Medieval Christian Theology: Sin
Every religious tradition has its own diagnosis for what is wrong with the world. For early and medieval Christians, the problem was sin. Christians saw sin as having entered the world at a primeval period, with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: they spoke and wrote of this moment as the Fall of Man—and as having been ushered in by the Devil (Satan), a demonic force of the angelic order inimical to God and to human beings. As they saw it, humankind and the earth in general were under the sway of sin and the Devil, and so evil acts were multiplied and perpetuated. God the Father, in his boundless love and mercy, recognized the plight that the world was in, and, in the fullness of time, he sent his son, the Second Person of the Trinity, to intervene on the behalf of sinful humanity and to effect its salvation. This act of salvation was accomplished through the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but the “campaign” to continue God’s saving work was carried on into the present, and the medieval Catholic Church understood its primary mission as serving as the trustee and agent of this continuing act of redemption.
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"They have all gone astray, they are all alike corrupt; there is none that does good, no, not one." — Psalms 14:3 |
Because the patristic and medieval traditions accumulated and evolved over the centuries, there was never one official definition of sin, though there was a general consensus within the Church over the basic contours of the idea. In general, sin was understood as including actions, behaviors, or habits of mind that transgress the moral law or commandments of God, and that therefore generate a distance, or barrier, between human beings and God. The biblical account suggests a model of sin as disobedience to the will of God or an insult or offense to God. One definition of sin offered by Augustine in his Answer to Faustus (XXII.27) was an especially influential one for medieval theologians: sin was something dictum vel factum vel concupitum contra legem aeternam [“anything said, performed, or desired contrary to the eternal law”]. It is absolutely crucial to emphasize that, as medieval people understood sin, it was a voluntary act, and so completely dependent upon the notion that human beings were able to exercise free will. One couldn’t sin accidentally: the intention to perform a sinful deed, or the consent to the sinful desire, was precisely what made an action sinful. Hence sin could also be thought of as a disorder of the will, or, to state it somewhat differently, sin was a consequence of a disordered will, a will oriented around vicious thoughts, desires, and habits, a will dishabituated from virtue.
The mightiest example of sin so construed, and the main Christian personification of evil, was undoubtedly the fallen archangel Satan, also known as the Devil (from Latin diabolus, from Greek diábolos, meaning “slanderer”). Christian tradition viewed Satan’s fundamental sin to have been willful Pride. As the fourth-century poet Prudentius describes Satan, he was
"a being of most beauteous features, overweening in his Satan here is no anti-God (as the early Manichaean heresy imagined), but a fallen angel, a rebel against God and the order of God’s creation, though to the medieval mind his rebellion has none of the dark glamor with which Milton invests it in Paradise Lost. Satan’s “sin” can be comprehended as committing his free will to something contrary to the law and nature of God. Namely, he claims himself, and not God, as his own creator; God is therefore unworthy of love, allegiance, and obedience. Dante’s Satan (Inferno 34) illustrates well the ultimate non-being of evil: though literally at the center of the cosmos (which at some level is where he always wanted to be),
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Satan is paralyzed, trapped, frozen into the deep lake of ice at the nethermost point of Hell. In freely and brazenly aligning himself with the non-being of evil, he has ironically deprived himself of all freedom. Outside of Dante, however, Satan and the other demons were seen as constantly attempting to distract humans from God and his commandments and to tempt them to sinful actions.
Satan (and his fellow fallen angels, the demons) may represent the first intrusion of sin into God’s universe, but the Original Sin of the human race comes with the story of Adam and Eve. With its usual terseness, the biblical account in Genesis tells of how God, having created the first couple, places them in the Garden of Eden and forbids them to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Persuaded by the serpent, whom both patristic and medieval audiences identified with Satan, Eve eats of the fruit of the tree and then offers it to Adam, who also eats. The catastrophic consequences of their actions—which include expulsion from the blissful Eden and the entry of death into the world--
Satan (and his fellow fallen angels, the demons) may represent the first intrusion of sin into God’s universe, but the Original Sin of the human race comes with the story of Adam and Eve. With its usual terseness, the biblical account in Genesis tells of how God, having created the first couple, places them in the Garden of Eden and forbids them to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Persuaded by the serpent, whom both patristic and medieval audiences identified with Satan, Eve eats of the fruit of the tree and then offers it to Adam, who also eats. The catastrophic consequences of their actions—which include expulsion from the blissful Eden and the entry of death into the world--
are also known as the Fall of Man, or often simply as the Fall. Certainly Adam and Eve's primary transgression was disobedience of God’s explicit command, but medieval views on what motivated this disobedience varied. Some medieval writers saw the basic sin here as pride: Adam and Eve, goaded by the serpent, were tempted by the power and immortality they thought that eating of the Tree would confer upon them. Others, especially later in the Middle Ages, saw the sin underlying the Fall as cupidity: in a supreme act of incontinent folly, the primordial couple greedily ate the fruit. And unfortunately, many medieval believers also understood the eating of the fruit to have been caused by the earliest example of what they saw as feminine weakness: being a woman, Eve was more easily persuaded by the serpent to eat the fruit, and she was able to use her feminine charms to persuade Adam in
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turn. Needless to say, this rather one-sided focus on Eve as the agent of temptation was both a by-product of, as well as a continuing source of, much ambient patristic and medieval misogyny.
