On Original Mortality

The following is my more considered reflection on some issues raised by my friend Bosco at his Liturgy blog.

One of the things that divides Eastern from Western Christian theology concerns how they regard the concept of Original Sin. The Western concept, largely developed by Saint Augustine of Hippo, is that the Fall led to a kind of contamination of human nature and humanity, robbing humans of the immortality they possessed by nature (as made in the image of God) and so rendering them subject to death, and stained with an inheritance of guilt that is passed along to each person born, a stain of guilt that has to be washed away in Baptism.

The Eastern church never adopted this view. It accepts that the Fall brought sin into the world, and that the effect of the sin is death; but it regards this as a consequence of the Fall without any inherited actual guilt. So the East doesn't think of it as transmission of something (like some kind of fluid passed along), but as an event with the logical after-effect of becoming subject to death

Both East and West (the West more explicitly) appear to accept that the original humans were immortal, and lost that quality with the Fall. It is doubtful whether this stands up to a close reading of the Scriptural text, nor is it necessary in order to preserve a doctrine of Original Sin, Western or Eastern, and the equally Pauline testimony that through that sin death entered the world, and that, in Adam, all die.

Looking at the mythological portrayal in the text of the creation accounts, Adam and Eve are denied access to the Tree of Life, and so lose immortality. Immortality, then, is not portrayed as something they had by nature, but because they had access to the Tree of Life. Every other human since, who never had access to the Tree, shares in the consequence of Adam's Fall. Nothing is portrayed as being "transmitted" because this is not about passing something along but about losing something.

In spite of the Scripture's mythological portrayal, the Western church (at a council in Carthage in 418 — with Augustine present, pressing his theology of original sin, a distinctly Western view later reaffirmed and codified by the Council of Trent) anathematized the notion I presented above, instead alleging an original inherent or natural human immortality that was lost due to the Fall, as the removal of, or alteration in, some aspect of human nature. I prefer the Scriptural view that the only entity immortal by nature is God, and that human immortality was (and will be again) a gift from God, a gift that could be lost, as indeed it was (in Adam) but which can also be restored (in Christ). This also makes good typological sense of immortality restored in Christ through the “tree of the cross.”

One way of looking at this involves thinking about the nature of God as the uniquely self-subsistent entity, the only One totally independent of all other entities. Immortality is an aspect of this independence, as the East sings in the Kontakion of the Departed, "only thou art immortal, the creator and maker of mankind." The Fall consisted in large part of Adam and Eve seeking that same independence — in their case, independence from God — in order, as the text says, to "become like God." The true human theosis cannot be achieved in such a bold, aggressive move, but rather involves — in the course of salvation history — the eventual jointure of our human nature with the divine. This union is a work already completed in Christ, who through the kenotic abandonment of what was his by right, became — in union with humanity and human nature — dependent and subject to death, "even death on the cross." And as Christ shares in our humanity in this way, we also come to participate in the divine life through our union with Christ.

The notion of original mortality is also coherent with the Genesis 1 commandment to the primeval couple, "be fruitful and multiply" — identical to the commandment given the non-human creatures, about whom no suggestion of immortality was ever made, nor does the Genesis 2-4 account offer any explanation for a "Fall" for the non-human world. The reason this commandment reflects mortality rests on the fact that progeny would not be needed if the couple were immortal; indeed, fertility and immortality combined would lead to eventual massive overpopulation of any finite space. Moreover, this is also coherent with the teaching of Jesus in Luke 20:35-36, where he explains that those who attain the resurrection to eternal life do not marry, exactly because they are immortal — no one will die, so no one will need to be replaced by a descendent.

All of this seems to mesh with a notion that the primal Fall lost something that the original humans had by grace, not by innate nature; and that the effect of that loss falls on their heirs and assigns not as a substantial inheritance — the presence of an inherited sinfulness distilled into their nature — but as the absence of something. If you think of it as a possession an ancestor had and then lost — say, a deed to a silver mine — it is easier to understand that the current poverty of their heirs is due not to something passed along, but precisely to something not passed along, as a consequence of that original loss. It is, effectively, about disinheritance.

None of this is to fall into the Pelagian view that Augustine was combatting at Carthage, and in which I think he went too far in his effort to find a mechanism for the workings of original sin as a substantial inheritance. I think ordinary life, and again the Scriptural text, reveal that human beings tend to sin by nature. The myth tells us that the primal couple commit the original sin while they are in Paradise. The sin is in their heart before it is in their hands. If they were naturally incapable of sin, they could not have done so; so there must have been in them a natural drive to the self (a theme beloved of Augustine, and surprising that he missed in his effort to pin all this down) is there from the beginning. It was the assertion of the human self, in its drive to become self-sufficient and independent of all else ("like God"), that it lost the likeness it already had, and the fellowship with God that allowed it access to immortal life in God's presence.

— Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG