Another theory is, that all human wills were included in the will of Adam, so that they all concurred with his will in the original transgression. [Footnote 164]
[Footnote 164: We refer the reader to the argument of Candace in Mrs. Stowe's Minister's Wooing, for a humorous but unanswerable reputation of the ancient Calvinistic doctrine of original sin.]
We find some difficulty in comprehending this statement. Did we all have a distinct existence, and enjoy a deliberative and decisive vote when the important question of human destiny was decided? If so, the unanimity of the judgment, and the total oblivion which has fallen upon us all, respecting our share in it and our whole subsequent existence, until a very recent period, are very remarkable phenomena which we have never seen adequately accounted for. The only other alternative is that of indistinct existence or virtual existence. That is, that the power of generating souls was in Adam, and that all human souls are actually derived from his soul by generation. Suppose they are. A father who has lost an organ or a limb does not necessarily transmit this defect to his posterity. Even if he does transmit some defect which he has contracted by his own fault to his son, that son is not to blame for it. If the principle of all souls was in Adam, virtually, their personality, which is the principle of imputability, commences only with there are distinct existence. Personality is incommunicable. An individual soul cannot communicate with another in the principle of identity, from which all imputability of acts, all accountability, all possibility of moral relations, proceeds. This notion of the derivation of souls, one from another, or from a common soul-reservoir, is, however, one perfectly inconceivable, and contrary to the plainest principles of philosophy. Substance is simple and indivisible. Spirit, which is the most perfect substance, contains, therefore, in its essence the most manifest contradiction to all notion of composition, resolution, division, or separation of parts. The substance of Adam's soul was completely in his own individual intelligence and will. The notion of any other souls deriving their substance from his soul is therefore wholly without out meeting. There is no conceivable way in which spirit can produce spirit, except by creation, and act to which created spirit is incompetent.
There remains, therefore only the doctrine, which is that of Catholic theology, that the human species is corporeally propagated by means of generation, and was therefore, in this respect only, virtually in Adam; but that each individual soul is immediately created by God, and comes into the generic and specific relations of humanity through its union in one integral personality with the body. How, then, can each individual soul become involved in a original sin? Does God create it sinful? This cannot be; and if it could it would not be the sin of Adam, or the sin of the race, but its own personal sin. The soul as it comes from the hand of God cannot be sinful in act. [{527}] The only possible supposition remaining is, that the soul contracts sin from contact or union with the body. Here the Calvinist, the Jensenist, or any other who maintains that original sin consists in positive deprivation of the soul's essence, or in habitual moral perversity, or determination of the will to sin, is in a position where he cannot move a step forward. How can soul be corrupted by body? How has the innocent soul deserved to be thrust into a body by which it must be polluted? These questions will never receive an answer. Nor will any credible or rational method of vindicating the doctrine that all men are born totally and positively depraved, or with a nature in any respect essentially evil, on account of Adam's sin, ever be discovered. The doctrine is utterly incredible and unthinkable, and will no doubt ere long have a place only in the history of past errors.
The way is now clear for the exposition of the Catholic doctrine respecting the mutual relations of Adam and his posterity in the original probation, trial, and fall of the human race immediately after its creation. That probation of Adam, in which the human race was included, must not be understood as including the entire personal probation either of himself or of his descendants. His own probation lasted during his lifetime, and so does that of each individual man. Had he been faithful in that particular trial which is related in the first chapter of Genesis, it is probable that, although the special privileges whose perpetuation depended on it would certainly have then secured to the race, he himself would have had a longer personal trial. So also, if the progeny of Adam had been confirmed in the perpetual possession of the privileges of the primeval state, each individual of the human race would have had a probation of his own, affecting his own personal destiny alone. Although each one of us would have been conceived and born in the state of original grace and integrity, as the Blessed Virgin was by a special privilege, as soon as the actual exercise of reason became completely developed, a period of probation would have commenced, in which we should have been liable to fail, as we are now after receiving grace through baptism.
