ORIGINAL SIN

Original Sin and
Its Transmission

by Peter A. Kwasniewski

As a consequence of the sin of our first parents, original sin has been inherited by the human race as a whole; in Adam all men sinned. This is the de fide teaching of the Church (cf. Catechism 402-406) and all orthodox theologians embrace it. Original sin is a mystery taught as a revealed doctrine, a reality which cannot be fully understood by the power of our minds, although the effects of original sin in the world furnish evidence for its existence.1 That it is possible for a man in this life to disbelieve in God, when it can be known with certainty that God is responsible for his being and his life and that God alone can satisfy his soul, seems to be clear evidence that the soul itself is damaged or wounded. Many signs bear witness to original sin, especially the moral and intellectual aberrations of mankind, such as polytheism and atheism, homosexuality and abortion. A soul in which there was no “principle of sin” would naturally love God, just as man is naturally inclined to love those who do good to him. A soul in which there was no scar of sin would equitably love other men by nature. None of this is or has ever been borne out in the world of experience.

    In fact, denying the existence of a fundamental condition of sin passed on from generation to generation necessitates a denial of the commonness of human nature inherited from the first parents. Assuming that something is radically wrong with humanity in the state in which it is presently found–an assumption which only a blind optimist would be unwilling to make–either one must admit that each child inherits his nature in the same degraded condition as it has endured from Adam, its ultimate origin, down to the child’s parents, its proximate origin; or one must deny the continuity of the human race and therefore the unity of the species, and try to explain the unfortunate state of mankind in a completely different way. It is no surprise that many moderns, charmed by the demythologizing voice of anthropology and psychology, have chosen the latter option, perhaps without a full consciousness of its ramifications. And since so many people do reject original sin, we should pause a moment to consider whether what they say makes any sense.

    It is not enough to say: “Social conditions produce sinfulness in individual human beings, and that is how our world continues to be plagued with evils.” For one might then ask: Why did the social conditions come to be so bad in the first place? And why do the very same problems continue to arise in every age, in every culture, in every society? It defies the bounds of all probability to say, as the ancient heretic Pelagius did, that men become sinners only by the bad example of others. For one needs to explain the universality of this bad example. It is certainly true that bad customs in a given social order can wreak tremendous harm on millions of people, as is evident from communism in the East and liberalism in the West. But again, it is important to ask why or how things as evil as communism and liberalism can arise to begin with. Let us grant that only a few men are purely malicious, and that the majority are merely led astray, like cattle or sheep led to the slaughter. The same problem exists, maybe an even deeper problem: how can so many people be led astray by what is obviously contrary to their genuine good, their lasting happiness? Fallibility, credulity, easy susceptibility to harm–all these defects, no less than malice and deceit, are signs of a serious disease in human nature. In light of such reflections, one sees how facile are the modern theories put forward to refute or replace original sin.

    Yet even with probable arguments on its behalf, the doctrine of original sin is not easily penetrated by reason. There is an element of obscurity in seeing how Adam stands as the definitive font of the human race. The doctrine of original sin is thus in a situation similar to that of the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity. Christian authors from every age adduce many probable arguments on behalf of the existence of the Trinity, but in the end it is necessary to admit that there is no way to prove this dogma philosophically. Original sin is especially difficult to understand because it is hard to see, first, how it could have happened at all, if our first parents were endowed with original justice and holiness, and second, how this sin, once it happened, is subsequently transmitted from Adam, through all generations, down to ourselves and our descendants. In this article, we are interested in the second question.

    Let us first be aware of the great difficulties. Because God is the sole creator of each individual soul, original sin, as a blemish on human nature, cannot be present in the soul as it comes directly from the hand of its Creator. On the other hand, if the soul is the “form of the body” and wholly masters the matter provided by the parents, the soul would seem to be in a position of dominance regarding the body and whatever it may inherit. How, then, can the flesh, or the matter derived from one’s parents and ultimately from Adam and Eve, be a sufficient cause of the disorder named original sin? Furthermore, how is it possible for one man’s sin to afflict his entire progeny, when we see that many other ancestral sins, e.g., those of one’s great grandparents, leave no mark upon later generations?

    The Church herself does not require us to accept any particular theory regarding the transmission of original sin. The individual Christian is obligated to believe only that there is such a thing as original sin and that every human being, save our Lord and His Mother, is afflicted with it from the first moment of existence. However, even though the Church does not put her weight behind a given account, her greatest theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas–whose doctrine is largely accepted as the Church’s own–does advance a clear and reasonable explanation, and it is this that we shall follow. Our goal is to shed light mainly on the role matter has in this transmission, and how the function of material defect helps to explain the woundedness of human nature.

