The dogmas of Creation and Providence bring us into the presence
of God; it is the action of God upon the world and man that they
proclaim and affirm. The dogma of Original Sin brings us back to
man; it is the act of man towards God, which stands at the very
beginning of the history of mankind.
{36}
In what does this dogma consist? What are the elements and the
essential facts which constitute it, and upon which it is
founded?
The dogma of Original Sin implies and affirms these propositions:
1. That God, in creating man, has created him an agent, moral,
free, and fallible;
2. That the will of God is the moral law of man, and obedience to
the will of God is the duty of man, inasmuch as he is a moral and
free agent;
3. That, by an act of his own free will, man has knowingly failed
in his duty, by disobeying the law of God;
4. That the free man is a responsible being, and that
disobedience to the law of God has justly entailed on him
punishment;
5. That that responsibility and that punishment are hereditary,
and that the fault of the first man has weighed and does weigh
upon the human race.
{37}
The authority of God, the duty of obedience to the law of God,
the liberty and responsibility of man, the heritage of human
responsibility are, in their moral chronology, the principles and
the facts comprised in the dogma of Original Sin.
I turn away my attention for a moment from the dogma itself, its
source, its history, the Biblical and Christian tradition of this
first step in evil of the human race. And considering man, his
nature, and his destiny in their actual and general state, I
investigate and verify the moral facts as they manifest
themselves at the present day, to the eyes of good sense, amidst
the disputes of the learned.
Man, at his birth, is subjected to the moral authority, as well
as the physical power of the parents who, humanly speaking,
created him. Obedience is to him a duty, and at the same time a
necessity. This physical necessity and this moral obligation,
however ultimately connected with each other, are not one and
identical; and the child, in its spontaneous development,
instinctively feels the moral obligation long before it is
conscious of the physical necessity.
{38}
The instinctive feeling of the obligation is united with the
growing sentiment of affection; and the child obeys the look, the
voice of its mother, unconscious of its absolute dependence upon
her. As the sentiment of affection and the instinct of obligatory
obedience are the first dawn of moral good in the development of
the child, so the impulse to disobedience is the first symptom,
the first appearance of moral evil. It is with the voluntary
disobedience of the child to the will of its mother that the
moral infraction commences, and it is in disobedience that it
resides. It considers neither the motives nor the consequences of
its act; it is simply conscious that it disobeys, and regards its
mother with a mingled feeling of restlessness and defiance; it
tries, with hesitation, the maternal authority; it strives to be,
and especially to appear, independent of the natural and
legitimate power which rules it, and which it recognises at the
very moment when it opposes its own will to that higher law.
{39}
As the child, so is the man. As man is born free, so he lives
free; and as he is born subject, so he lives subject. Liberty
co-exists with authority and resists without annulling it.
Authority exists before liberty, and as it does not yield to it,
so neither does it supersede it. Man, inasmuch as he knows that
he disobeys, renders homage to authority by the very fact of his
disobedience. Authority, on its side, recognizes the liberty of
man, by the condemnation which it passes on him for having
misused it; for he would not be responsible for his acts were he
not free. In the co-existence of these two powers, authority and
liberty, at one time in accordance, at another in conflict, lies
the great secret of nature and of human destiny, the fundamental
principle of man and of the world.
Let it be clearly understood that I speak here of the moral
world, of the world of thought and of will. In the physical world
there is neither authority nor liberty; there are merely certain
forces, forces acting inevitably and unequally.
{40}
If the question concerned the material world, could I do better
than repeat what Pascal has admirably said: "Man is but a
reed--the weakest in nature--but he is a reed which thinks; the
universe need not rise in arms to crush him; a vapour, a drop of
water suffices to kill him. But were the universe to crush him,
man would still be nobler than the power which killed him, for he
knows that he dies; and of the advantage which the universe has
over him, the universe knows nothing." When man obeys or
disobeys, he knows just as well that authority confronts him, as
that liberty of action abides with himself. He knows what he
does, and he charges himself with the responsibility. Moral order
is here complete.
Throughout all times and in all places, in all men, as in the
first man, disobedience to legitimate authority is the principle
and foundation of moral evil, or, to call it by its religious
name, of sin.
