom. 7:23). ), and in regenerated people.

3. However, sometimes original sin is taken in a broad sense, when, for example, the doctrine is expounded about the reality of this sin, its universality. And it is precisely under the name of original sin that both sin itself and together its consequences in us are understood: the deterioration of all our forces, our inclination more towards evil than towards good, and others. This is because in the Holy Scripture itself the doctrine of original sin and its consequences is set forth, for the most part, inseparably; and on the other hand, because when the reality of original sin, or its universality, is proved, at the same time the reality or universality of its consequences is also proved.

4. There are two known false teachings regarding original sin. One is those who completely reject the reality of this sin, saying that everyone is born as pure and innocent as Adam was created, and that sickness and death are the natural consequences of human nature, and not the consequences of original sin - so the Pelagians taught in antiquity, and in modern times the Socinians and the rationalists in general teach. Another doctrine is that of the Reformed, who go to the opposite extreme, exaggerating too much in us the consequences of original sin: according to this doctrine, the ancestral sin completely destroyed freedom in man, the image of God and all spiritual forces, so that the very nature of man became sin, everything that desires, whatever a man does is a sin, his very virtues are sins, and he is decidedly incapable of anything good. The Orthodox Church rejects the first of these false opinions with its teaching about the reality in us of original sin with all its consequences (that is, original sin understood in a broader sense); the latter he rejects with his doctrine of these consequences.

the reality of original sin, its universality and mode of distribution

The ancestral sin, the Orthodox Church teaches, with its consequences spread from Adam and Eve to all their descendants through their natural birth, and therefore undoubtedly exists.

I) This teaching has a solid foundation in Scripture. The passages of Scripture related to this can be divided into two classes: some express mainly the idea of ​​the reality and universality of original sin in people; while others predominantly thought about reality and the way it was disseminated.

From places of the first kind:

1. The most important and clear is in the fifth chapter of the letter of the holy apostle Paul to the Romans. Making a comparison here between Adam and the Lord Jesus Christ in relation to them in relation to the human race, the Apostle writes, among other things: “by one man, sin is in the world outside, and death is sin, and so death is in all men, in which all have sinned” (12). “If you die by the sin of one man, multiply the grace of God and the gift of the grace of the one man Jesus Christ in many excesses” (15). “If the only sin is the death of the reign of one, multiplying more than the excess of grace and the gift of truth accepting, one Jesus Christ will reign in life. For the same reason, just as there is a single sin in all people, there is a condemnation, so there is a single justification in all people, there is a justification of life. As if by the disobedience of one man, the sinners were many, and the obedience of the one righteous will be many” (17-19). From these words it can be seen: a) that sin entered the world, and through sin death also entered, as a consequence of it, through the one man Adam: “let us unite (δι' ένός) man sin into the world of avnida and sins (διά τής άμαρτίας) death” ; b) that it was through the sin of the one that death entered into all people, and not through their own sins: “and so (οϋτως) death is in all men inside ... by the sin of one many people died ... by the sin of one sin the death of the kingdom by one (διά τοϋ ένός )"; c) that together with death, which is a consequence of sin, all men and sin entered into one, and that it was through this sin, before their own, that people became sinners: “in it all have sinned”; “disobedience (διά τής παρακοής) of a single person sinned bysh (κατεστάθησαν - became, became) many”; d) finally, that it was precisely through the sin of one that entered into all people before they began to sin themselves, and another consequence of sin is condemnation: “one (δι’ ένός) through sin in all people is condemned.” Consequently, those who reject the spread of original sin from the forefathers to the entire human race are unjustly saying that such a meaning lies in the words of the Apostle under consideration. “Adam sinned first and therefore died; all other people sin according to his example, and therefore die as a result of their own sins - and, therefore, the sin of Adam entered the world only through imitation, and is not communicated to people through birth. In addition to the remarks we have presented, which clearly refute such an interpretation, we will make some more: a) The Apostle, as if to protect against this interpretation, deliberately said in the same chapter of the Epistle to the Romans: “Death reigns from Adam even to Moses and over those who have not sinned in the likeness of a crime Adamov "(14); b) according to the words of the Apostle, through sin, death passed to all people, and indeed all people die, even infants; but infants have no sins of their own, and cannot sin according to the example of Adam; c) “if the Apostle, let us quote the words of the blessed. Augustine, had the intention of talking about the sin of imitation, he would rather say after the Savior (John 8:41-44) that through an angel sin entered the world, because the angel sinned first "; d) “Many sin by their very deed, not at all thinking of Adam’s sin: how then does Adam’s sin harm them by its example?” ; e) The Apostle expresses that through one, i.e. man, “sin into the world outside” (έισήλθεν), that is, that this sin did not remain at its source, but spread, passed from it to all men, that the first sinner gave birth to sinners who are subject to death. The same thought as in the place examined is also contained in the words of the Apostle: “For as in Adam (έν τώ Άδάμ) all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). If all people die in Adam, then they die the same death with him, which occurred as a result of his sin.

2. Another, less clear, is in the book of Job. Depicting the disasters of human life, the holy man says among other things: "For whoever is clean from filth: no one, but one day of his life on earth" (Job 14:4-5). Here, obviously, we are talking about some kind of filth, from which no one is free from people, and moreover, from birth itself. What is this filth? Since, according to Job’s description, it is the cause of the disasters of human life (vv. 1-2), and makes a person guilty of the judgment of God (3), it must be assumed that here we mean moral filth, and not physical, which is already a consequence moral, and cannot by itself make a person guilty before God - the sinfulness of our nature is understood, passing on to everyone from the ancestors.

Places of the second kind are:

1. The words of the Savior in His conversation with Nicodemus: “Amen, amen I say to you: unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the spirit is spirit” (John 3:5-6). The meaning of these words is that a person born naturally, no matter who he is, Jew or Gentile, cannot enter the Kingdom of God, into the kingdom of grace and then into the kingdom of glory, unless he is reborn from above in the sacrament of baptism. This means - a) all people, by their very nature, are now subject to some kind of impurity, and moral impurity, because it serves as an obstacle for them to enter the moral kingdom of Christ; and - b) this impurity spreads to all people through their natural birth. In order to explain this place, we can recall the words of the Apostle that we are “by nature the children of the wrath of God” (Eph. 2:3).

2. The saying of the Psalmist in his penitential psalm: “Behold, in iniquity I was conceived, and in sins give birth to me, my mother (Ps. 50:7), and as from Hebrew: “in iniquity ... in sin ...” Here one cannot understand the personal sin of the king-prophet, because in this sin, he says, I was conceived and born; this sin, therefore, was inherent in him from the time when he did not yet have personal activity. It is also impossible to understand the sin of David's parents, that is, that he was conceived and born by them lawlessly - it is known that David was not the fruit of a crime, that Jesse, his father, shone with the life of a righteous man, and his mother was the lawful wife of Jesse. Therefore, nothing else should be understood under the name of lawlessness, in which David was conceived and born, as that sin, which, being born from the first disobedience of Adam, passes from Adam to all his offspring. The natural law of conception and birth is the same for all men; consequently, it is impossible to indicate the reasons why only one king of Israel should have been conceived and born in the sin of the ancestor, and all other people would have been free from it.

II. Having such firm grounds in Holy Scripture, the dogma of original sin has no less firm grounds in Holy Tradition. The evidence for this legend is:

1. The custom of the Church to baptize infants, which has existed in it since the time of the Apostles themselves, as the ancient teachers testify: Irenaeus, Origen, Cyprian and many others. And she always performed this baptism according to the testimony of the same teachers and her symbols: "for the remission of sins." What kind of sins, when babies cannot yet sin by themselves? “Infants,” said Origen, are baptized for the remission of sins. What are the sins? Or when they sinned? And how can they need a baptismal font, if not in the sense that we just said: “no one will be clean from filth, if only one day of his life on earth”? And since the defilements of birth are cleansed through this sacrament of baptism, infants are also baptized. That's why it's a blessing. Augustine boldly points the Pelagians to the baptism of infants in support of the idea that the Church has always recognized in people the reality of ancestral sin. It must be added that during the baptism of infants, as well as adults, the Church from ancient times used spells to drive away from the newly baptized "every evil and unclean spirit hidden and nestling in his heart." What would these spells mean if the Church considered babies to be pure and not involved in ancestral sin? And the ancients of these spells were not rejected by the Pelagians themselves.

2. Councils that were in the fifth century on the occasion of the Pelagian heresy. It is known that from 412 to 431 in different parts of the Christian world, and in the east, and especially in the west, there were more than twenty councils that considered the aforementioned heresy, and all unanimously anathematized it. The acts of all these councils were printed in Collect. Concil. T. I, ed. Harduin.. How can one explain such a unanimous uprising against the Pelagian error if the doctrine of original sin had not been widespread and deeply rooted in the Church of Christ since the time of the Apostles themselves? It would be superfluous to give definitions of all these councils against the Pelagians; it will suffice to quote the words of the most important of them, the Carthaginian (418), accepted by the Orthodox Church among the nine local ones. “Whoever rejects the need for baptism of small children and newborns from the mother’s womb of children, or says that although they are baptized for the remission of sins, they do not borrow anything from the ancestral Adam’s sin that should be washed with the bath of resurrection (from which it would follow that the image of baptism in remission of sins is used over them not in the true, but in a false sense), let him be anathema. For what was said by the Apostle: "by one man sin is in the world below, and death is in sin, and so is death in all men below, in whom all have sinned" (Rom. 5:12), it is fitting to understand it in no other way, except as the Catholic Church, which is everywhere, has always understood and widespread. For, according to this rule of faith, infants, who by themselves cannot commit any sins, are truly baptized for the remission of sins, so that through regeneration, that which they took from the old birth will be cleansed in them.

