Anselm and the Guilt of Adam Kevin A. McMahon Saint Anselm College Perhaps the most difficult element in the traditional teaching on original sin is the claim that the very guilt of Adam’s sin has been passed on to the entire race. It was Augustine who, in the course of the Pelagian controversy, first drew this conclusion from St. Paul’s discussion of sin, particularly in the letter to the Romans. Augustine ultimately attributed the transmission to the agency of concupiscence, a less than happy solution. When he came to treat the issue in his Summa theologiae, Aquinas shifted the agency from the impetus of concupiscence to the will of the first man, a move of marked importance in the Augustinian tradition. But, as this paper will show, Aquinas was already anticipated in this by the approach taken by Anselm in his On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin. Sometime between the summer of 1098 and the summer of 1100, at Lyons in France where he had gone after attending the Council of Bari, Anselm wrote a sequel to the Cur Deus Homo, bearing the somewhat cumbersome title of On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin.1 Its purpose was to answer still another question of that ever-inquiring monk, Boso, namely, given that our redemption could have been the work only of a sinless man who was also divine, how is it that Jesus, who indeed shared our humanity, could nonetheless have escaped our condition of constituting a single mass of sin? It strikes me, however, that Anselm’s answer, which pretty much follows the Augustinian line in explaining that Jesus’ humanity was unique because his conception was unique, effected by the power of the Holy Spirit, is less important than what he has to say as he wrestles with the more basic question of how it could be that we do, in fact, make up a single massa peccati, understanding by this Augustine’s claim that we are all sinners, even those of us who are too young to have committed any personal sin, because we all share in the sin of the first man, and we share in his guilt. The statement that each person, from the moment of birth, is burdened with guilt was Augustine’s defining contribution to the doctrine of original sin. The Jewish scriptural, and later the rabbinical and pseudepigraphal traditions, spoke of a first sin whose effects, including moral weakness and death, were passed on to the race, but not the guilt.2 It will not be found in St. Paul, unless one wishes to argue that “guilt” is to be accounted among the many layers of meaning that belong to άµαρτια, sin, as Paul speaks of it in Romans 5. Then again, this may be exactly how Augustine understood St. Paul, for it was in the course of commenting on the letter to the Romans in his early treatise, Ad Simplicianum (396), that Augustine coined both phrases, “original sin” and “original guilt,” distinguishing clearly two ideas that he may have considered were combined in St. Paul. Our mortality, he wrote, we inherit as the penalty of original sin 1
Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man and The Virgin Conception and Original Sin, translation, introduction and notes by Joseph M. Colleran (Albany: Magi Books, Inc., 1969), 22-3. 2 This was the conclusion of F. R. Tennant after his study of the Jewish writings in The Sources of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin (New York: Shocken Books, 1968; reprint of 1903 edition), 167-68. The Saint Anselm Journal 2.1 (Fall 2004)
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