The Bible account mentions only a few specific consequences of Adam and Eve’s disobedience: sexual awareness, expulsion from the Garden, the necessity to labor for one’s sustenance, the pains of childbirth, enmity between humans and the serpent, and, most importantly, death. The early Christian and medieval imaginations amplified these consequences, including illness, old age, fear, ignorance, confusion, involuntary sexual arousal, and infirmity of will and strength. But by far the most far-reaching aspect of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve was that, in the medieval West, it was considered hereditary. In other words, medieval believers considered that all humanity shared in the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin; because of the Fall, human nature had incurred a hereditary weakness, a propensity toward sinfulness. The idea of Original Sin derives from Paul’s conviction (Romans 5:12, 1 Corinthians 15:22) that the primeval sin of Adam was mysteriously transmitted to all of his descendants, though it also has roots both in Jewish notions regarding collective sin and Greco-Roman ideas about the heritability of curses and blessings. Medieval Christians typically believed that this inherited Original Sin was transmitted specifically through the act of sexual intercourse.
The Bible account mentions only a few specific consequences of Adam and Eve’s disobedience: sexual awareness, expulsion from the Garden, the necessity to labor for one’s sustenance, the pains of childbirth, enmity between humans and the serpent, and, most importantly, death. The early Christian and medieval imaginations amplified these consequences, including illness, old age, fear, ignorance, confusion, involuntary sexual arousal, and infirmity of will and strength. But by far the most far-reaching aspect of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve was that, in the medieval West, it was considered hereditary. In other words, medieval believers considered that all humanity shared in the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin; because of the Fall, human nature had incurred a hereditary weakness, a propensity toward sinfulness. The idea of Original Sin derives from Paul’s conviction (Romans 5:12, 1 Corinthians 15:22) that the primeval sin of Adam was mysteriously transmitted to all of his descendants, though it also has roots both in Jewish notions regarding collective sin and Greco-Roman ideas about the heritability of curses and blessings. Medieval Christians typically believed that this inherited Original Sin was transmitted specifically through the act of sexual intercourse.
And so human beings, as medieval Catholic Christians saw it, were beset with sin from all sides: they had inherited the stain of Original Sin, which led in turn to a sort of moral weakness and a propensity to yield to all sorts of further sinful impulses. They viewed the most prominent of these as the Seven Deadly Sins (or “Seven Capital Sins”—“capital” because each stood at the head of a group of subspecies of sin): Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust. Penitential manuals such as Peraldus’s Summa Vitiorum or Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale describe in detail how each of these sinful impulses encompassed a host of other specific sinful actions. Lust, for example, could lead to fornication, or rape, or adultery, or bestiality; wrath could manifest as sullenness, impatience, vengeance, misanthropy, or even as suicide. In addition to this host of inherited impulses, humans were also of course subject to more active demonic temptation. As the author of the First Epistle of Peter writes,
“Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (5:8). It was into this milieu, a world where humans are continually beset by moral dangers both active and passive, that the unique and game-changing salvific entrance of the incarnate Jesus Christ into the world was to take effect, and the drama of the Redemption to be enacted.
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Further Reading
- Dante Alighieri, Inferno: A Verse Translation, trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (Anchor Books, 2002)
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II (on the will, vices, and virtues), ed. The Aquinas Institute (Emmaus Academic, 2012)
- Augustine of Hippo, The Answer to Faustus, A Manichaean, trans. Elizabeth Ruth Obbard (New City Press, 2007)
- Guillelmus Peraldus, Summa on the Vices, ed. Richard G. Newhauser et al. (Oxford University Press, forthcoming)
- Prudentius, "The Origin of Sin," in Prudentius: Volume 1, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press, 1949)