{41}
Disobedience has various and complicated sources; it may spring
from a thirst for independence, from ambition or presumptuous
curiosity, or from giving rein to human inclinations and
temptations; but, whatever its origin, disobedience is ever the
essential characteristic of that free act which constitutes sin,
as it is also the source of the responsibility which accompanies
it.
Eminent men, eminently pious men, have combated the doctrine of
human liberty; unable to reconcile it with what they term the
divine prescience, they have denied the fundamental fact of the
nature of man, rather than fully acknowledge the mystery of the
nature of God. Others, equally eminent and sincere, have limited
themselves to raising doubts regarding human liberty, and denying
it the value of an absolute and peremptory fact. In my opinion,
they have confounded facts essentially different, although
intimately blended; they have ignored the special and simple
character of the very fact of free will. During a course of
lectures which I delivered thirty-five years ago at the Sorbonne,
on the history of civilization in France, having occasion to
examine the controversy of St. Augustine with Pelagius on free
will, predestination, and grace, I explained these subjects in
terms which I repeat here, finding no others which appear to me
more exact and more complete:--
{42}
"The fact which lies at the foundation of the whole dispute," I
said in 1829, "is liberty, free will, the human will. To
comprehend this fact exactly, we must divest it of every
foreign element, and confine it strictly to itself. It is the
want of this precaution that has led to such frequent
misconception of the thing itself; men have not looked simply
at the fact of liberty, and at that alone. It has been viewed
and described, so to speak, _péle-méle_ with other facts,
closely connected to it, it is true, in the moral life of man,
but which are no less essentially different. For example, human
liberty has been said to consist in the act of deliberating
upon and choosing between motives; that deliberation, and that
choice and judgment consequent upon it, have been regarded as
the essence of free will.
{43}
Not so at all. These are acts of the intellect, not of liberty;
it is before the intellect that the various motives of
resolution and action, interests, passions, opinions, and such
like, present themselves; the intellect considers, compares,
estimates, weighs, and judges them. This is a preparatory task,
which precedes the act of volition, but which does not in any
way constitute it. When, after deliberation, man has taken full
cognisance of the motives presented to him, and of their value,
there takes place a process entirely new, and wholly different,
that of free will; man forms a resolution--that is to say, he
commences a series of facts having their source in himself, of
which he regards himself as the author; and these are
effectuated because he wills them; they would have no existence
did he not will it, and would be different if he desired to
produce them otherwise. Now, let us imagine all remembrance of
this process of intellectual deliberation obliterated, the
motives so known and appreciated, forgotten; concentrate your
thought, and that of the man who takes a resolution, upon the
moment when he says, 'It is my will, therefore I shall do so;
and ask yourself, ask too the man, whether he could not will
and act otherwise.
{44}
Without doubt, you will reply, as he will do, 'Assuredly,' and
this it is that reveals the fact of liberty; it consists wholly
in the resolution which man takes after the deliberation is at
an end; it is the resolution that is the proper act of man,
which is through him and through him alone; a simple act,
independent of all the facts which precede or accompany it,
identical in the most varied circumstances, always the same,
whatever be its motives or its results.
"At the same time that man feels himself free, and is conscious
of the power of commencing by his own will alone a series of
facts, he recognises that his will is subjected to the empire
of a certain law, which takes different names, according to the
circumstances to which it is applied--moral law, reason, good
sense, &c ... Man is free, but according even to man's own way
of thinking, his will is not arbitrary; he may use it in an
absurd, senseless, unjust, and culpable manner, and whenever he
uses it a certain rule must govern it. The observance of this
rule is his duty, the task assigned to his liberty."
{45}
It is that act of a will (that is to say of a will strictly
brought back to its central and essential limits) acting freely
in the intimate recesses of his being, which, in the case of
disobedience to the law of duty, constitutes in man sin, and
entails on him its responsibility.
Is this responsibility exclusively personal, and limited to the
author of the act, or communicated, so to say, by contagion, and
transmitted in a certain measure to his descendants?
I am still considering only actual appreciable acts, such as they
produce and manifest themselves in the moral life of the human
race.