The probation of the human race in Adam was, therefore, a special probation, on which the possession in perpetuity of certain supernatural privileges, freely and gratuitously conceded to the race, was alone dependent. The merely personal consequences of the sin of Adam and Eve affected themselves alone individually. That is, the guilt of an actual transgression with the necessary personal consequences following from it attached to them alone, and we have nothing to do with it, any more than with any other sins committed by our intermediate progenitors. The father of the human race did not act, however, in a merely individual capacity in this transaction. He was the federal head and representative of the race. A trust was committed to him in behalf of all mankind, and this trust was the great gift of original sanctity and justice, the high dignity of supernatural affiliation to God, the glorious title to the kingdom of heaven. By his sin he forfeited this gift in trust, both for himself as an individual, and also for his descendants who were to have inherited it from him. There is no ground for asking the question, why it followed that Adam, having fallen, should transmit a fallen nature by generation to his posterity. This question is only asked on the supposition that fallen nature is a nature essentially changed and depraved, whereas it is really a nature which has fallen from a supernatural height back to its own proper condition. With all due respect to the eminent writers who have attempted to answer this question, we must be allowed to say that we cannot attach any definite meaning to their answer. [{528}] Adam, they say, having a fallen nature, could only transmit the nature which he had. All humanity was in him when he sinned, and therefore humanity as generic having fallen into sin, each individual who participates by conception in generic humanity participates in its sin, or is conceived in original sin. This language may be used and understood in a true sense; but in its literal sense, and as it is very generally understood, it has no meaning. It is derived from the extravagant and unintelligible realism of William of Champeaux, and some other schoolmen, according to which humanity as a genus has a real and positive entity, like the great animal in se of Plato, from whom all particular animals receive their entity. These notions have long since become obsolete, and it is useless to refute them. The The human genus or species was completely in Adam, but it was not distinct from his individuality; rather it was completely in his individuality constituting it in its own generic or specific grade of existence, as the individuality of a man. Humanity is also completely in every other human individual. This humanity, constituting the specific essence of Adam, as a man, was identical with his existence, for existence is only metaphysical essence reduced to act. It could not be essentially changed without destroying his human existence. Whatever is contained in humanitas must have remained in him after the fall, otherwise he would no longer have remained a man, or indeed have continued to exist at all. It is only this humanitas or specific essence of human nature, that Adam had any natural power to reproduce by generation. He could not have lost the power of transmitting it by the fall, except by losing altogether the power of reproducing his species. The immediate, physical effect of generation is merely the production of the life-germ, from which the body is developed under the formative action of a soul, created immediately by God. The only depravation or corruption of nature, therefore, which is physically possible, or which can be supposed to follow by a necessary law from the corruption of nature in Adam, is a corruption or degeneracy in in this life-germ, through which a defective or degenerate body is produced. This opinion has then long ago condemned by the church. It is, moreover, contrary to science. The human animal is perfect as an animal, and although there is accidental degeneracy in individuals, there is no generic or specific degeneracy of the race from it's essential type. But supposing that a defective body were the necessary consequence of Adam's sin, a defective soul could not be. The parent does not concur to the creation of the soul of his offspring, except as an cause. God creates the soul, and he cannot create a human soul without creating it in conformity to the metaphysical archetype of soul in his own idea, and therefore having the essence on soul completely in itself. How, then, can the infusion of this soul into a body which is physically degenerate make it unworthy of that degree of the love of God and of that felicity, which it is worthy of intrinsically, and apart from its union with the body?
There is no law in nature by virtue of which Adam must or could transmit anything essentially more than human nature before the fall, or essentially less after the fall. The law by which he was entitled to transmit privileges or gifts additional to nature on condition of is fulfilling the terms of God's covenant with him was therefore a positive law; why those human laws which enable man to transmit with their blood property, titles of nobility, or the hereditary right to a crown. These privileges may be forfeited, by the crime of an individual in whom they are vested, for himself and for his posterity. They may be forfeited for posterity, because they are not natural rights. In the same manner, the supernatural gifts conferred on Adam were forfeited for the human race by his sin, because they were [{529}] not natural rights, or debita naturae, but gratuitous gifts to which Adam's posterity had do hereditary right, except that derived from the sovereign concession of God, and conceded only in a conditional manner. This conditional right could only be perfected by the obedience of Adam to the precept of the Almighty forbidding him to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. As he failed to obey this precept, his posterity never acquired a perfect right to the gifts of supernatural grace through him. By virtue, therefore, of our descent from him, we possess nothing but human nature and those things which naturally belong to it; we are born in the state in which Adam would have been placed at the beginning if God had created him in the state of pure nature.
