On Original Sin
27/07/25
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THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS, IMAGE: HIERONYMOUS BOSCH
We believe original sin, in its Latin peccatum originale, to be one of the most evil notions to exist. A placement of guilt inherent within an individual, condemning them for what they are and what they have been brought into without consent. Identity with peccatum originale is rejected as if your day-to-day life is subject to being acknowledged as an abomination. The only way to clear this creation is through innocence, getting rid of impurity, which lacks coherent thought when birth itself is one of the purest, cleanest elements of nature. But to hate on creation like birth, to regard their cataclysm as guilty, creates stagnation, weighing on the soul. This anti-life sentiment is an echo of unassurance, self-hatred, and outright discomfort of essence. In this article, we will explore the theological debate and general views surrounding original sin, concluding that peccatum originale is self-destructive.
The debate surrounding the ‘anti-life’ nature of original sin stems from Nietzsche’s ‘The Genealogy of Morality’, where he explores the development of Good and Evil, where, through Christianity, we have gone from ‘Noble Morality’ to ‘Slave Morality’. Nietzsche speaks of a previous morality, post-Christian Europe, where the nobility were hegemonic in culture. This morality was joyful due to the self-affirmation aspect. The nobility created their values, ones which embraced the sensations and were pro-life, ignoring ‘altruism’. Due to the nobility obtaining more power than the peasantry class, they established this morality as ‘Good’. In turn, this definition of good, equating to noble morality, meant the opposite morality known as ‘Bad’.
Nietzsche, with this elitism, then introduced us to the origins of peccatum originale, being an element of how morality switched to being anti-life. The peasants, out of ‘Ressentiment’ towards the noble class, used Christianity as a way to gain power and, in turn, created this Judeo-Christian morality as a tool to revert the standards. This “Conceptual Transformation” knighted the peasants and the Priests as the new ‘Good’ in morality and the previous noble features as ‘Evil’, thus birthing ‘Slave Morality’, an inherently anti-life set of values. Nietzsche explains how original sin is a factor in creating and maintaining slave morality, as it instils a moral sense of duty in the individual to pursue the ascetic life. Peccatum originale and the consequental guilt charges man to feel a moral sense of frustration and uneasiness when acting on anything self-affirmative.
With no other way to release these emotions, Nietzsche exclaims, “All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn themselves inwards”, suppressing the human spirit, trapping them in an overwhelming dread of guilt. To find escape, they must turn themselves into the ‘ascetic ideal’, which Nietzsche translates as “a will to nothingness”. The individual submits to the Christian ideal, acting on its practices, creating a cyclical account where guilt constantly resides within the individual. Original sin is a benefactor of this. Suppressing mankind by acknowledging their existence as a debt. Trapped in a wave of anti-life sentiment.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, IMAGE: GUSTAV-ADOLF SCHULTZE
Augustine, a creator of the notion behind original sin, reflects this. The human condition, according to Augustine of Hippo, is inherently born of guilt. Pursuing our intrinsic lusts and desires perpetuates the libido dominandi, the desire to dominate. In obtaining this desire, without suppressing ourselves to lives of asceticism, Augustine felt that chaos and cruelty would ensue. Yet his conclusion towards original sin is flawed.
Augustine’s conception of human nature arises out of a response to Pelagianism. Pelagius believed that God bestowed free will on his rational creation, yet wished them to use it for good. Therefore, any innate orientation towards sin is merely a result of God giving humanity freedom to choose, as he writes that “this very capacity to do evil is also good… because it makes the good part better by making it voluntary and independent.”
Augustine, however, dismissed this by looking towards Adam. He felt that during the Fall, humanity was ‘seminally present’ in the loins of Adam. Because of this, Augustine posits that humanity was irreversibly corrupted by the sins of the father, a life-restricting belief that splits families, causes mental tension, and only backtracks progress within individuals. An evil concept developed from whiny Augustine, who pins this down to the “secret yet just judgement of God”. Any accusations of unfairness in this system are quickly and conveniently shot down by Augustine in City of God when he writes that “Grace cannot be unjust, nor can justice be cruel”. True anti-life sentiment in its fullest.
It must be noted, however, that Pelagius’ denial of Augustine’s conception of original sin is quite damning, as he accused it of being influenced by gnostic concepts likely influenced by Augustine’s earlier Manichaeism (labelled by the Church as a perverted dualist heresy). The concept of original evil, or that ‘Good’ was light extracted from evil matter, eerily reflects Augustine’s idea that our carnal desire is a sign of evil in our nature, and that any good we do must be forcefully and painfully extracted from this evil nature. Pelagius outright denies this, asserting the influence of free will yet conceding that “the long habit of doing wrong which has infected us from childhood… holds us in bondage and slavery to itself so that it seems somehow to have acquired the force of nature”; thus, Augustine has mistaken cause for effect.
