Scotus Academicus, Tomus quintus: De Creaturarum Corporalium et de Homine

Notandum 1. It is more certain than certain that the sin of the first Parent not only shook human nature, stripping it of the charisms divinely bestowed upon it, but also wounded it in many respects. Hence not incongruously very many of the holy Fathers think that the first man, and in him all his posterity, was shadowed forth by Christ the Lord in that Parable of Luke 10, of the man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, who fell among thieves; who stripped him, and having laid wounds upon him went away, leaving him half dead; yet it has not been so ascertained what those principal wounds are which were inflicted upon human nature by sin. Indeed it is agreed that all the miseries of body and of soul with which we are tossed throughout the whole course of our life, as well as death itself, have been derived from original sin upon the whole human race. For had the happy state of innocence stood, man would never have endured death, nor the miseries asserted to attend upon death; for although by the constitution of nature he would have been mortal, as was proved in the preceding Disputation, yet he would nowhere have experienced death, as St. Augustine most excellently teaches, book 6 De Genesi ad litteram, chapter 25, where, having said that Adam was created immortal after a certain mode, he adds:

that which was granted him from the tree of life was not from the constitution of nature, from which he was separated by the tree when he sinned, so that he could die: had he not sinned, he could not die. He was therefore mortal by the condition of his animal body: but immortal by the benefit of his Creator.

Therefore just as death altogether dwelt as an exile from that fatherland of happiness, so misery would be wholly absent — that misery pressing in from every quarter, whether from the soul, or from the senses, or from the body, or from external things, whereby man would be tormented against his will: for to be afflicted against one's will by any evil, whether great or small, is not of the nature instituted in man, but of the punishment of the condemned. Whence St. Augustine, book 1 against Julian, chapter 5, briefly sets forth in these words that total immunity from all bodily inconveniences, whereby before the sin committed by Adam no external sense would in any way have been offended or disturbed either inwardly or outwardly: Far be it, he says, that we should believe there was anything whereby our sense, whether inwardly or outwardly, would be pricked by pain, or wearied by toil, or confounded by shame, or burned by heat, or constricted by cold, or assailed by horror. It is certain therefore that all the miseries of body and of soul flowed forth from original sin itself, as from a virulent fountain of all evils, into the whole human race; but whether it also utterly ruined the natural faculties and powers of man is here to be determined. Therefore

Notandum 2. A threefold genus of natural virtues and faculties can be distinguished in man; namely, intellectual, arbitral, and animal: from which there bursts forth, as it were, a corresponding appetite, whereby he is borne toward that which is agreeable to those very faculties: for the intellective power follows and inquires into truth, that in its attainment it may delight and rest: while the arbitral, or voluntary, pursues the good, shuns evil, and seeks out and desires everything whatsoever that illustrates and confirms the liberty of man: finally the sensitive bursts forth toward that which pleases the senses, that it may derive therefrom a certain delight and felicity. The first assimilates man to the Angels: the second makes him, as it were, equal to God: but the third aggregates him to the brute animals. To the first are opposed ignorance and blindness of mind: to the second captivity and languor in attaining the good and fleeing evil: to the third, the miseries of the senses and the tossing of unbridled concupiscence. But whether, and in what manner, original sin inflicted all these plagues upon human nature must here be opened up.

Notandum 3. There has been implanted in rational nature, by that very fact that it is rational, not only a capacity but also an inclination and native propension toward the good of honesty, which above all among the three genera of goods is consonant with reason. Now this inclination can be distinguished as twofold: one indeed remote and radical, which is the very substance of the rational soul, as it has the character of a nature and, as it were, of a radical principle from which faculties and operations burst forth: the other proximate, by which it is found in the powers and faculties from which operations arise: and those powers are especially the intellect and the will; for the sensitive appetite participates only in something of reason on account of the intimate conjunction it has with the rational part; whence also it has only an imperfect inclination toward the good of honesty; wherefore it stands in need of the moral virtues, which subject it to the rational appetite.

Advertendum moreover that the inclination of these faculties toward the good of honesty can be understood to be diminished in two ways. First indeed intrinsically, and on the part of the subject, if something of entity or intensity be withdrawn from them, just as habits are diminished when they are relaxed. Secondly, on the part of the term, the entity of the subject remaining intact, insofar as, certain impediments supervening, the power is removed from attaining or achieving the term toward which it tended: for the more the power has been hindered by reason of impediments from some act, the less will be its inclination and aptitude for such an act.