3. Sayings of private teachers of the Church who lived before the appearance of the Pelagian heresy, such as: a) Justina: “(Christ) blessed to be born and taste death, not because He Himself needed it, but for the sake of the human race, which through Adam (άπό τοϋ Άδαμ) was subjected to death and the temptation of the serpent"; b) Irenaeus: “in the first Adam we offended God by not fulfilling His commandments; in the second Adam they were reconciled to Him, becoming obedient even unto death; we were debtors not to another, but to the One whose commandment we broke from the beginning ”; c) Tertullian: “from the beginning man is deceived by the devil in order to break the commandment of God, and therefore put to death; after that, the whole human race, descended from his seed, became a participant (traducem) in his condemnation ”; d) Cyprian: “If great sinners who have previously sinned much against God, when they believe, are granted remission of sins and baptism and grace are not forbidden to anyone, much less should this baby be forbidden, who, having barely been born, did not sin in anything , except that, having come from the flesh of Adam, he received (contraxit) the infection of ancient death through birth itself, and who the more conveniently proceeds to accept the remission of sins that he is forgiven not his own, but other people's sins ”; e) Ilaria: “In the delusion of one Adam, the whole human race went astray ... from one, the sentence of death and the labor of life spread to all”; f) Basil the Great: "resolve the primitive sin by giving food - for as Adam gave us sin with a bad taste, so we will blot out this harmful taste if we satisfy the need and hunger of a brother"; g) Gregory the Theologian: “this newly planted sin came to unfortunate people from the progenitor ... we all participated in the same Adam, and were deceived by the serpent, and mortified by sin, and saved by Adam in heaven”; h) Ambrose: “we all sinned in the first man, and through the succession of nature the succession spread from one to all and in sin ... so Adam is in each of us: human nature sinned in him, because through one sin passed into all” ; i) John Chrysostom: “how did death enter and reign? Through the sin of one: for what else does it mean: "in him all have sinned"? After his (Adam's) fall, even those who did not eat from the tree all became mortal from that time ... this sin caused general death.

We do not cite similar sayings of many other teachers of the Church who lived in the same period; and what has been cited is absolutely sufficient to see the whole folly of the Pelagians, ancient and new, who assert that Augustine invented the doctrine of original sin, and, on the other hand, to realize the full justice of the words of the blessed. Augustine to one of the Pelagians: “I did not invent original sin, in which the Catholic faith believes from ancient times; but you, who reject this dogma, are no doubt a new heretic.

III. Finally, in the reality of original sin, which passes on to all of us from our forefathers, we can be convinced in the light of sound reason, on the basis of undoubted experience.

1. Whoever enters and deepens into himself with full attention, he cannot but say with the holy Apostle Paul: , do not acquire. If I don’t want good, I do it, but if I don’t want evil, I do it. If, if I don’t want to, I do this, I no longer do this, but the sin that lives in me. I am gaining a law, I want to do good for me, as evil is present to me. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man: but I see another law in my deeds, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me captive by the law of sin which is in my deeds” (Rom. 7:18-23). In particular, those who carefully observe themselves and their neighbors cannot fail to recognize the following truths: a) there is a constant struggle in us between the spirit and the flesh, reason and passions, strivings for good and attractions for evil; b) in this struggle, the victory almost always remains on the side of the latter: the flesh prevails in us over the spirit, the passions dominate the mind, the attraction to evil overpowers the desire for good; we love goodness by nature, we desire it, we enjoy it, but we do not find the strength in ourselves to do good; we do not love evil by nature, but meanwhile we are irresistibly attracted to it; c) the habit of everything good and holy is acquired by us with great effort and very slowly; and the habit of evil is acquired without the slightest effort and extremely quickly, - and vice versa - d) it is extremely difficult for us to wean ourselves from any vice, to conquer in ourselves any passion, sometimes the most insignificant; and in order to change the virtues that we have acquired by many exploits, some insignificant temptation is enough for this. The same predominance of evil over good in the human race, which we now notice, has been noticed at all times by others. Moses writes about antediluvian people: “everyone thinks diligently in his heart against evil all the days” (Gen. 6:5), and then about people after the flood: “the mind of a man is diligently against evil from his youth” (Gen. 8: 21). David testifies that “all deviated, together they were not the keys: do not do goodness, do not be to one” (Ps. 13:3; demolished. 25:4). Solomon says that "there is no righteous man on earth who does good and does not sin" (Eccl. 7:20); that the "seven" fall in a day and the righteous (Prov. 24:16). The writings of the Prophets are generally filled with complaints and reproaches against the iniquities of their contemporary people. The apostles preached that "the whole world lies in evil" (1 John 5:19); that “all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). The pagan sages themselves complained that the whole human race was corrupted, and that some irresistible inclination, innate in man, attracted him to evil. Where does such disorganization in human nature come from? Where does this unnatural struggle of forces and aspirations come from in it, this unnatural predominance of the flesh over the spirit, passions over the mind, this unnatural inclination towards evil, overpowering the natural inclination towards good?

2. All the explanations that people have come up with for this are unfounded, or even unreasonable; the only explanation, quite satisfactory, is that offered by Revelation in its teaching on the hereditary sin of the first parents. AND -

a) It is impossible to accept the opinion of the ancients that the source of all evil that exists in a person lies in his body, that the substance in which the human spirit is clothed, by its very nature, opposes all his spiritual aspirations, darkens his mind, causes disturbances in his will and heart, and from delusions inevitably leads to vices. This opinion, firstly, leads to the most disastrous consequences, contrary to common sense. If matter is the source of sin, then the author of sin is God; because He is the Creator of matter, He created our body as well as our soul, and united them together. This means that we are not subject to any responsibility, we are innocent when we do evil, because we act according to the nature that God has given us. This means that there is no difference between good and evil, and the moral law should have no meaning for us. Secondly, this opinion contradicts experience, without explaining anything. If indeed the spirit and the flesh in us oppose each other by their very nature; If then, just as the spirit naturally draws us to good, the flesh also naturally draws us to evil: then why is it that the spirit in us is not stronger than the flesh, but rather the flesh is stronger than the spirit, while how natural it would be to expect the opposite? From what, according to the general consciousness, the attraction to evil prevails in us over the attraction to good, so that “if we want good, we do this, but if we don’t want evil, we do this” (Rom. 7:19)? Why, at least, is the attraction to good and the attraction to evil in us unequal? On the other hand, although it is true that some passions and vices have a basis in our bodily organization, for example, anger, to which people of a choleric temperament are especially susceptible, and the like: for that there are other passions and vices, such as pride, pride, envy, ambition, which cannot be produced from temperament, which originate and develop directly in the soul, and therefore find their root in it, and by no means in the body.

b) The opinion of some of the newest thinkers, too, is unfair, that evil in man is an inevitable consequence of his limitation. “Man, they say, is by nature limited, and a limited being is necessarily imperfect; from imperfection in all human abilities come his errors, and from errors naturally evil is born. True, every limited being is imperfect in comparison with another less limited being, and all limited beings are imperfect in comparison with an infinite Being; but this does not mean that every limited being is imperfect in itself, that it is insufficient for its purpose, that it is incapable of fulfilling those laws to which its nature is subject. So, angels are limited and imperfect in comparison with God, however, nevertheless, they are perfect in their own rank, each in his own place, they are sinless, because they fulfill their destiny, fulfill the moral law to the extent that they can perform according to their limitations; because they love their Creator with all the power of love bestowed upon them. In the same way, a person, although even more limited and more imperfect in comparison with God than angels, could remain perfect in his own rank in relation to his destiny, could fulfill moral commandments to the extent of his limitations, could love God with everything. his, human, being; could occupy a lower degree of holiness compared to angels, but despite that, remain innocent before God and sinless. To be imperfect means to have qualities less high than another being placed higher on the ladder of being; but to be a sinner means, through the abuse of freedom, to violate those relations that should exist between the Creator and a rational creature, it means to arbitrarily deviate from the path of the Divine commandments and go against one's own destiny. God does not require from us such virtues that would be beyond our strength; does not oblige us to holiness, which is inaccessible to our nature; He requires only what is completely natural to us, and what we can do within our powers. And if so: then the violation of the law of God by man can no longer be considered a simple consequence of his limitations and relative imperfection: no, this is a real evil, testifying to the depravity of his nature.