Adam as the Head of Mankind

    The most important truth to understand in connection with our topic is the way in which Adam is the font of humanity, the origin and repository, in a sense, of human nature. St. Thomas explains that a human being may be considered either in himself alone, or in relation to a whole community (collegium) of which he is a member. Because man is a social animal indebted for his existence and well-being to various communities, both of these considerations, the individual and the communal, indicate some aspect of what man truly is. Thomas argues that an act can be attributed to man in either way:

for that act which a man does by his own choice and of himself is attributed to him insofar as he is a particular person, but an act is attributable to him insofar as he is part of a community, which act he does not do of himself or by his own choice, but which is done by the whole community or the majority of the community or by the head of the community, just as that which the ruler of the state does the state is said to do, as the Philosopher says. For such a community of men is regarded as one man, such that different individuals appointed to different offices are as it were different members of one natural body. . .2

Thomas then applies this analysis, resting on the distinction between personal and collegial, to the status of the individual descendants of Adam, the first parent, in whom the nature of man was precontained, and by whom the whole of mankind was existentially represented. The multitude of descendants are considered to be one in their ultimate specific origin, Adam, just as many effects of the same kind are traced back to their first specific cause. “Adam, inasmuch as he was the principle of all human nature, fulfilled the function of a universal cause, and so by virtue of his act all human nature propagated from him is corrupted.”3 Thus the collegium spoken of here is the collegium of human nature, whose first member is, in a unique way, at once the head and the body of the community, and whose first act of rebellion therefore causes guilt and the consequences of sin to be communicated to all who share the same human nature. In Thomas’s words: “the whole multitude of men receiving human nature from the first parent is to be considered as one community, or rather as one body of one man, in which multitude each man, even Adam himself, can be considered either as a single person, or as a particular member of this multitude which is derived from one man by natural origin.”4

    Adam is the head of mankind insofar as his voluntary decision to disobey God affects the progeny who will inherit his nature in the state in which he left it; Adam is the body of mankind insofar as the material principle derived from his nature by means of the seed in the act of generation, and thereafter in every act of generation conditioned by this first, contains virtually in itself the disorder which impedes the bestowal of God’s gifts upon man in the way that He would have bestowed them if Adam had not fallen. “Original justice was superadded to the first man out of divine liberality. But that it is not given to this [postlapsarian] soul by God is not on His part but on the part of human nature in which there is an impediment incompatible with it.”5 Thus the guilt of original sin, as well as the substance and manner of its transmission, are traced back to Adam as to a principle and sufficient cause. As Ludwig Ott states: “Adam was the representative of the whole human race. On his voluntary decision depended the preservation or loss of the supernatural endowment, which was a gift, not to him personally but to human nature as such. His transgression was, therefore, the transgression of the whole human race.”6 St. Thomas explains this idea more fully:

. . .at his creation God had endowed man with a supernatural gift, namely, original justice, by which his reason was subject to God, his lower powers to reason, and his body to his soul. But this gift was not given to the first man as to a single person only but as to a principle of all human nature, namely, so that from him by way of origin it would be transmitted to his descendants. Now the first man sinning by his free judgment and choice lost this gift he had received in that same tenor, i.e., in the precise sense, in which it was given to him, namely, for himself and for all his descendants. The lack then of this gift accompanies the whole of his posterity, and thus this defect is transmitted to his descendants in that manner in which human nature is transmitted, which [nature] is transmitted not according to the whole [of man] but according to a part of it, namely, the flesh, into which God infuses the soul.7

    The blessed state of our first parents was the result of higher-than-natural (praeternatural) gifts freely bestowed upon them by their Creator, and held upon the simple condition of obedience. That Adam’s soul could so master his flesh as to prevent the occurrence of death is due only to a special divinely-bestowed strengthening of the power of Adam’s form. The imparting of this gift of immortality to Adam’s offspring hinged upon Adam’s own obedience. When the gift was lost, the power of the form to overcome the natural corruptibility of matter was lost, and death, along with a legion of moral and physical evils, entered into the world. Adam’s offspring are therefore born in a simply natural state, i.e., a state where matter’s intrinsic inclination to wear out and dissipate is not checked by a special gift. This natural state, deprived of grace, bears in addition the wounds of sin, so that even the nature considered in itself has become disordered. The same observations apply to other praeternatural gifts such as perfect knowledge and wisdom, or the perfect dominance of the sense-appetites by the rational appetite. E.I. Watkin gives an excellent summary of the doctrine:

Original sin presupposes two distinct orders, nature and supernature. The latter is an elevation towards the unlimited life of God, whereby man is released from the limits inherent in his created nature, and made in very truth a superman, a partaker of the Divine Nature, an adopted son of God. It is, therefore. . .an added free gift of God. It was, however, bestowed by God on our humanity when He created the first man. It was given to him not as a merely personal possession, but as an endowment attached to his nature. It carried with it as by a connatural consequence certain special graces by which human nature as such was so delivered from defects naturally inherent in it, as to be thereby enabled perfectly to receive and obey the power and operation of the supernatural life. . . . This supernature and its effects were given to human nature, not to Adam as an individual; they were given to humanity as a solid whole with Adam, a body of which Adam was the divinely appointed head. It would therefore have been ours by natural descent from Adam, in virtue of our solidarity with him as incorporate in his body by generation. When, however, Adam fell, he lost this supernature for human nature as such, for humanity as a whole. As we should have partaken of supernature in virtue of our natural solidarity with Adam, we now partake of his lack of supernature in virtue of the same natural solidarity.8

    For St. Thomas, the notion of the unity and continuity of the human race is fundamental to natural ethics and revealed theology. There is only one human nature as such, though this nature is multiplied in many individual human beings; as a consequence, this nature is continuous from Adam down to the last human being who is to be born. It is only in virtue of this unity and continuity that all men are judged according to the same natural and divine law, that the first man’s fall has repercussions for all subsequent men, and that the New Adam, Jesus Christ, is truly the redeemer of all men, past, present, and future, or more accurately, is the redeemer of human nature in every individual member who shares the same. As Watkin goes on to show, the principle of natural “solidarity” is at work in all conditions of man–the original, the fallen, the redeemed.

    This law of solidarity implied in the doctrine of original sin is neither unjust nor arbitrary. It is a fundamental law of the providential order. We are not intended to be raised to supernature, to attain our supernatural destiny and live our supernatural life as unrelated units, but as members of a social organism. This organism would have been humanity as one whole with the first man its head. Now it is redeemed humanity–the church-body of the God-Man who has taken our humanity to raise it once more in Himself to supernatural communion with God. If our fall and redemption were not thus effected in and through human solidarity, that would have been a difficulty indeed, for it would have been in disharmony with the fundamental nature of humanity.9

The Damage Adam’s Sin Did to Human Nature

   As a window into the mystery of original sin, it will be instructive to focus on the disorder of the sensitive or sense appetites, particularly what the tradition calls the “concupiscible.”10 The concupiscible appetite by nature responds to sensible goods. Being a sense power, it does not have a built-in principle for recognizing things that only reason can know, e.g., property rights. Hence, just by itself, the sense appetite is inclined to desire food when the nose catches an appetizing scent in the air–whether the food belongs to me or to my neighbor. This is what all animals do, and because man is an animal, he too responds to sensible goods indiscriminately. But man is more than animal; as rational, it belongs to him to put the animal appetites in proper order with respect to the final and total end of his intellectual nature, namely, his perfection in knowledge and love. Moral virtue, therefore, consists in making the sense appetite tractable and obedient to right reason’s dictates with the good of the whole person in view. Reason, apprehending that a certain item of food belongs to another person, commands the appetite to desist or turns it away from that good to something else in order to control its spontaneous tendency. In the perfectly virtuous man, the sense appetite would be so accustomed to the prompt command of reason that it would not put up a fight against his reasonable choice, though it may very well offer some independent objections to it, based upon its limited scope of apprehension.

    Now, with this picture in mind, we can see that even an unfallen man’s sense appetites would respond by nature to certain sensible goods–i.e., they would have a strong desire for the possession of those goods. In order for reason to dominate the appetites perfectly, a special gift is needed, a gift conferring heroic or superhuman command, so that the sense-appetites would not even begin to desire something which reason knows should not be pursued. The common theological tradition teaches that Adam and Eve possessed such a gift: their sense appetites were perfectly supple and subordinate to reason.11 This perfect subordination is not something that man has by nature, because, as an animal, he has animal desires distinct from rational desires, and he needs to learn how to command the former by means of developing the latter. In other words, there would be some kind of process of education involved even in the hypothetical case of unfallen or integral nature not gifted from birth with a superhuman power of command. Hence when Adam sinned, not only did he lose the other gifts mentioned, he lost reason’s ability to rule monarchically and without struggle over the sense appetites. Even with the assistance of grace, fallen man can only re-establish reason’s rule fitfully, incompletely, so that the sense appetites are never quite fully in line with reason.