These things thus premised, four questions come principally to be resolved in this Question. 1. What wounds were inflicted upon the rational faculty through original sin. 2. Whether it altogether broke the liberty of the arbitral and voluntary faculty. 3. What plagues it inflicted upon the sensitive appetite. 4. Finally, in what manner it altered the inclination toward the good of honesty.

First Conclusion. — There are four wounds especially which original sin inflicted upon the intelligence or human mind.

The first is ignorance of things necessary even for the conservation of natural life itself, wherein infants possess as little as not even the beasts, as St. Augustine elegantly explains in book 1 De Peccatorum meritis et remissione, chapter 38.

The young, he says, of many flocks, although they be very small, do not indeed advance even in understanding as their bodily growths depart, because they have not a rational soul; yet even the tiniest of them both run and recognize their mothers, nor are they brought by care and help to the teats of others for sucking: but they know of themselves, with wonderful facility, those things placed in a suitable position within their mothers' bodies. Contrariwise, man when born has neither feet fit for walking, nor hands apt at least for writing; and unless the nipples of the breast be applied to his lips by the aid of those nourishing him, he does not perceive where they are, and rather than suck at the breasts lying beside him he can only cry from hunger. Accordingly this infirmity of body altogether corresponds to the infirmity of mind; nor would the flesh of Christ have been in the likeness of the flesh of sin unless that flesh had been flesh of sin, under whose weight the rational soul is thus weighed down.

The second wound is fatuity and dullness of mind, which abides in some persons from their very birth; for there is no animal so destitute of knowledge by means of reason suited to its own nature as some idiotic and rude men are born. Lamenting this calamity and misery of the human mind, St. Augustine describes it thus in Epistle 28 to Jerome:

Then some are slow, he says, and forgetful, so that they have not even been able to learn the first elements of letters. But certain ones are of such fatuity that they differ not much from the flocks, whom the common people call fools.

Hence, in book 1 De Peccatorum meritis, chapter 22, refuting those who, following Plato, think that souls, on account of offenses committed elsewhere, are thrust down into bodies congruent with their merits, and therein afflicted more or less, he says thus:

Who, according to those men, who opine that souls, which before this body lived in heavenly places according to the merits of a former life, are burdened by earthly bodies more or less, would not affirm that those who deserved to lose the light of mind so as to become, with senseless reason, brutish — as the common people call them — sinned before this life more wickedly and more savagely?

The third wound is difficulty in learning and in acquiring knowledge. For ignorance has propagated its roots so deep and so high in the talents of certain men that they prefer to live always in the shadows of ignorance rather than to drain so great a labor as occurs in acquiring the sciences. Hence St. Augustine lib. 22. De Civit. Dei, cap. 22. What, he says,

of that which indicates a certain horrible depth of ignorance, from which every error arises, which embraces all the sons of Adam as with a dark bosom, so that man cannot be delivered from it without labor, sorrow, and fear?

Hence, in book 1 De Peccatorum meritis, chapter 36, from this ignorance and difficulty in learning he gathers original sin.

Into that therefore, he says, densest darkness of slowness, where the soul of the infant fresh from the womb — certainly the soul of a man, certainly a rational soul — lies not only without speech, but incapable even of learning things: why, or when, or whence was it thrust thither? If it is the nature of man so to begin, is not that nature already vitiated? Why was not Adam created such? Why was he capable of precept, and knowing how to impose names upon his wife and upon all the animals?... But this one, not knowing where he is, what he is, by whom he was created, from whom begotten, already guilty of offense, not yet capable of precept, is involved and pressed by so great a darkness of profound ignorance that he cannot, even as one awakened from sleep, know these things at least when shown to him, but time must await wherein he may gradually digest this I-know-not-what intoxication, not through one night, as any gravest drunkenness is wont, but through several months and years: which until it be done, we punish so many things in adults and tolerate them in infants that they cannot all be numbered.