c) The opinion of those who have appeared in modern times is also unjust, who assert that the source of human evil lies not in the nature of man, but in the shortcomings of his upbringing, that each person is born pure and innocent, as Adam was created, and the result is already evil and vicious bad upbringing, bad examples, etc. If this were true: then - aa) it is impossible not to be surprised how, in the course of too seven millennia, constantly working on its upbringing, humanity has not yet learned to preserve the primitive purity and innocence with which everyone is supposedly born; It is incomprehensible why it is a bitter necessity that all people themselves receive and pass on to others precisely a bad upbringing. It is known, on the contrary, that - bb) in recent times, in many educated states, all possible measures have been taken to improve public institutions where youth is brought up; the most effective means are used to protect pupils from vices and teach them to virtue, and yet the power of evil does not cease; the attraction to vice apparently prevails in people, as it always has, over the impulses to virtue, and not infrequently even new crimes, which were not known before, appear. All this remains an insoluble riddle, if we assume that a person is born good, and that in our upbringing we must take care not to correct the shortcomings that already exist in us with which we were born, but only to preserve our hereditary innocence. Finally, it must be said that - c) although bad education can really increase evil in us and accelerate its development, just like good education usually weakens strength and can partially suppress it at the very beginning, yet evil exists in us even before any education. To be convinced of this, one simple observation of an infant who has not yet been subjected to the influence of any system of education, and which could not yet be reflected in the advantages or disadvantages of the method that will be chosen for the development and direction of his abilities, will suffice. The most superficial observer cannot fail to notice that the infant already clearly shows dispositions for anger and pretense, lies, disobedience - not because he saw all these shortcomings in his parents and acquired them for himself through imitation, but because to them he is attracted by an innate inclination. The same must be said of the influence of bad examples on the corruption of man. If a person is born good, without any predisposition and inclination to evil, then why does he allow himself to be carried away by bad examples, and does not find enough strength in himself to resist them? Why do bad examples have a stronger effect on us than good ones? Why is it so much easier for us to do evil than to do good? Why do the offspring of evil already appear in babies who have not yet reached self-consciousness and cannot imitate others?

d) The most satisfactory solution to all these questions for the mind, the most just explanation of the evil that exists in the human race, is offered by divine Revelation when it says that the first man was indeed created good and innocent, but that he sinned against God, and thus damaged his whole nature, and after that all the people descended from him are naturally already born with ancestral sin, with a damaged nature and with an inclination to evil. There is nothing incomprehensible or incredible here. We see from experience that children inherit the diseases of their parents, and often these diseases are established for a long time and pass in certain families from generation to generation. We know from experience and from simple considerations that "an evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit" (Mt. 7:18), that a contaminated stream naturally flows from a contaminated spring, that when the root of a tree is corrupted, then its trunk cannot remain uncorrupted. . Consequently, humanity, corrupted in its root, must inevitably appear corrupted in its branches. And if the first man became sinful, damaged his whole nature, then his offspring cannot but inherit the same sinful and damaged nature.

consequences of ancestral sin in us

Passing in this way from the forefathers to the whole human race, original sin inevitably transfers with it to us all the consequences that it produced in the forefathers themselves. The most important of these consequences are:

1. Clouding of the mind and especially its inability to understand spiritual subjects related to the field of faith. “A man of the soul, says the Apostle, does not even receive the Spirit of God: for he is foolishness, and cannot understand, he claims spiritually” (1 Cor. 2:14). And therefore, as one of the first blessings, he wishes newly converted Christians, “may the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation, to the knowledge of Him” (Eph. 1:17). But one should not present this clouding of the mind in an exaggerated form and think that people, as a result of ancestral sin, have become completely incapable of understanding spiritual things; on the contrary, the same Apostle testifies of the pagans themselves that “God’s reasonable (what can be known about God) is in them”, that “His invisible, from the creation of the world the creatures are conceived, the essence is visible, and His inherent power and Divinity”, and that is why they are unanswerable: "having known God beforehand, you would not glorify God" (Rom. 1:19-20). And if fallen man had no ability at all to understand the objects of faith, then he would not be able to communicate the divine Revelation, which he could neither recognize nor assimilate. This consequence of the ancestral sin in us was also recognized by the teachers of the Church.

2. The subversion of free will and its inclination more to evil than to good. The holy Apostle describes in detail this sad state of our active ability when he says: “We know, as if it does not live in me, that is, in my flesh, good: if I want to, I will not find it. If I don’t want good, I do it, but if I don’t want evil, I do it. If, if I don’t want to, I do this, I no longer do this, but the sin that lives in me. I am gaining a law, I want to do good for me, as evil is present to me. For I delight in the law of God according to the inner man: but I see another law in my mind, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me captive by the law of sin which is in my mind” (Rom. 7:18-23). But on the other hand, it is unfair to assert that the sin of the forefathers has completely destroyed freedom in us, so that we cannot even wish for anything good, and our whole nature has become evil (Right Confessor, part 1, answer to question 27; last Eastern Patriarch On the Right Faith, part 14). This idea is contrary to - a) the words of the holy Apostle just cited, which say that at least “to desire good is present” to us, even if we hate it (Rom. 7:17), and that there is still a remnant of good in us in the inner a man who delights in the law of God. Repugnant - b) to all those very many places in which commandments, advice, convictions, promises, threats are spoken to fallen man, such as, for example, the entire Decalogue (Ex. the last chapters of Deuteronomy (28-32): these places would have no meaning if there were not supposed to be a remnant of freedom in a person. Disgusting - c) almost as many passages of Scripture, where it is not only assumed, but directly stated that a fallen person has free will, and precisely in relation to spiritual life; that he is the master of his actions, and can both obey and oppose the will of God. For example: “If anyone desires to follow Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me” (Matthew 16:24); “If you want to go into the stomach, keep the commandments” (Matt. 19:17); “if you want to be perfect, go, sell your property and give to the poor ... and follow me” (21); “If anyone wants to do His will, he understands the doctrine, which is from God, or I speak from Myself” (John 7:17); “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you beat the prophets and stone those sent to you, when you want to gather your children, as if your chicks are gathering cocosh under the krill, and you don’t want to” (Matt. 23:37); “He who stands firm in heart, having no need, but having authority of his own will, and behold, he has judged in his heart to watch over his maiden, who does good” (1 Cor. 7:37). Contrary to - d) the unanimous teaching of the Holy Fathers and teachers of the Church, who, no matter how weak, represented freedom in fallen man, but at the same time argued that the ancestral sin did not destroy it in us, and now it is in the will of each of us to choose good or evil, in spite of all the temptations that surround us, and therefore they filled their writings with innumerable instructions and exhortations to Christians, that they also tried, on their part, with the help of the grace of God, to fight against sin and succeed in virtue. Finally, it is repugnant - e) to the consciousness of every person and the conviction of all peoples. We all feel that we often make a choice from various possible actions for us, and if we decide on any one, then we decide without any coercion, and at our own will; that it is up to us to perform the chosen action in one way or another, that we can leave it unfinished and choose another instead, etc. Therefore, all peoples have always had some kind of laws that governed their actions; everyone had a concept of the difference between good and bad actions, and both of them were sane to people.

3. Darkening, but not destruction of the image of God. It is unavoidable to allow a clouding, already as a result of a clouding of the mind and the subversion of freedom in a person. But destruction is impossible, because neither reason nor freedom, with their natural aspirations for the true and good, were destroyed in man from ancestral sin. And Holy Scripture, indeed, testifies that the image of God remains in us even after the fall. Thus, God Himself, blessing Noah and his sons after the flood, among other things, asserts for him dominion over all animals (Gen. 9:1-2), which, as we have seen, served as one of the essential features of the image of God in man; and further, forbidding the shedding of human blood, expresses His will in the following words: “If you shed blood on a man, it will be shed in his place: as the image of God created man” (6). The teachers of the Church also always admitted the remnants of the image of God in fallen man, and reproached the Origenists with their false teaching that the ancestral sin completely blotted out this image in us. And if the image of God, which serves in us as the only basis for uniting (religion) with God - our Prototype, was completely destroyed in us, then in this case we would be incapable of reuniting with Him, and Christianity would have no meaning.

4. Death with all its forerunners: illness and suffering. The holy Apostle bears witness to this when he says: “Through one man sin came into the world, and death through sin, and so death came into all men outside” (Rom. the dead” (1 Cor. 15:21). The ancient teachers of the Church unanimously testify: a) Tatian: “We are not created for death, but we die through ourselves; we were ruined by our own will"; b) Theophilus: “through disobedience, a person was subjected to illness, sorrow, suffering, and finally fell into death”; c) Basil the Great: “Adam himself prepared death for himself by moving away from God ... so it was not God who created death, but we ourselves brought it on ourselves by crafty consent”; d) Gregory the Theologian: “how many misfortunes I have seen, and misfortunes that have not been gratified by anything; so I have not seen a single good that would be completely withdrawn from sorrow, since the pernicious taste and envy of the enemy branded me with bitter disgrace ”; e) Ambrose: “Through the crime of Adam we were subjected to death” and others.

moral application of dogma

The Lord created man perfect in soul and body, and having created it, prepared for him the most blessed dwelling on earth, paradise; He Himself contributed to the disclosure and strengthening of his spiritual powers, honored him with His direct revelations, dwelt in him with His grace, bestowed on him the tree of life and immortality even in the body, and in order to open before him a field for exploits and merits, he spoke to him His commandment. But man violated the commandment of God, angered his Creator, and lost his primeval glory, became imperfect and corrupted in all his being, was subjected to illness, disaster, death. Striking proof of how dangerous it is to violate the will of God, how fatal and destructive sin itself is, how terrible it is to fall into the hands of the living God - the just!