Augustine’s full doctrine of original sin goes even further, defining guilt as a universal human inheritance. All of humanity, he claims, shares in both Adam’s guilt (reatus) and his corrupted nature, passed on through concupiscence (the orientation towards sin). All infants are thus born guilty by default as guilt becomes an ontological condition, justifying the necessity of infant baptism and shaping Western moral psychology by internalising sin as an intrinsic feature of human nature. Freud, by contrast, refutes this through a psychoanalytic lens. For him, guilt arises solely through the development of the superego, an internalisation of parental authority and social rules. The superego becomes the harsh internal judge, punishing the ego for its forbidden (yet instinctual) desires. Guilt is thus not a product of divine judgement, but rather of socialisation, or the cost of civilisation. Freud believed the teaching that human nature was corrupted by original sin was a primitive and childish attempt to deal with our natural instincts, an attempt that causes as much immorality and unhappiness as it prevents. Viewing humanity as inherently evil does not provide the proper motivation for following religious social rules; instead, it frames sinning as the default, thereby largely failing to prevent it. He argues that although Christian moral law is in place to reduce suffering, it also causes suffering through repression, thus inspiring unconscious resentment against civilisation. This is similar, he notes, to the childhood neuroses of a child’s dissatisfaction with the external imposition of authority.
Despite Augustine’s errors, Christian theory has obviously developed since the 5th century. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican Friar during the 13th century, developed upon the notion of original sin. Instead of a Manichaeist outlook, Aquinas believed that evil was not a separate entity, but rather a mere lack of justice/good (privatio boni). According to Aquinas in Summa Theologica, the remedy for this fallen state is God’s grace and faith formed through charity (fides formata caritate), which together restore the soul’s orientation towards God. He argued that baptism cleanses original sin, but not concupiscence, a permanent result of the Fall. While Aquinas’s system is distinct from Protestant theology, his nuanced treatment of sin, grace, and human will sets the stage for later discussions about the nature of salvation and human cooperation with divine grace.
Original sin has no discernible trajectory in its development, with the notion being constantly disputed. With such beliefs there is a prominent place, though not comprehensively convincing, in understanding how Christianity and peccatum originale is a device aimed to limit the individual and prevent an overall will from the human spirit, seen with Augustine’s belief in libido dominandi and Aquinas’ strong connection with values being placed in faith of something other than the individual.
ST THOMAS AQUINAS, IMAGE: CARLO CRIVELLI
In understanding the wider debate over original sin, J.L. Mackie presides over this issue by calling into question the necessity of the peccatum originale in Christian theology. For many theologians, original sin is a result of Adam and Eve’s free will in the Garden of Eden. Without free will, they would never have erred in eating from the Tree of Knowledge and thus cast a hundred billion of their descendants into sin. However, without free will, many argue they would not have been free, and thus their devotion to God would lack sincerity. Mackie finds this unconvincing and rightfully so, arguing that a truly all-powerful God could have made possible a version of free will without the capacity for Adam and Eve to sin originally. To critics who suggest that this would have been impossible, as it directly contradicts the logic of free will, he deploys the Cartesian notion of an all-powerful God, external to our laws of logic that He created and thus exists in a state outside of them. For this God, why shouldn’t it be possible for Him to create a version of free will without the possibility of peccatum originale? In fact, as God is all-knowing, He knew the original sinners would always eat the apple, and thus by placing them in the garden with all those conditions, He was knowingly condemning humanity to fall.
Mackie concluded by arguing that the four omnis (-scient, -present, -potent, and -benevolent) are logically inconsistent, as the God who created the conditions of our universe and let Adam and Eve fall into sin was either not all knowing, not all powerful or not all loving, and as to reject any of these is to reject the widely-accepted Christian notion of God, this presents quite a glaring issue for many, an issue that no-one has convincingly risen to the challenge of.
In exploring this debate, it is clear that the progressive justifications and arguments for original sin undermine its existence as a suppressive force built on illogical notions. May we live a life with limitations in mind, not promoting hedonism, but one without guilt riddling our daily existence. We cannot be simply controlled by the “disputations of the Scholastics [which are] nothing but empty fictions, the dreams of idle men”, as Martin Luther proclaims.
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