Now this difficulty of learning and of undertaking knowledge appears chiefly from this, that although all men by nature desire to know, as Aristotle says in book 1 of the Metaphysics, or as Tullius says in book 1 of the Tusculans: Nature presses upon our minds an insatiable kind of desire of seeing the truth: yet so great is the weakness of the human mind that it knows perfectly neither even the tiniest creature nor the worm; whence Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, deserves to say: All things are difficult: man cannot explain them by speech. But far greater is its ignorance of itself; since the human mind knows nothing less than itself, nay, does not even understand its own works: whence the royal Psalmist, Psalm 18: Who can understand sins? From my secret ones cleanse me. Which indeed is the highest argument of incredible unhappiness, that he himself who sins daily by his own will can scarcely discern whether he has truly sinned, or consented with deliberate will, how often and how much he has offended. But how obscure and meager a knowledge of God human study can acquire, so many erroneous opinions of the Gentiles concerning the nature of God bear witness; since their madness proceeded so far that they attributed divinity not only to viler animals, but even to certain kinds of vegetables and herbs.

Finally, the fourth wound implanted in the human mind by original sin is that very levity and undisciplined agitation of the mind, whereby it comes to pass that we turn over many empty and vain things even against our will. St. Jerome laments this calamity in his Dialogue against the Luciferians, perhaps speaking in the person of another: Hence very often in my prayer, either I walk through the public place, or I reckon accounts from the treasury, or, defiled by a base thought, I carry about things which even boys would blush to utter. And St. Augustine, book 10 of the Confessions, chapter 35:

When, he says, in matters of this kind our heart is the receptacle, and bears the wares of copious vanity, thence also our prayers are often interrupted and disturbed, and before thy countenance, while we direct the heart's attention to thine ears, the matter so great is cut off by trifling thoughts rushing in, I know not whence.

Second Conclusion. — Likewise there are four principal wounds inflicted upon the human will and arbitral faculty by original sin.

The first is that very conversion of love toward self, whereby it comes to pass that all seek their own things and burn with disordered self-love. Thence arise all those deviations of the soul which Saint Augustine enumerates in lib. 22. De Civit. Dei, cap. 22.

Namely, biting cares, perturbations, terrors, mad joys, discords, quarrels, wars, treacheries, angers, enmities, deceits, flattery, fraud, perjury, rapine, perfidy, pride, ambition, envy, homicides, parricides, cruelty, wickedness, lust, petulance, impudicity, impurity, fornications, adulteries, incests, and against nature, of both sexes, so many filthy and unclean things which we are accustomed even to call shameful; sacrileges, heresies, blasphemies, false oaths, oppressions of the innocent, calumnies, circumventions, betrayals, false testimonies, unjust judgments, violences, robberies, and whatever such evils do not come to mind, and yet depart not from the life of man: whence all the works of darkness, although exercised only by wicked men, nevertheless flow forth from that virulent fountain of perverse self-love ingested through original sin.

The second wound is that very great difficulty which each experiences in overcoming vices and cultivating virtues. For although nature itself stimulates toward virtue and withdraws from vice — especially since the natural end of man, as regards the will, is to live according to the dictate of right reason, and therefore to pursue virtue itself — nevertheless men tend toward it with difficulty and hardly: witnesses of which thing are those immense and manifold punishments wherewith both children and adults must be urged, that even against their will they may be stimulated toward virtue and restrained from vices. Hence Augustine, in the passage praised shortly above:

What mean the many rods which are employed to curb the wantonnesses of little ones? What mean Pedagogues, Masters, the rod, the straps, the whip, that discipline whereof Sacred Scripture says, the sides of the beloved sons must be beaten, lest growing untamed, being now hard, they can be subdued soon, or perhaps cannot? What is done by all these punishments except that ignorance may be beaten down and depraved desire restrained, amid which evils we groan in this age? To these is added that incredible negligence in acquiring those things which look toward living blessedly, both in this life and after death: for although men know exceedingly well that the sole felicity, however slight, which they can taste in this mortal life lies stored in the study of virtue; although likewise by the light of faith they know steadfastly that heavenly beatitude is promised only to those living piously; nevertheless experience establishes that most men have nothing less at heart than procuring virtues and eliciting good works, whereby they may attain temporal beatitude and merit eternal: so great evidently a forgetfulness of themselves, so huge a sleep, so unhappy a security has oppressed the human race from the sin of the first transgression.