The sin of the first parents, with all its consequences, passed on to the entire human race, so that we are all conceived and born in lawlessness, weak in soul and body, and guilty before God. May this serve as an unceasing lesson for us living to humility and awareness of our own weaknesses and shortcomings, and together may it teach us to ask for grace-filled help from the Lord God, and with gratitude to use the means of salvation given to us in Christianity.

sources

Footnotes

1. contr. haeres. V, c. 24; cf. c. 23.
2. In Genes. homil. XVI. n. 2.
3. Sermon for Holy Pascha, in the "Creations of the Holy Fathers" IV, 160.
4. Degenes. ad litt. XI, p. 29.
5. Precise Presentation rights. faith, book II, ch. 30, p. 134. Elsewhere in the same work of St. John of Damascus conjectures why the devil chose the serpent as his weapon: “Before the fall, he says, everything was subject to man; for God has made him ruler over all that is on the earth and in the waters. Even the serpent was close to man, and even more other animals approached him, and with their pleasant movements seemed to be talking to him. That is why the devil, the head of evil, through him inspired the most pernicious advice to the forefathers” (Book II, ch. 10, p. 83).
6. Justin. Dialog. cum Tryph. With. 103. 124: Tertull. de patient, c. 5; Origen. in Joanne. T. XX, n. 21; Lactant. Institute. divin. 11, 13; Euseb. Praep. Evang. VII, 10; Ambros. de paradise c. 11, no. 9; Greg. Nyss. in Ps. Tract. II, c. 16; Theodoret. Quaest. in Genes. XXXI, in Chr. Thu. 1843, III, 361.
7. In Genes. homil. XVI, n. 2. 3. We have given here the thoughts of St. John Chrysostom in an abbreviated form.
8. At the same time, Saint John Chrysostom represents God speaking to Adam in this way: “What indulgence do you deserve, having forgotten My commandment and daring to prefer the giving of a wife to My words? For although the woman was “give,” My commandment and the fear of punishment were sufficient to keep you from eating. Or you did not know, or did not know? That is why, taking care of you, I predicted that you would not be subjected to this - so that although your wife set you up to violate the commandment, you are not innocent either. You were obliged to have even greater faith in My commandment and take care not only not to taste it yourself, but also to show your wife the greatness of the crime, for you are the head of the wife and she was created for you. And you perverted the order, and not only did not correct it. but he himself fell with her. And then he remarks from his side: “Consider also the words of the husband: “Woman, thou hast given me with me; Here there is no necessity, no coercion, but election and freedom: only “dade”, and did not force, did not force ”(in Genes. homil. XVII, n. 4. 5).

The following factors are related to the fall of the first parents (Gen. 3:1-6):

The free will of man;

Temptation by the devil (in the form of a snake) of Eve and Eve - Adam;

The limitations of the nature of the ancestors.

Note that if even one of them were eliminated, there would be no sin. However, despite this similarity in these factors, they are all of a different type. In general, in the system of causal connection of events relating to original sin, one can single out, in addition to the actual cause and effect of the fall, also necessary and sufficient conditions and incitement.

Let us consider from this point of view the attitude towards the fall of the progenitors of these factors.

a) The free will of a person is sometimes given (attributed) the meaning of the cause (co-cause) of sin, the beginning (root) of evil (sin), the subject of temptation, the object of temptation.

However, free will in relation to a sinful, as well as a righteous, act is not its cause, or the reason for its commission, or its beginning. It is the reason for the possibility of his choice or one of the necessary conditions for his commission. In other words, free will is a necessary condition for the performance of a moral act in general. Without free will there is neither righteous nor sinful action. St. John of Damascus says that man created by God "had the opportunity to abide and prosper in good... as well as to turn away from beauty and find himself in evil because of the possession of free will..." (38: 152, 153).

In general, to perform any moral act, two conditions are necessary and, at the same time, sufficient: the ability to perform this act while being able not to perform it, that is, to have free choice (free will); desire (free will) to do something. At the same time, if our free will is given to us by the will of God, is the same necessary and inalienable property (attribute) of our nature as, for example, the mind and one of the aspects of the image of God in us that does not depend on us, then the very result of the choice (manifestation this will) will obviously already depend on us. This is due to the fact that, unlike physical freedom, which can be influenced and which can be limited to the most varied degree, moral freedom (that is, the actual possibility of moral choice) cannot be influenced and limited in principle.

A person always has the opportunity to choose the moral direction of an act - to go to God or from Him. That is why we must be responsible for any moral act. A robot or mechanism, not having such a choice, cannot sin, since they act according to a program predetermined by them without the possibility of changing it. If we, realizing the sinfulness of an act, do it, or, realizing that it is necessary to do good, we do not do it, then here the lack of our will is manifested. And we become slaves of sin, because we do not do what we want, not what we consider reasonable, but we do not do what we want and consider reasonable.

On the question of the possibility of the temptation of freedom, we note the following. In temptations, one can single out, for example, such general aspects as: the object of temptation (who is tempted), the subject of temptation (who is tempting) and the object of temptation (what is tempted). Freedom can be the subject of temptation only if the object of temptation does not have it, for example, for a prisoner released on freedom under the obligation to return. From that point of view, strictly speaking, the ancestors could not be tempted by freedom, since they already had it. Man was tempted not by freedom, but by the devil. He abused his freedom given by the Creator, replacing in his soul confidence in the Creator with confidence in the lying devil. At the same time, the freedom of the forefathers is directly related to their fall, since it is one of the necessary conditions for committing a moral act in general and a sinful act in particular.

In the "Catechism of the Catholic Church" (Moscow, "Rudomino", 1996, p. 96), one of its sections is called: "the temptation of freedom." That is, freedom (free will) appears here as an object of temptation. However, the object of temptation is not the actual freedom of a person, but the person himself with all the forces (abilities) of the soul (heart, mind, will). In other words, the object of temptation includes free will, but is not identical with it.

b) The temptation of Eve by the devil is sometimes seen as a reason for her fall. Some clarification needs to be made here. The ratio of cause and reason is quite aptly expressed in the well-known saying: "If there was a reason, there will always be a reason." Therefore, if we ascribe to temptation the meaning of an occasion, then it will be necessary to consider Eve, and then Adam, already in advance, as if internally, prepared for sin, for the commission of which only (only) a small stimulus is sufficient. However, such an opinion does not correspond to the Orthodox understanding that the forefathers were created perfect enough to resist sin.

When understanding the temptation from the devil as directly one of the causes (external cause) of the fall of the first parents, we also face certain problems. First, if the ancestors themselves were only one of the causes of the fall, then the retribution for this should not have been complete, but only partial and proportional to the weight, or contribution, of this cause to the commission of sin. However, Adam's attempt to justify himself by shifting part of the blame onto Eve and God Himself (Gen. 3:12), just as Eve's attempt to justify himself by shifting part of the blame onto the serpent (Gen. 3:13), was not successful, as can be seen from Gen. 3:16-19, 23, 24. Secondly, this understanding of temptation is, in essence, based on the following proposition: "if there were no temptation, there would be no sin." But on the basis of such “logic”, it will be necessary to recognize the root cause of the crime and God Himself as the one who created the angelic world (including Dennitsa) and created Eve, who seduced Adam (it was in this way that the ancestors tried to justify themselves).

Not only did God not push the first parents to sin, but on the contrary: He created man perfect enough to choose and achieve immortality and warned him about the consequences of disobedience (Genesis 2:17). At the same time, God, as the Creator of everything (Jer. 51: 19; see also: Gen. 1; Is. 45: 12; 44: 24; Jer. 27: 5; Rev. 24: 11; Pr. 11: 25; Sir 24:8; 43:36) provided two paths (two paths of life) to the forefathers. One of them led to immortality, as a result of the constant strengthening of the forefathers in righteousness. The other one led to spiritual and physical death, as a result of violation of the will of God. “God created man free,” says St. Ephraim the Syrian, “honoring him with mind and wisdom and putting life and death before his eyes, so that if he wishes to walk the path of life in freedom, he will live forever; but if, according to an evil will, he goes the way of death, he will be tormented forever” (40: 396). As it is said in Holy Scripture: “God did not create death (that is, God did not introduce mortality into man, man himself introduced this property of the obligatory onset of physical death) and does not rejoice at the death of the living, for He created everything for being ...” ( Prev 1: 13, 14); “God created man for incorruption and made him the image of his eternal existence…” (Wisdom 2:23).