We find the poetry and mythology of nearly all nations expressing
the idea of an Utopian state of existence, referred to times
remote and primitive, to which they assign different names, as
the Golden Age, the Age of the Gods, and which they picture as an
epoch when there existed no moral and physical evil in the
world,--an era of peace, bliss, and innocence.
{46}
This is the more remarkable, as it has no foundation, and finds
no pretext in any tradition of historical times, however remote;
for from the commencement of history, from the time that we can
discern any trace of facts at all precise and authentic, it is
not the Golden Age, on the contrary, it is the Iron Age which
appears--an epoch of violence and ignorance and barbarism, in
which war and force are rampant, and which has not in effect the
least resemblance to those beautiful dreams of ancient poetry.
Without now seeking to establish any relation between these
mythological dreams and the Biblical traditions; or, for the
moment, drawing from the Golden Age any argument in support of
the Garden of Eden; I merely point it out as a great fact, as
evidence of a general instinct, so to say, of the human
imagination. What is the meaning of this? Whence comes this
Utopia of innocence and bliss in the cradle of the human race?
{47}
To what does this idea of a primal time, without strife, without
sin, and without pain, correspond?
But from this cradle of man and this primitive poetry, to revert
to the present time, to real life, to the cradle of the infant,
why is it that, apart from all personal affection, we so readily
term infancy the age of innocence? How is it that we find it so
charming to give it this name, and regard it under this aspect?
Physical ill is already present, for it begins with the very
beginning of life; but moral ill has not yet appeared; life has
not yet brought to the soul its trials, nor called forth its
failings, and the idea of the soul without spot or stain has for
us an inexpressible attraction; we feel a deep joy in witnessing
innocence, or at least its image in the child, when we no longer
see it around us, nor find it within ourselves.
What means this universal instinct, which in the dreams of the
imagination, as well as in the intimate scenes of domestic life,
whether we turn in thought to the cradle of the human race or to
that of the infant, leads us to regard innocence as the primitive
and normal state of man, and makes us place in the spot where
innocence resides that which some term Paradise, and others the
Golden Age?
{48}
Manifestly between the soul without spot and the soul tainted
with evil, between the creature who is merely fallible and the
creature who has sinned, there is a very great change of state, a
distance immense, an abyss. We have a secret feeling of this
deplorable change, of the fall into this abyss; and it is without
premeditation, by the mere impulse of our nature, that we suffer
our thoughts to bear us far--far beyond that abyss, and to pause
on the rapturous contemplation of a state anterior to the fall.
Hence spring, and thus are explained, the power and the charm
which the idea of innocence has for us; absolute innocence we
have never seen, but the idea is still vouchsafed to us; and so
it appears to us in the cradle of the world, and in the cradle of
the infant, and the pleasure is infinite which we derive from the
ideal spectacle of purity which they each suggest.
{49}
Is this a pleasure foreign to all personal sentiment, to all
secret reference to ourselves, the pleasure, that is to say, of a
simple spectator? No: these impressions, which the picture of
innocence awakens in us, are connected with and carry us back to
ourselves; this change in the state of man, that mysterious Past
which has thrown him so far from innocence, leaving him,
nevertheless, the idea and the worship of it--these were not the
lot of the first man alone: the entire human race was, and
remains, subject to them. Our present evil does not proceed
solely from ourselves; we have received it as a heritage before
having brought it upon us as a penalty: we are not merely
fallible beings, we are the children of a being who has sinned.
{50}
How can we feel surprise at this inheritance of woe! Have we not
daily the example and the spectacle before our eyes? It is an
incontestable and undisputed fact, that two elements enter into
the moral life of man: on the one side, his innate dispositions,
his natural and involuntary inclinations,--on the other, his
inmost and individual will. The natural inclinations of a man do
not destroy his moral liberty nor enslave his will, but they
render its exercise more laborious and more difficult to him; it
is not a chain which he carries, it is a burden that he bears.