The third wound is that continual struggle of one's own will against itself, and a certain unstable inconstancy; for since all created things, both superior as the Angels and inferior as cattle, ever will the same or nill the same, pursue good, flee evil, man alone, tossed by his own will alternating, rejects what he had just chosen, and chooses what he had held in contempt. Thence it comes to pass that the superior part of the soul not only suffers perpetual struggle with the inferior, but even conflicts perpetually with herself. Hence St. Augustine, book 8 of the Confessions, chapter 9:

Whence this monster, he says, and why this? Let thy mercy swear, and I ask, if perchance they can answer me, the hiding places of the punishments of men, and the darkest contritions of the sons of Adam. Whence this monster, and why this? The mind commands the body, and it is obeyed at once: the mind commands itself, and is resisted.... I, when I deliberated that I might now serve my Lord, as I had purposed, I was he who willed, I who would not. Nor plainly did I will, nor plainly would I not: the same contended within me, and I was dissipated by myself, and that dissipation befell me indeed unwillingly: yet it showed not the nature of an alien mind, but the punishment of mine.

Finally, the fourth wound inflicted by original sin upon the arbitral, voluntary faculty of man, is that very infirmity and diminution of free choice; for, as St. Augustine teaches in many places, through the sin of the first Parent the free choice of man has been so vitiated that, unless it be quickened and strengthened by divine grace, it is altogether weak and powerless for pursuing and embracing virtue: here he seems to assert that it altogether fell: for as he says in the book De perfectione iustitiae, chapter 4, Nature, conquered in vice into which it fell by will, collapsed in liberty: and in the Enchiridion, chapter 30, Man, ill using free choice, lost both himself and it: and in the Epistle to Vitalis, We have lost free choice for loving God by the greatness of the first sin. These things, however, are not to be so understood, as though St. Augustine wished that free choice had altogether perished through the sin of the first Parent: for he openly teaches the contrary in many places, especially Epist. 47 to Valentinus; The Catholic Faith, he says,

neither denies free choice, whether unto a good life or unto a bad life, nor attributes to it so much that without grace it can avail for anything; and in book 2 to Boniface, chapter 5, he says:

We do not say that the free choice perished from the nature of men through the sin of Adam.

And in book 1 to the same, chapter 2, he teaches openly in what manner man's free choice is held to be diminished through Adam's sin; namely, that he no longer possessed that perfection of liberty which he had in the state of innocence, for acting with the greatest ease whatsoever good, and abstaining from evil; for having said: Which of us says that through the sin of the first man free choice has perished from the human race? He adds:

Liberty indeed perished through sin: but that which was in Paradise, of having full justice together with immortality: wherefore human nature stands in need of divine grace, the Lord saying, if the Son shall make you free, then shall you be truly free.

Whence, when he says that the first man, ill using free choice, lost both himself and it, he signifies quite clearly that he did not lose free choice as to substance, but as to that accidental mode of perfection which he had in the state of integrity and innocence: thus the first man did not lose himself as to substance, but as to accidental and gratuitous gifts: with which in that happy state he was illustrated, and on account of sin despoiled of them. But concerning these things we shall say more in the following Disputation.

Third Conclusion. — Various, but principally four, are the wounds wherewith the inferior part of man, or the sensitive appetite, has been wounded through original sin.

The first is the continual warfare and struggle itself, which concupiscence renews against the higher part of the soul at every moment; for man endures an internal war unceasingly even unto death: wherefore the Apostle, Romans 6, lamenting, exclaims: Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? How fierce, how deadly is that war, the depraved life of many young men bears witness, who burn in an immense fire of most shameful pleasures: the constant courses of lusts also bear witness, whereby the concupiscence of perverse men is irritated and inflamed; likewise the constant mortifications bear witness, whereby men devoted to piety crucify themselves, that with these as it were heavenly arms they may bind and conquer so hostile an enemy.

The second are the innumerable calamities and miseries, and above all the very many kinds of diseases with which we are tossed day by day. Whence St. Augustine, book 1 against Julian, chapter 6, thus addresses him:

Behold, misery of the human race surrounds thy senses. Thou art a man; put nothing human away from thee, and in those things which thou dost not suffer, sympathize with those who suffer; although thou thyself, however great thine earthly felicity may be, dost pass no day without internal war, if indeed thou strivest to fulfill what thou professest. But in those things which thou canst no longer remember, look upon little children, how many and how great evils they suffer, amid what vanities, torments, errors, and terrors they grow up. Then already grown, even those serving God, error assails that it may deceive, labor or pain assails that it may break, lust assails that it may inflame, sorrow assails that it may cast down, pride assails that it may exalt: and who can swiftly expound all things wherewith the yoke weigheth heavy upon the sons of Adam? This evident misery of the nations compelled the Philosophers of the Gentiles, whether knowing or believing something of the sin of the first man, to say that we are born for the sake of undergoing punishments on account of certain crimes committed in a former life....