The Holy Fathers recommend that people who have committed a sin consider it the cause of themselves and sincerely repent of it, not trying to justify themselves by external circumstances, which sometimes other people who tempt us also act as. St. Anthony the Great says: “... let us not blame our birth or anyone else for the sins we have committed, but only ourselves, for if the soul willingly indulges in corruption, then it cannot be invincible” (quoted from 8: 63, 64). Each person chooses his own path. For “He (God) from the beginning created man and left him in the hand of his will ... Life and death are before man, and whatever he desires, that will be given to him” (Sir. 15: 17). Everyone himself is guilty of committing a sin, since “... he is tempted, carried away and deceived by his own lust; lust, having conceived, gives birth to sin, and the sin committed gives birth to death ”(James 1: 14-15).

At the same time, “... God is not tempted by evil and Himself does not tempt anyone” (James 1: 13) and makes it possible for us to overcome temptation, because “... he will not allow you to be tempted beyond your strength, but when tempted, he will also give relief so that you can endure” (1 Cor. 10:13). “For the Lord is almighty and stronger than all, and at all times is victorious in a mortal body, when he goes to battle with the ascetics. If they are defeated, then it is obvious that ... by their own will, by their foolishness, they have bared themselves from God ”(St. Isaac the Syrian. Quoted from 20: 152). “Since the opposite force only induces and does not compel, then the grace of God also induces, because of the freedom and sobriety of nature. If now a person, prompted by Satan, does evil, then it is not Satan who is condemned instead of him, but the person himself suffers torture and punishment, as if of his own free will he submitted to vice ”(St. Macarius the Great. Quoted from 43: 364). “Those who have entered into the struggle for the inner man and experienced it have no doubt that the enemies of salvation are constantly slandering us, inciting evil, and opposing our doing good. In this they have some freedom - they have been given the power to incite. But God has given man the power to reject all their actions and, moreover, to crush their harmful glory or freely agree with them ”(St. John Cassian the Roman. Quoted from 86: 182).

At the same time, the devil with false promises (“... for there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks his own, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” John 8: 44) that the forefathers, having tasted the fruits of the forbidden tree and becoming “as gods who know good and evil” (Gen. 3:5) will not die (Gen. 3:4), pushed them onto the path of sin and death. Here "a murderer pretends to be a philanthropist" (12:28). At the same time, the devil, although he directly pushed Eve to death, did it not by force (for otherwise there would be no sin for a person, since sin implies free will), but with the help of cunning (the devil adorned the path of sin with false promises and made this path attractive to Eve with this false decoration) and using Eve's free will. Therefore, it is said that “... through the envy of the devil, death entered the world...” (Wisdom 2:24).

From what has been said, it follows that the temptation of Eve by the devil is not the cause of sin or a reason for committing it, but an incitement to sin, which in itself is already an independent crime. By the way, in modern criminal law, incitement to crime is also a punishable act.

Note that the devil sinned first among incorporeal intelligent beings - Angels (before the appearance of man). He was the first to sin among all rational beings (after the appearance of man), since he contributed to the fall of man with his deceitful speeches. “He (the devil) was a murderer from the beginning...” (John 8:44). At the same time, in both cases, the devil also seduced others: first, the angels, whom he dragged along with him, then the man (Eve). The Holy Scriptures say: “He who commits sin is of the devil, because the devil sinned first” (1 John 3:8). "Sin is the evil fruit of the evil seed of the devil... sin and iniquity are not His (God's), but the devil's invention and deed... the chief and inventor of it (sin) is the devil" (St. Tikhon of Zadonsk. Quoted from 83: 237 , 260). “Sin is an invention of the free will of the devil” (Archimandrite Justin (Popovich). 76: 36).

On the connection of human sin with the devil, St. John of Kronstadt writes: “Sin is the spiritual adultery of the human soul with the devil: a person exposes his heart to him, and the enemy, uniting with the soul, pours out his seed into the heart of a person - the poison of sin ...” (41: 163, 164). At the same time, the holy father compares the disastrous effect of sin on the heart with the effect of moths on clothes: “There is a moth for clothes, there is also for the human heart. This is a sin" (41: 206). That is, just as a moth corrodes and destroys clothes, so sin corrodes and mortifies the soul.

c) Consider now the relation of the forces of the soul to the fall. Before eating the forbidden fruit, the forefathers obviously had to make a decision about it. Such decisions are made in the realm of the mind, for "the beginning of every work is reflection..." (Sir. 37:20). However, this does not imply the initiative of the mind in relation to sin, which can be understood in two ways. Firstly, as the fact that the mind, of all the powers of the soul, was the most responsible for sin, that is, it was the "initiator of sin." Secondly, as the fact that a person first sinned by thinking, that is, “the fall of a person occurred precisely in the area of ​​the mind.”

In a general assessment of the mind, it is advisable to use two criteria - the direction of the mind and its development. The direction of the mind is what exactly a person thinks (what he thinks), in which direction he thinks: whether he thinks about the heavenly or the earthly. The development of the mind is exactly how a person thinks (thinks), how effectively he can foresee the results of his actions and find solutions to the tasks. Since these criteria are not mutually related, the same person can simultaneously have a very developed mind according to one criterion and be unreasonable according to another.

The direction of the mind, or the direction of thinking, of a person is determined by his feelings. It is on the basis of the resulting feelings that the goal is chosen. In other words, a person will strive for what he likes best (gives more pleasure, happiness, bliss), taking into account the expected consequences, including in the form of remorse, and a number of other factors. “The desire for happiness, bliss is inherent in man by God...” (57: 108); “... no matter how tastes are formed, they force a person to arrange his life in such a way, to surround himself with objects and relationships that indicate his taste and with which he is peaceful, being satisfied with them. Satisfying the tastes of the heart gives him sweet peace, which constitutes its own measure of happiness for every ”(24: 34); “The heart (the heart here means feelings - a.k.) has a very strong influence on the nature and direction of thinking and all human behavior” (23: 66). “The desire of God is the eternal bliss of man, as evidenced by the very nature of man, constantly desiring and striving only for the pleasant in life, and hating and constantly desiring to avoid everything unpleasant ...” (119:10).

Each person, according to his own taste, will strive for his treasure. Only for some this treasure will be earthly blessings, earthly glory, about the transience of which the holy Apostle Peter writes (1 Peter 1: 24), and for others - heavenly blessings, heavenly glory, to which, for example, the saint Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 2:9; 2 Cor. 4:17, 18; Rom. 8:18) and St. Seraphim of Sarov (29:53).

The human mind decides how to achieve the goal in a rational way, that is, it chooses the path to achieve the goal determined by the senses. “The mind is the servant of the heart,” says St. John of Kronstadt (17:51). Further, the will (will power) provides (if possible) movement towards the goal (achievement of the goal) in the way that the mind has chosen.

From this point of view, the initiator of sin is feelings, not thoughts, and the fall of man began in the region of the heart, not the mind. In other words, it was their sensual side, and not the rational side, that played the main role in the fall of the ancestors. Indeed, from Gen. 3: 6 it follows, according to V. N. Lossky, that for Eve “... a certain value appears outside of God” (20: 253), or, as Archpriest N. Malinovsky says: “... to a purely spiritual desire” to be like the gods” the desire for criminal sensual pleasure has joined” (23: 313. Book 1), that is, for the forefathers, it becomes possible to receive pleasant feelings (pleasure) outside of God, contrary to His will or as a result of sinful actions. The first people liked the prospect of being like gods, knowing good and evil, contrary to the will of God the Father who created them, than the prospect of obedience to Him.

In other words, this can be said as follows. Before being tempted by the devil, the human mind (as well as other powers of the soul) was not in a state of necessity to choose between sin and righteousness. Man had neither internal nor external temptations. In the conditions of paradise, “when the necessities ... for the life of the body were given by itself, the mind did not remain idle, having all the time free from bodily labors, but incessantly admired spiritual contemplations, pouring inexhaustible joy in it. This work was brought up in him by God Himself, who, by His good pleasure, came to him every day for a conversation,” writes the Monk Nilus of Sinai (quoted from 9: 239). That is, at first the mind of the ancestors, obviously, indulged in the contemplation of God - his Creator and Father, protecting and nourishing them. When Adam and Eve were offered a choice: either to become “like gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5), contrary to God the Father, or to be obedient to Him, it was the feelings that chose the first path (vicious goal). And then already the mind and will of a person transferred him from the state of the possibility of committing (or not committing) a sin to the state of committing a sin.

Here is the opinion of Archpriest N. Ivanov on this issue: “A person sees that the fruits from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are good for food, that is, that it is good for his material existence, and everything else in the world is only “food” for “ I". The soul forgets about its connection with the Source and with all nature, it only wants to satisfy its desires. The normal self-affirmation of the flesh and the joy of sensation that arises during becoming turns into lust - the lust of the flesh. This is the first step of the fall.

A person sees that the idea that has arisen of new possibilities, not only purely material, is good for food, but also pleasing to the eyes, and desirable - good for the eyes and desirable, for it gives satisfaction to the soul. A whole complex of spiritual forces finds its satisfaction on the path of tasting good and evil, that is, on the path where good and evil are only equally acceptable means for satisfying desires. In himself, a person can think: “Everything that appears to me, that relates to me, must relate to me in such a way as to give pleasure.”

