Breviloquium

After the fall of our first parent, something must be said about the transmission of original sin. Concerning this, first the mode of corruption, second the mode of transmission, and third the mode of healing must be considered.¹

The mode, then, by which the human race is corrupted through original sin is this. For everyone generated through sexual intercourse is born by nature a child of wrath², because deprived of the rectitude of original justice. On account of its absence, we incur, as regards the soul, a fourfold punishment, namely weakness, ignorance, malice, and concupiscence. These four were inflicted on account of original sin; and these spiritual punishments are accompanied in the body by manifold penalty, manifold defect, manifold toil, manifold illness, and manifold pain. To these punishments succeeds the punishment of death and incineration, the punishment of deprivation of the vision of God and loss of heavenly glory, not only in adults but also in unbaptized infants. These infants, indeed, are punished with the “mildest punishment”³ among the rest, because they have only the punishment of loss, without the punishment of sense.

The reason for understanding the foregoing is this: since the first principle does all things from itself, according to itself, and for itself, it must be the best and most righteous, and therefore the most pious and most just; hence all its ways are mercy and truth⁴ or judgment. But if God had founded man in such miseries from the beginning, there would be neither piety nor justice—that is, it would oppress its work with such misery without any preceding fault. Likewise, if he filled us with such miseries, or permitted us to be filled with them, without fault, divine providence would govern us neither piously nor justly. If, therefore, it is most certain that the first principle is most righteous and most merciful both in producing and in governing, it must have made the human race in such a way that from the beginning there was in it neither fault nor misery; it must also govern it in such a way that it does not permit misery to be in us except on account of some preceding fault. Since, therefore, it is most certain that from our origin we contract a manifold misery of punishment, it is certain that we are all born by nature children of wrath, and therefore deprived of the rectitude of original justice; this privation we call original fault.⁵

And because every fault signifies a withdrawal from the immutable good and an approach to the mutable good⁶, and to withdraw from the immutable good is to withdraw from supreme virtue, truth, and goodness, while to approach the mutable good is to tend toward it through love more than is due, hence one who loses original justice incurs weakness, ignorance, malice, and concupiscence.

Again, because one who abandons the immutable good for the sake of the mutable good becomes unworthy of both, hence, by reason of the lack of original justice, the soul loses⁷ temporal tranquility in the body through manifold corruption and death, and at last is separated from the vision of eternal light, losing the happiness of glory both in soul and in body.

Finally, because the lack of this justice in those being born does not arise through a movement of their own will or through actual delight, hence original sin does not deserve after this life the punishment of sense in Gehenna, since divine justice punishes not above what is deserved, but below it, and it is always accompanied by superabundant mercy. — We must believe that blessed Augustine understood this⁸ although his words, outwardly, because of his detestation of the error of the Pelagians, who granted them some happiness, may seem to sound otherwise. For, in order to bring them back to the middle, he inclined more abundantly toward the extreme.