We do not stand, therefore, before God, by virtue of our conception and birth from the first parents of mankind, in the attitude of personal offenders or voluntary transgressors of his law. Our essential relation to God as rational creatures is not broken. Our nature is essentially good, and capable of attaining all the good which can be evolved from its intrinsic principles; that is, all natural knowledge, virtue, and felicity. That which is immediately created by God must be essentially good. A spirit is essentially intelligence and will, and therefore good in respect to both, or capable of thinking the truth and willing the good. Moreover, it is a certain philosophical truth that when God creates a spirit he must create it in act, or that the activity of the spirit is coeval with its existence. The first act or state of a spirit, as it precedes all reflection, deliberation, or choice, and flows necessarily from the creative act of God himself, is determined by him, and must therefore be good. The acts which follow, either follow necessarily from the first, or are the product of free deliberation. In the first case, they are necessarily good; and in the second they may be good, otherwise they would be necessarily evil, which is contrary to the supposition that they are free. The human soul being in its essence spirit, and incapable of being corrupted by the body, must therefore be essentially good at the moment when it attains the full exercise of reason and of the faculty of free choice. If so, it is capable of apprehending by its intelligence and choosing by its will that which is good, and cannot, therefore, come into the state of actual sin or become a personal transgressor except by a free and deliberate purpose to violate the eternal law, with full power to the contrary. It may exercise this power to the contrary by a correct judgment, a right volition, and thus attains the felicity which is the necessary consequence of acting rationally and conscientiously. So far as this is possible to mere unassisted nature, it may continue to put forth a series of acts of this kind during the whole period of its earthly existence. That is to say, it is capable of attaining all the good which can be evolved from its intrinsic principles, or all natural knowledge, virtue, and felicity. This is equivalent to saying, that it can have a natural knowledge and love of God, as is affirmed by the best theologians with the sanction of the church. For Pius V. has condemned the following proposition, the 34th of Baius: "Distinctio illa duplicis amoris, naturalis videlicet quo Deus amatur ut auctor naturae, et gratuiti quo Deus amatur ut beatificator, vana est et commentitia et ad illudendum sacris litteris et plurimis veterum testimoniis excogitata." "The distinction of a twofold love, namely, natural, by which God is loved as the author of nature, and gratuitous, by which God is loved as the beatifier, is vain and futile, and invented for the purpose of evading that which is taught by the Holy Scriptures and by many testimonies of the ancient writers." [Footnote 165] It would be easy to multiply proofs that the doctrine of man's capability of moral virtue, from the intrinsic [{530}] principles of here's nature, is the genuine Catholic doctrine. [Footnote 166] This is not necessary, however, at present.
[Footnote 165: Denziger's Enchirid., p. 305.]
[Footnote 166: See Aspirations of Nature by Rev. I. T. Hecker, passim.]
We proceed to another point, namely, How it is that mankind can be said to be born in original sin, when they are innocent of all personal and actual sin at the time of birth? The state in which Adam's posterity are born, and which is denominated the state of original sin, considered subjectively, is a state of privation of supernatural grace and integrity. If man had been created for a natural destiny, this state of inhability to the supernatural would not have been a state of sin. If he had been created in the state in which he is now born, as a preparatory state to the state of grace, to be endowed at a subsequent period with supernatural gifts, it would not have been a state of sin. Entitively it would have been the same state as that in which he is now born. It would not have been a state of sin, because the state of sin receives its denomination from a voluntary transgression which produces it. The particular notion of sin is an aversion from God as the supreme good produced by the voluntary election of an inferior good in his place. The posterity of Adam are born in a state of habitual aversion from God as the supreme good in the supernatural order, which is the consequence of the original sin of Adam. Since they virtually possessed a right to be born in the state of grace and integrity, which was forfeited by his sin, the state of privation in which they are born, relatively to their original ideal condition and to the transgression by which they were degraded from it, is properly denominated a state of sin. This is incurred by each individual soul through its connection with the body which descends from our first parents by generation, because it is this infusion into a human body which constitutes it a member of the human race. As a member of the human race, and by virtue of his descent from Adam, each individual man participates in all the generic relations of the race. If Adam had not sinned, he would have received by inheritance from from him a high dignity and great possessions, transmitted to him through the blood; as the case is, he is born disinherited. There is no injustice or unkindness in this; because the rights which have been forfeited were not rights involved in the concession of rational existence itself, but rights gratuitously conceded on certain conditions, and because no personal blame is imputed where none exists. The illustration so often employed by theologians of a nobleman who has suffered attainder is perfectly apt to the case. His posterity are born under an attainder, which in human law corresponds to original sin under the divine law, and are thus placed in a state of privation; relatively to that condition of nobility which was formerly hereditary in the family; but which in itself is an honest condition. In the eye of the law, their father's crime makes them incapable of the privileges of nobility, but it does not deprive them of the common rights of private subjects.