But the Apostle deems such to be that opinion whereby each soul is believed to be inserted into diverse bodies according to the merits of its former life. What therefore remains, unless the cause of these evils be either the injustice or the impotence of God, or else the punishment of the first and old sin? But because God is neither unjust nor impotent, there remains what thou dost not will, but art compelled to confess: that the heavy yoke upon the sons of Adam, from the day of their going forth from their mother's womb unto the day of burial in the mother of all, would not have been, unless the merit of original guilt had gone before.

The third kind of evils which original sin introduced into the animal portion of man is the very need of food and drink, and that so great as sometimes to drive men even to frenzy. Hence St. Augustine, lib. 22. De Civit. Dei, cap. 22.

Hath not, saith he, the foul ardor brought thirsty men even to this, that they have drunk human urine, or even their own? Hath not hunger brought them to this, that they could not abstain from the flesh of men, nor from men not slain and burnt, but killed by themselves for the moment, nor yet strangers merely, but even mothers devouring their own children with incredible cruelty, which raging hunger wrought?

Fourth and last is the very savagery of the whole universe against man; for not only the brute animals, which from the beginning ought to have obeyed man in all things, immediately after his sin withdrew from his dominion and lay snares for his very life in countless ways, but also the elements themselves of things and the heavens fight against him; for as St. Augustine observes in the place just praised,

Scarcely can it be told how great are those losses which befall the race of men from heats, colds, tempests, rains, floods, lightning, thunder, hail, the bolt, chasms of the earth, oppressions of ruins, eruptions of fires, and likewise so many poisons of plants, of waters, of winds. What evils do they suffer who sail! what they who journey over land! what the tillers of gardens and fields! How many and how great calamities are feared for the fruits of the fields from heaven and earth, or from most pernicious animals!

Fourth Conclusion. — Original sin vitiated man's native inclination toward honest good; not indeed intrinsically, and as to entity, but extrinsically, and as to ready operation, namely by subjecting certain obstacles, through which he may not attain that good so promptly and readily.

This Conclusion consists of three parts: the First of which appears from all those texts of Scripture whereby the very inclination of man toward evil is proved. For the sense and thought of the human heart are prone to evil from its youth, saith God, Genesis 8. Which truth St. Paul plainly expounds, Romans 7:

I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is to say, in my flesh, that which is good. For to will is present with me; but to accomplish that which is good, I find not. For the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do. Now if I do that which I will not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that when I have a will to do good, evil is present with me. For I am delighted with the law of God, according to the inward man: but I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members.

The second and third part are likewise evident, namely that that natural inclination toward virtue, or honest good, is not diminished intrinsically by original sin: since the substance of the soul and its faculties, namely intellect and will, can suffer no intrinsic loss, seeing that they are incorruptible and indefectible as to entity, whence no substantial change, no defect can occur in them. Hence the whole repugnance to the attainment of honest good is extrinsic: for original sin, by taking away original justice, turns man away from his last end: but that aversion renders him not so prompt to operate rightly: therefore by original sin the promptitude, aptitude, and inclination of rational nature toward honest good is diminished. The major is evident; the minor is proved: the last end stands related to operable things in the same way as first principles stand to speculative matters: but the intellect lacking assent to the premises is not so apt and prompt to assent to conclusions as when furnished with that assent to the premises: therefore neither does the will averted from the last end become so prompt and ready to pursue the honest good as while it adhered to the last end. Wherefore original sin, by taking away original justice, whose rein kept the powers of man free from the raging motions of concupiscence, is indirectly, and as it were by removing an obstacle, the cause that such powers tend with unbridled impetus toward their objects and burst forth into illicit affections.

Whence four wounds in general are reckoned to human nature from original sin: namely ignorance in the intellect; malice in the will; weakness in the irascible, and unbridled commotion of concupiscence itself in the concupiscible.