The second stage of the fall is the seeming possibility of a new life. The harmony of the beauty of the whole, when everything in the world is beautiful only because it reflects the glory of God and praises the Creator, this harmony and beauty become good only because they are good for me. My "I" becomes the center of harmony and the center of beauty and wants everything only for itself. Such is the second stage of the fall - the lust of the eyes.

And finally, the third stage of the fall. A person wants to have knowledge in the sense of owning what he sees ... But if a person takes an independent path, reveling in complete freedom of choice, forgetting about the commandment given to him by the Creator, then he can easily reach for "evil" knowledge, that is, knowledge of only that which is beneficial to him, but detrimental to his brethren. And he will persevere, seeking to master this knowledge.

The path of knowledge (in fact, confusion) of good and evil in oneself is the path of individualistic self-affirmation. It gives the experience of struggle, self-exaltation, enjoyment in a sense of self-admiration, a sense of superiority over those who can be turned into an object of enjoyment and domination. The proposed path is the path of pride in oneself, one's knowledge and one's imaginary perfection. This path is the path of contemplating one's superiority. Such is the third stage of the fall - worldly pride" (12: 235-237).

Thus, the forefathers fell into vicious feelings, thoughts and desires until they violated the commandment of God - eating the fruits of the forbidden tree. It follows from this that the opportunity to receive pleasure outside of God was with man before the fall and loss of grace, that is, it was part of his nature (it was laid by God in the nature of man at his creation). This situation seems quite understandable and logical. Indeed, “if all citizens could not achieve personal happiness otherwise than to promote the common good, then only madmen would be vicious; all people would be forced to be virtuous ”(French materialist Helvetius. Quoted from 3: 110). In this case, a person with a physical (fundamental) opportunity to sin would not do this, because he would not want to do this due to his innate nature. Thus, we are talking here about the natural moral impossibility of sinning. There is no personal merit in this yet.

The opposite version of "sinlessness" is that a person fundamentally could not sin at all. “Who dares to assert that God could not create freedom, inaccessible to sin and irresistible by evil? And out of stones He can raise up children to Abraham (Matthew 3:9). But how would such freedom differ from necessity? “God,” says St. Gregory the Theologian, “honored man with freedom, so that good belongs no less to the one who chooses than to the one who puts the seeds of onago.” “They say,” St. Basil the Great argues, “why is sinlessness not given to us in the very structure, so that it would be impossible to sin, even if we wanted to? For the same reason, why do you not recognize ministers as serviceable when you keep them bound, but when you see that they voluntarily perform their duties before you. The possibility of evil is so originally necessary and natural to human freedom that, according to the judgment of reason, to destroy this possibility in man would mean the same as to re-create man; just as now to stop the possibility of sin in a person would mean the same thing as performing a permanent miracle on him” (48:15). St. John of Damascus teaches: "... virtue is not something done under compulsion" (38: 153). According to St. Gregory of Nyssa: “... virtue is a thing that is not subject to control and voluntary, and forced and forced cannot be virtue” (14: 54). Nemesius, Bishop of Emesa, on the basis of the correlativity of reason and free will (see note No. 14), writes: for themselves they blame God for the fact that He created man reasonable, and not unreasonable. It is necessary, after all, one of two things: either that it originates unreasonable, or that, being rational and revolving in the sphere of activity, it should be endowed with free will ”(25: 176). Archpriest N. Malinovsky says: “As for giving a person freedom with the possibility of sin, then without such an opportunity, freedom would not differ from necessity. Then virtue would not be a merit, and he would not enjoy blessedness by right” (23:316. Book 1).

Let us also cite the opinion of the Russian religious philosopher S. L. Frank on this issue. “Somewhere in the Talmud, the fantasy of the Jewish sages tells of the existence of a holy country. In which not only all people, but also all nature obeys unquestioningly the commandments of God, so that, in fulfilling them, even the river stops flowing on Saturdays. Would we agree that God from the very beginning created us such that we automatically, of our own accord, without reflection and reasonable free decision, like this river, would fulfill His commands? And would the meaning of our life be realized then? But if we automatically did good and were rational by nature, if everything around us of itself and with complete, forced evidence testified to God, to reason and goodness, then everything would immediately become absolutely meaningless. For "meaning" is the rational realization of life, and not the running of clocks, meaning is the true discovery and satisfaction of the secret depths of our "I", and our "I" is unthinkable outside of freedom, for freedom, spontaneity require the possibility of our own initiative, and the latter presupposes that not everything goes smoothly “by itself”, that there is a need for creativity, for spiritual power, for overcoming obstacles. The Kingdom of God, which would be obtained completely “free of charge” and would be predetermined once and for all, would not be the Kingdom of God for us at all, for in it we must be free partners in divine glory, sons of God, and then we would be not only slaves, but a dead cog in some necessary mechanism. “The Kingdom of Heaven is taken by force, and those who use force rapture it” (Matt. 11:12; Luke 16:16), for in this effort, in this creative feat - a necessary condition for true bliss, the true meaning of life. Thus, we see that the empirical nonsense of life, with which a person must struggle, against which he must strain his will to achievement to the maximum extent, his faith in the reality of the Meaning, not only does not prevent the realization of the Meaning of life, but mysterious, not completely comprehensible and yet, in a way that we understand from experience, it is the very necessary condition for its realization. The meaninglessness of life is needed as an obstacle that needs to be overcome, because without overcoming and creative effort there is no real discovery of freedom, and without freedom everything becomes impersonal and lifeless, so that without it there would be neither the realization of our life, the life of my very "I", nor the realization his very life, in its last true depth. For “wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and narrow is the gate, and narrow is the way that leads to life” (Matt. 7:13). Only those who put the cross on their shoulders and follow Christ will find true life and the true meaning of life... We have seen that the evil and imperfection of our empirical nature is in some incomprehensible way necessary for the fulfillment of the meaning of life, for without it freedom would be impossible. achievement, and without the latter, the meaning of life would not be the true meaning, would not be what we are looking for” (78: 96-99).

From what has been said, it is clear that the fundamental impossibility of sinning completely excludes the personal merit of a person in such “sinlessness”.

Let us single out another type of impossibility to sin, which consists in the fact that by consistently and systematic strengthening of one's righteousness, a person can gradually move, in the terminology of Blessed Augustine, from the possibility of not sinning to the impossibility of sinning. We are talking here about the acquired, as a result of synergy (collaboration, cooperation, connection) of the will of God and the will of man, the moral impossibility of sinning, which, of course, is credited to man.

Let us emphasize one of the differences between the fundamental (physical) and moral impossibility of sinning, which lies in the fact that the first is characteristic of a robot or animal (but not a person), and the second is characteristic of a person (but not a robot or an animal). In general, the listed variants of sinlessness, with the exception of the last one, lead to the disappearance (determine the elimination) of the very concept of sin as a moral act.

St. Macarius the Great writes: “Our nature is acceptable both for good and for evil, and for God's grace and for the opposite force. It cannot be forced” (Conversation 15, ch. 23. Quoted from 8: 152). On this issue, we will also quote the words of St. Isaac: “Passionlessness does not consist in not feeling passions, but in not accepting them” (quoted from 10: 390); blessed Mark: “For when the soul does not make friends with the passions by thinking about them, then, since it is incessantly occupied with other cares, the strength of the passions cannot hold its spiritual feelings in its claws” (quoted from 10: 390); Saint Anthony the Great: “If you want, you can be a slave of passions, and if you want, you can remain free, not bowing under the yoke of passions: for God created you autocratic” (quoted from 8: 71); Archimandrite Paisius Velichkovsky: “He is impassive who has overcome addiction in all prepositions, compelling or seducing, and, having risen above all passions, is not indignant for any thing of this world ...” (89: 22).

If the opportunity to receive pleasure from sinful deeds would not be inherent in human nature, then there could be no spiritual feats. This is due to the fact that a person would have nothing to overcome. In other words, if there were no internal struggle, then there would be no victories and, accordingly, awards for them. For, Heavenly rewards are given only for spiritual victories (spiritual feats). And as you know, the most difficult victory is the victory over yourself, over your lusts. “The fight with yourself is the most difficult fight. Victory from victories is victory over oneself,” says F. Logau (quoted from 104: 11). This victory is gained only in the spiritual struggle (internal warfare) that every Christian wages.

Thus, the opportunity to enjoy both following God and following from Him is given to a person for a free conscious choice: to be with God or outside of Him; perform righteous deeds, overcoming temporary temptations and improving spiritually, or sin, yielding to lusts and imperceptibly falling into sensual traps with “pleasure lures” set by evil spirits; to be, in accordance with this, in good or evil. Temptations (temptations) are allowed to us (in us) by the mercy of God for the possibility of receiving rewards (crowns) for overcoming them. Therefore, God does not allow temptations beyond our strength (1 Cor. 10:13).