Equally incontestable and undisputed is it that the natural
dispositions of men are different and unequally distributed; no
one is entirely exempt from evil inclinations; every man is not
only fallible, but prone to transgress, and prone not only to
transgress, but to transgress in some particular direction or
other. Nor can the fact be disputed, although appreciable with
more difficulty, that the natural and special dispositions of the
individual descend to him in a certain measure from his origin,
and that parents transmit to their children such or such moral
propensities just as they do such or such physical temperament,
or such or such features. Hereditary transmission enters into the
moral as well as the physical order of the world.
{51}
This inheritance must take effect, it has done so from the first
days of man's existence upon earth, for man has been created
complete in his whole nature. And whilst, at the same time as
complete, he has been created fallible, I ask, who shall measure
the distance between man fallible, but still without fault, and
the first transgression? Who shall sound the depth of the fall,
and of the change which it brought into the moral condition of
its author? Who shall weigh the consequences of this change to
the state and the moral dispositions of man's descendants? To
appreciate the extent and gravity of this awful fact, of this
first appearance and this first heritage of moral evil, we have
but one test,--the instinct we still preserve of a state of
innocence, and of the immense space which this instinct
irresistibly compels us to place between native innocence and
man's first transgression; but this test is unexceptionable; it
dimly reveals to us, in this fatal transformation, the whole
infirmity and responsibility of the human race.
{52}
An objection is raised to this as an injustice: how, it is said,
can each man be responsible for a fault which he has not himself
committed--for the transgression of another man, separated from
himself by so many ages? I consider this objection weak and
frivolous. Such an objection would attach to all the inequalities
which exist among men, to the inequality of the destinies as well
as that of the nature of man, to the inequality of his moral
disposition as well as to that of his physical powers. The
objection would attach to the solidarity of successive
generations, and the controlling influence which the ideas, the
acts, the destiny of each of them exert on the ideas, the acts,
the destiny of those which follow it. The objection would attach
to the ties which unite the child with its parents, and which are
the cause of its sometimes inheriting their evil dispositions,
and sometimes suffering for their faults. It is in short the
general order of the world to which such an objection must apply;
it is the very existence of evil, and its unequal distribution in
a manner wholly independent of individual merit which assumes the
character of a monstrous iniquity.
{53}
And when we come to this point, that we no longer refer the
source of evil to the fault and the responsibility of man, placed
here on earth in a scene and period of transition and of trial,
see to what alternative we are brought. We must either regard
evil as natural, eternal, necessary, in the future as in the
past, as the normal state of man and of the world; that is to
say, we must deny God, the creation, the Divine Providence, human
morality, liberty, responsibility and hope; or, on the other
hand, it is to God Himself that we must impute evil, and whom we
must render accountable.
The dogma of Original Sin alone relieves the human mind from this
odious and unacceptable alternative: far from being in
contradiction either with the history of humanity, or with the
facts and instincts which constitute man's moral nature, this
dogma admits, illustrates, and explains them.
{54}
The fact of original sin presents nothing strange, nothing
obscure; it consists essentially in disobedience to the will of
God, which will is the moral law of man. This disobedience, the
sin of Adam, is an act committed everywhere and every day,
arising from the same causes, marked by the same characters, and
attended by the same consequences as the Christian dogma assigns
to it. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, this act is
occasioned by a thirst for absolute independence, the ambitious
aspirings of curiosity and pride, or weakness in the face of
temptation. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, it
produces an immense change in the inmost state of man, a change,
the mere idea of which seizes upon the human soul, and disturbs
it to its very depths; it transports man from the state of
innocence to the state of sin. At the present day, as in the
Garden of Eden, the act which produces this change involves and
entails the responsibility not only of its author but of his
descendants; sin is contagious in time as in space, it is
transmitted, as well as diffused.
{55}
The Christian dogma exhibits the first man created fallible, but
born innocent; innocent at the age of man, proud in the plenitude
of his faculties, not the subject of any evil and fatal heritage.
All at once, for the first time, of his own will, man disobeys
God. Here lies Original Sin, the same in its nature as sin at the
present day, for they both consist in disobedience to the law of
God, but it is the first in date in the history of man's liberty,
and the human source of that evil for which the Christian
religion, whilst pointing it out, offers to man the remedy and
the cure.