St. Augustine On Adam's Sin

“Early Christians writers often refer to the first sin as Adam’s sin, leaving Eve invisible. At other time Eve is made all too visible and blamed for the tragedy of the fall.” The Sacred scripture tells us the loss of sanctifying grace referring to our first parents which were excluded from the family deal with God; Gen 3:10 and 23. God is presented as a judge and launched against them the final verdict, (Gen 3: 16-19). For some fathers of the Church the divine displeasure was translated into the eternal reproach. Thus, “Tatian and Theophilus, shared Justin’s view... Adam’s sin and its consequence for humankind as the loss of deification.” For his part, Irenaeus of Lyons sustained that Adam’s sin was just a disobedience to the status of God;

Therefore, like Adam we are free to obey or disobey. Moreover, men are made sinners only by an act of active rebellion against God and men are saved when they do the right thing. For these beliefs Pelagius was condemned at the Council of Carthage in A.D. 412. St. Augustine on his own referred to his theory as a virtue of organic unity, that the whole human race somehow was in Adam at the time of his transgression. It teaches that God originally created a general human nature, which it was divided into many parts as many as there are human beings. Adam possessed all human nature and through his sin became dirty and guilty. Naturally, each individual part shares this guilt and dirt. “Augustine’s conception of an inherited sin provided a principle explaining human solidarity in sin with Adam. This principle is the core element of the classic doctrine of original sin. like Paul, Augustine’s primary interest was with Christ, not Adam…Augustine’s starting premise was the necessity of Christ’s redemption for all humankind, not original

Thomas Aquinas, the original sin consists formally in the lack of original justice and materially in the disorderly concupiscence. St. Thomas differentiates all sin as a formal and material element, the separation of God and the conversion of the creature. Because of the conversion to the creature is manifested itself primarily in the bad concupiscence, St. Thomas, together with St Augustine, seen in the concupiscence, which in itself is a consequence of original sin, the material element of this sin. Moreover, the above mention doctrine of St Thomas is located on the one hand under the influence of St. Anselm of Canterbury, which put the essence of original sin exclusively in the deprivation of the primitive justice and on the other hand, under the influence of St. Augustine, which defined the original sin as a concupiscence with its guilty tie and said that this guilty tie is eliminated by Baptism, while concupiscence remains in us an evil, not as sin, to exercise in our moral struggle. During the reformation, Martin Luther, who argued that humankind is essential corrupted in its nature, that its freedom is voided, and in everything we do there is a sin. The Council of Trent (1546) affirmed that the ontological significance of baptism, which erases original sin, remains including concupiscence. Man is free in his actions and may be with his good works and sustained by the grace have his guilts wash them