In the Book of Wisdom of Jesus, the son of Sirach, it is said: “My son! if you begin to serve the Lord God, then prepare your soul for temptation” (Sir. 2:1). “This world is a competition and a field for competition. This time is the time of struggle ”(Isaac the Syrian. Quoted from 20: 152). “He who overcomes the passions of the flesh is crowned with incorruption. If there were no passions, there would be no virtues, no crowns bestowed from God on worthy people ... But when a person with wisdom and reason, having fought well, overcomes and conquers passions, then he no longer fights, but peaces with his soul and is crowned from God as a conqueror” (St. Anthony the Great. Quoted from 8: 71, 73). “Temptation is not evil, but good. It makes good people even better. This is a crucible for refining gold; this is a mill for grinding hard grains of wheat. This is a fire that destroys thistles and thorns in order to make the earth capable of receiving good seeds” (St. John Chrysostom, quotation from 97:7). “What made all the saints famous and received the Kingdom of Heaven? Sorrows, temptations, deeds. Some endured severe torments and tortures and for this received a martyr's crown; others indulged in ascetic labors in the wilderness and for that acquired the Kingdom of Heaven for themselves: and why would God allow the saints to endure so many dangers, temptations, sorrows, if it were possible to receive the Kingdom of Heaven without all this? Therefore, let us not lose heart when sorrows and sorrows befall us, but on the contrary, let us rejoice that the Lord takes care of us, tempting us in sorrows and calamities, like gold in fire” (97:12). “War, brethren, is war for Christians throughout this life, war with our enemies, the devil, with our passionate flesh and with the corrupt world. We must earn crowns, we must strive to be worthy of life with Christ. And we can achieve this only by a good, Christian feat. The apostles and holy martyrs did not suffer in vain, and, preserving their faith, they renounced temporal life itself. It was not in vain that the desert ascetics left the world and chose for themselves unconditional humility, perfect chastity and total non-acquisitiveness. By humility they conquered the intrigues of the devil, by chastity the lust of the flesh, and by non-possession the charms of the world. Let us also, strengthened by the grace of God, imitate them in patience and deeds, so that we receive victorious crowns from the righteous Creator God. Our God, glory to Thee!” (Archpriest V. Nordov. Quoted from 64: 349).

d) It follows from what has been said that the forefathers themselves are to blame for their fall. The reason for their fall is not an excess of free will, but their own free desire to commit a sinful act (in the sinful orientation of the will, more specifically, in the lustful desire to become like the gods), in the desire due to the sinfulness of their feelings and thoughts. This desire, in turn, is not a mitigating circumstance, but rather an aggravating one. And just as a worldly judge decides on a crime, so the universal Judge has made His righteous decision on the first crime committed by people. For “His works are perfect, and all His ways are righteous. God is faithful, and there is no unrighteousness in Him; He is just and true” (Deut. 32:4). “... You are righteous, O Lord, and all Your works and all Your ways are mercy and truth, and You judge with a true and right judgment. forever!” (Tov. 3: 2).

The guilt of Adam and Eve is that they violated the commandment (will) of God, although it was in their will to keep the commandment, even being under the influence of the devil. The fall that occurred is connected with the limitations of the nature of the forefathers, whose heart, mind and will succumbed to temptation, but this limitation is not the cause of the fall. It is only one of the necessary conditions for the possibility of this fall. “They (the forefathers) only had to want to resist the deceiver and stand in goodness, and they would stand: everything depended on their will alone, and they had plenty of strength” (21: 485).

We also note the following. If Adam and Eve, having fully acknowledged their guilt in committing a sin, would have prayed to the All-Merciful God for forgiveness, then, perhaps, God, in His great mercy, seeing this repentance, would have forgiven them. St. Theophan the Recluse says: “If they had repented sooner, perhaps God would have returned to them, but they persisted, and in the face of obvious denunciations, neither Adam nor Eve admitted that they were guilty” (36: 88).

The first commandment actually created for man the first scale of values: keep the commandment of God or become like gods, knowing good and evil, contrary to the will of God. At the same time, a person, instead of striving from an image to likeness, or from godlikeness to godlikeness, rushed to a false value, which led him to death.

As Metropolitan of Minsk and Slutsk Filaret says: “Being a part of the world and at the same time appointed by God as the ruler of the world, man desired to receive his part of being and dispose of it absolutely independently - apart from God. Thus, man fell away from God, and the connection with the One who created him was broken. ... Being the image of God, man self-deified himself and found himself outside the paradise of well-being" (52:10).

Thus the first crime was committed on earth. At the same time, the devil did not leave his criminal activity in the future - inciting (inclining) a person to sin. The Holy Apostle Peter teaches: "Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour" (1 Peter 5:8). The holy Apostle Barnabas says: “We, brothers, must be careful about our salvation, so that the evil one, sneaking up on us with deceit, does not turn us away from our life” (quoted from 43:13). The Monk Macarius the Great writes: “The evil prince is the kingdom of darkness, having first captivated a person, so he overlaid and clothed the soul with the power of darkness, as they clothe a person in order to make him a king and give him all the royal robes, and so that from head to nails he would wear everything So the evil prince clothed the soul with sin, all its nature, and defiled it all, captivated it all into his kingdom, left not a single member of it free from his power, neither thoughts, nor mind, nor body, but clothed it in purple of darkness. As in the body (in case of illness) not a single member of it suffers, but it is entirely subject to suffering: so the whole soul suffered from the infirmities of vices and sin. The evil one has clothed the whole soul - this necessary part of a person, this necessary member his malice, that is, into sin, and thus the body became suffering and corruptible ... (Conversation 2, ch. 1).

The spirits of malice bind the (fallen) soul with chains of darkness; why can’t she love the Lord as much as she wants, or believe as much as she wants, or pray as much as she wants, because from the time of the crime of the first man, opposition both openly and secretly took possession of us in everything ... (Conversation 21, ch. 2 ).

Satan and the princes of darkness from the time of the transgression of the commandment sat down in the heart, in the mind and body of Adam, as on their own throne ... "(St. Macarius the Great. Conversation 6, ch. 5. Quoted from 8: 152-154,162).

The Bible speaks of the temptation (seduction, seduction) of people by the devil, for example, in 1 Cor. 7:5 and Rev. 20: 7,10; the devil also tried to tempt Jesus Christ (Mt.1-10; Mk.1:12,13; Lk.4:1-13).

The numbering of sins can be carried out in the form of a continuous (absolute) numbering and in the form of a thematic (relative) numbering. In the first case, each subsequent sin is assigned a number one more than the previous one. In the second, sins are divided into groups according to some thematic feature, and in each group there is a continuous numbering, starting from one. From the point of view of continuous numbering, the sin of the forefathers in paradise, as mentioned earlier, was not the first. From the point of view of thematic numbering, this was the first sin committed in the human race, or, in short, original sin.

In the Holy Scriptures, in relation to the sin of the first parents, two types of events are clearly distinguished (see note 44): violation of the will of God, which consists in certain actions of Adam and Eve; God's punishment that followed these actions and consisted in the fact that the forefathers and their descendants began to be in a certain state (the state of mortality, deviation to evil, etc.). Therefore, it seems more appropriate to call the known actions of the forefathers original sin, and the subsequent known state, both of themselves and their descendants, the consequences of this sin, or evil (and, for example, not respectively, the first sin and original sin).

At the same time, there are other terminological systems proposed by various authors to describe the sin of the forefathers and its consequences. For example: "under the name of the ancestral sin in the ancestors themselves is meant their sin, and at the same time the sinful state of their nature, into which they entered through this sin; and in us, their descendants, we mean one sinful state of our nature, with which in which we are born" (21:493,494). "Original sin, we read in the Orthodox Confession of the Eastern Catholic and Apostolic Church, is the transgression of the law of God given in Paradise to the ancestor Adam" (21:493). "... This innate sinfulness, passing from ancestors to descendants by birth, together with guilt or responsibility before the judgment of the truth of God for this innate sinfulness of nature, is known under the name of original or innate sin ..." (23:327. Book 1)

Adam and Eve- the first people created by God, people on earth.

The name Adam means man, son of the earth. The name Adam is often identified with the word man. The expression "sons of Adam" means "sons of men." The name Eve is the giver of life. Adam and Eve are the progenitors of the human race.

A description of the life of Adam and Eve can be read in the first book of the Bible - - in chapters 2 - 4 (audio recordings are also available on the pages).

Creation of Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve were created by God in His likeness on the sixth day of creation. Adam was created "from the dust of the ground." God gave him a soul. According to the Hebrew calendar, Adam was created in 3760 BC. e.

God settled Adam in the Garden of Eden and allowed him to eat fruit from any tree except the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam was to cultivate and keep the Garden of Eden, and also to give names to all the animals and birds created by God. Eve was created as Adam's helper.

The creation of Eve from Adam's rib emphasizes the idea of ​​the dual unity of man. The text of Genesis emphasizes that "it is not good for the man to be alone." The creation of a wife is one of the main plans of God - ensuring the life of a person in love, for "God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him."

The first man is the crown of the world created by God. He has royal dignity and is the ruler of the newly created world.

