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Ancestral Sin and the Eight Thoughts

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Ancestral Sin and the Eight Thoughts

The divergence starts with what is inherited from Adam. The Greek fathers held that what passes down is mortality and corruption, a nature damaged and a will weakened, and Orthodoxy therefore speaks of ancestral sin rather than original sin. Guilt is not inherited on this account, because guilt attaches to acts and a newborn has committed none. Baptism is accordingly read as entry into the healing of a damaged nature rather than as acquittal on a charge already filed.

Much of the argument turns on a single clause of Paul's letter to the Romans. The Greek can be read as saying that death spread to all because all sinned. The Latin rendering made it in whom all sinned, which points the sentence at Adam and gives inherited guilt a foothold that the Greek does not obviously offer. Twentieth century Orthodox theology, Meyendorff in particular, built a good deal on that difference.

The atlas carries the point as debated rather than settled, because the second position is also held: that the contrast has been drawn far too sharply, that Greek writers do at times speak of an inherited culpability, and that a good part of the East and West divide here is a modern polemical construction rather than a patristic fact.

The same literature produced something the Western tradition made famous. Evagrius Ponticus, writing in fourth century Egypt, listed eight thoughts, the logismoi, that assault a monk: gluttony, fornication, love of money, dejection, anger, listlessness, vainglory and pride. John Cassian carried the list to the Latin West and Gregory the Great reworked it in the sixth century, and out of that reworking the familiar seven eventually settled, with vainglory absorbed into pride and envy added.

In their original setting they are not sins. They are thoughts, arriving unbidden, to be noticed and treated. Nobody confesses a thought in Evagrius; a monk learns to recognise which one has come and what answers it. That is why the East never turned the list into a schedule of offences, and the West did.

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