Where was the Garden of Eden located?

We have become accustomed to the appearance of sensational reports that the place where the Garden of Eden was located has been found. Of course, the location of each "discovery" is different from the previous one. The Bible describes the area around the garden, and even uses recognizable place names such as Ethiopia and the name of four rivers, including the Tigris and Euphrates. This has led many, including Bible scholars, to conclude that the Garden of Eden was located somewhere in the Middle East region known today as the Tigris and Euphrates Valley.

To date, there are several versions of the location of the Garden of Eden, none of which has solid evidence.

Temptation.

It is not known how long Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden (according to the Book of Jubilees, Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden for 7 years) and were in a state of purity and innocence.

The serpent, which "was more cunning than all the animals of the field that the Lord God created," by tricks and cunning convinced Eve to try the fruit of the forbidden Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Eve refuses, referring to God, who forbade them to eat from this tree and promised death to anyone who eats this fruit. The serpent tempts Eve, promising that, having tasted the fruit, people will not die, but will become Gods who know Good and Evil. It is known that Eve could not stand the temptation and committed the first sin.

Why does the serpent act as a symbol of evil?

The serpent is an important image in ancient pagan religions. Due to the fact that snakes shed their skin, they were often personified with rebirth, including the natural cycles of life and death. Therefore, the image of the snake was used in fertility rituals, especially those associated with seasonal cycles.

For the Jewish people, the snake was a symbol of polytheism and paganism, the natural enemy of Yahweh and monotheism.

Why did the Sinless Eve allow herself to be deceived by the serpent?

Comparison, albeit indirect, of man and God, led to the appearance of theomachistic moods and curiosity in the soul of Eve. It is these sentiments that push Eve to the deliberate transgression of God's commandment.

The cause of the fall of Adam and Eve was their free will. Violation of the commandment of God was only offered to Adam and Eve, but not imposed. Both husband and wife participated in their fall by their own free will, for outside free will there is no sin and no evil. The devil only excites to sin, and does not force it.

History of the Fall.

Adam and Eve, unable to withstand the temptation they were subjected to by the devil (the Serpent), committed the first sin. Adam, carried away by his wife, violated the commandment of God and ate from the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Thus Adam and Eve incurred the wrath of the Creator. The first sign of sin was a constant feeling of shame and vain attempts to hide from God. Called by the Creator, they laid the blame: Adam - on the wife, and the wife - on the serpent.

The fall of Adam and Eve is fateful for all mankind. The Fall violated the Divine-human order of life and accepted the Devil-human, people wished to become Gods, bypassing God. By the Fall, Adam and Eve brought themselves into sin, and sin into themselves and all their descendants.

Original sin- rejection by a person of the goal of life determined by God - becoming like God. Original sin contains in germ all the future sins of mankind. Original sin contains the essence of all sin - its origin and nature.

The consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve affected all mankind, who inherited from them human nature corrupted by sin.

Exile from paradise.

God expelled Adam and Eve from paradise so that they would cultivate the land from which Adam was created, and eat the fruits of their labors. Before the exile, God made clothes for people to cover their shame. God placed in the east near the garden of Eden the Cherubim with a flaming sword to guard the way to the tree of life. It is sometimes believed that the archangel Michael, the guard at the gates to paradise, was a cherub armed with a sword. According to the second version, it was the archangel Uriel.

Two punishments awaited Eve and all her daughters after the fall. First, God multiplied Eve's pains in childbirth. Second, God said that relationships between a man and a woman would always be characterized by conflict (Genesis 3:15 - 3:16). These punishments come true over and over again in the life of every woman throughout history. Regardless of all our medical advances, childbirth is always a painful and stressful experience for a woman. And no matter how advanced and progressive our society is, in the relationship between a man and a woman there is a struggle for power and a struggle of the sexes, full of strife.

Children of Adam and Eve.

It is known for certain that Adam and Eve had 3 sons and an unknown number of daughters. The names of the daughters of the ancestors are not recorded in the Bible, since, according to ancient tradition, the clan was conducted through the male line.

The fact that Adam and Eve had daughters is evidenced by the text of the Bible:

The days of Adam after he begat Seth were eight hundred years, and he begat sons and daughters.

The first sons of Adam and Eve were . Cain, out of envy, kills Abel, for which he was expelled and settled separately with his wife. From the Bible it is known about six generations of the Cain tribe, further information is not traced, it is believed that the descendants of Cain died during the Great Flood.

He was the third son of Adam and Eve. Noah was a descendant of Seth.

According to the Bible, Adam lived for 930 years. According to Jewish legend, Adam rests in Judea, next to the patriarchs, according to Christian legend - on Golgotha.

The fate of Eve is unknown, however, in the apocryphal "Life of Adam and Eve" it is said that Eve dies 6 days after the death of Adam, having managed to bequeath to her children to carve the history of the life of the first people on stone.

Original sin in Orthodoxy is one of those provisions that is unclear to a person who is just beginning to get acquainted with Christian doctrine. About what it is, what are its consequences for all of us, and also what interpretations of original sin exist in different branches of Orthodoxy, you can learn from this article.

What is original sin?

At first glance, this looks absurd: in the Christian tradition, it is believed that a child is born into the world with an already damaged human nature. How can this happen if he has not yet had time to commit sins, if only because he has not yet entered a conscious age? In fact, the problem is different: the essence of original sin lies in the fact that each person is born into the world initially damaged (primarily in the spiritual sense, but not only) due to the act of the first ancestor Adam. It was through him, as you know, that a spiritual disease entered the world, which all his descendants inherit.

Many people make the mistake of trying to explain what original sin is. We should not assume that in this case we are responsible for the fact that Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Everything is not so literal, and if you read the holy fathers, this will become clear. Adam's sin is no longer our sin, the fact is that for us it consists in human mortality. As follows from the Bible, the Lord God told Adam that he would die if he ate the forbidden fruit, and the serpent - that he and Eve would become equal to God. The serpent-tempter did not deceive the first people, but together with the knowledge of the world they became mortal - this is the main consequence of original sin. Thus, this sin was not transmitted to other people, but had disastrous results for them.

Consequences of Adam and Eve's sin

Theologians believe that the results were so hard and painful precisely because God's original commandment was easy to follow. If Adam and Eve really wanted to fulfill it, they could easily refuse the offer of the tempter and remain in paradise forever - pure, holy, sinless and, of course, immortal. What is original sin? Like any sin, it is disobedience to the Creator. In fact, Adam created death with his own hands, moving away from God and subsequently mired in it.

His act not only brought death into his life, but also clouded the initially crystal clear human nature. She became distorted, more prone to other sins, love for the Creator was replaced by fear of him and his punishment. John Chrysostom pointed out that before the animals bowed before Adam and saw him as a master, but after being expelled from paradise, they ceased to recognize him.

Thus, man from the highest creation of God, pure and beautiful, turned himself into dust and dust, which his body will become after inevitable death. But, as follows from the Bible, after the first ancestors ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, they hid from the Lord, not only because they began to fear his wrath, but also because they felt guilty before him.

What happened before original sin

Before the fall, Adam and Eve had a very close relationship with the Lord. In a sense, they were one with him, their souls were so deeply connected with God. Even the saints do not have such a connection, especially other Christians who are not so sinless. Therefore, it is extremely difficult for us to understand it. However, this does not mean that this union does not need to be sought.

The man was a reflection of God's image, and his heart was blameless. The original sin of the first ancestors is called before him; they did not know other sins and were absolutely pure.

How to escape the consequences

Baptism does not deliver from original sin, as is commonly believed. It only gives a person the opportunity to become a different, true Christian. After baptism, a person remains mortal, enclosed in a mortal body shell, and at the same time has an immortal soul. It is important not to destroy it, because, according to the Orthodox tradition, the Last Judgment will come at the end of time, at which it will become clear what fate is in store for every soul.

Thus, baptism helps to restore the lost connection with God, albeit not fully. In any case, original sin made the essence of man more inclined to evil than to good, as it was originally, and therefore it is extremely difficult to reunite with the Creator in this world. However, judging by the examples of the saints, apparently, it is possible.

In essence, this is precisely why baptism is obligatory for those who consider themselves Christians - only in this way, and in no other way, can they be together with God and be saved from the death of their souls.

Original sin in Protestantism

It is worth understanding what original sin is in the understanding of Protestants, namely Calvinists. They, unlike the Orthodox, believe that the consequences of Adam's sin are not only the death of all his descendants, but also their inevitable bearing of guilt for the sin of their ancestor. For this, every person, in their opinion, deserves punishment. Human nature in Calvinism is thoroughly corrupted and saturated with sinfulness.

This view most closely matches the Bible, although it is puzzling.

Original sin in Catholicism

Catholics believe that the sin of the original people is disobedience and weak trust in the Creator. This event led to a large number of different consequences: Adam and Eve lost the favor of God, as a result, the relationship between the two of them was broken. Previously pure and sinless, they have become lustful and tense. This reverberated in other people with moral and physical damage. However, Catholics believe in the possibility of his correction and redemption.