    The rebellion of our first parents caused more than the loss of praeternatural gifts. The loss of these gifts produced a further consequence, disordered concupiscence. The union of soul and flesh, in which the former is meant to rule the latter, no longer corresponds exactly to the pattern of human nature as intended by the Creator. We may therefore say that human nature itself was wounded or weakened, although this must not be taken to mean that the essence of man was in any way altered.12 Natura vulnerata, non deleta, as St. Augustine says: nature is wounded, not destroyed. The wound or weakness consists in the insubordination of powers within human nature, allowed as a punishment for disobedience. Having lost the supernatural aid given by God, Adam also lost human nature’s full integrity. This woundedness, no less than the privation of the gifts, is passed along to Adam’s offspring.

    Adam’s body possessed a degree of utmost perfection, or perfect accord with form, derived from the orderliness of his soul’s powers. The magnitude of his sin so fundamentally altered his relationship with God, with nature, and with himself, that it sent tremendous aftershocks into his whole being. The nature was not capable of being substantially altered—human nature remains human nature throughout—but it was capable of being weakened in such a way that difficulties would henceforth arise in the very intention and execution of the good suitable to this rational nature. It is like the difference between a healthy animal and a sickly one. A healthy animal can become afflicted with a disease and produce sickly offspring. If that disease is of a sufficient degree of power, if it sinks into every cell of the first animal couple, all of their offspring will be tainted with it. The effects of the first or original sin can thus be accounted for in terms of two factors: the deprivation of those gifts which rendered the first man immortal, wise, and kingly, and the wounding of his nature in such a way that the disruption would ripple out into all of his descendants.

    It should be noted in passing just how far Christian truth is from the Darwinian mindset prevalent among moderns. For the evolutionist, nature is an escalating spiral of ever more perfect beings, whose gradual or sudden advances are passed on genetically to their offspring. For the Christian, just the opposite is the case: Adam, once fallen, passed on a weakened nature to his offspring, in such a way that none of the offspring can ever attain the perfection of their progenitor in his pristine condition; and because the whole of the natural order existed for man’s sake, and was in a manner contained in him, as the Church Fathers hold in common, the entire material universe fell when Adam fell. Thus all things in nature are now inferior to what they were at the beginning of time.

    As an illustration of the role matter plays in the perpetuation of a nature deprived of its ideal condition, consider the case of people burdened with congenitally defective organs. “Fallen matter,” if we may so call it, cannot waylay and damage natural form in itself. By constricting form and impeding its operations, however, deficient matter limits the extent to which the form can be realized in the individual and his acts. This effect of limitation is seen evidently in those born blind. Their souls have the power of sight, but their material organs are damaged and thus the power cannot be brought to act. Proof of this is the fact that surgical operations have been performed in which healthy eyes have been transplanted into people blind from birth, and once the optical nerves were properly connected and the patients had recovered from the operation, they could actually see. The same is true for all the blind and deaf men healed by our Lord. If their souls did not already possess the power of seeing or hearing, Jesus could not have made them see by healing their eyes or ears.

    The application of this example to our topic is evident. The power to conform oneself to the dictates of right reason, as well as the power of reason to rule over the sense appetites, are in the rational soul by nature and cannot be affected by any sins, much less by any indisposition in matter. However, these powers are unable to extend themselves over the entire man, who experiences the rebellion of lower powers against higher ones, and the difficulty of instating the order of reason in his soul. Original sin can thus be understood at one level by analogy with congenital blindness. Thomas emphasizes, of course, that there is not a strict parallel, because inherited physical defects do not call forth blame, but rather pity, as Aristotle had said; physical defects passed on by way of generation are not evils of fault. That is why original sin cannot be placed in the same class as other inherited evils. Indeed, if the individual human being is considered in isolation from the whole of humanity, the defect of original sin cannot be imputed to him in the manner of fault (cf. Catechism 404-405). Only by placing each descendent of Adam in continuity with his original parents, and therefore in the larger collegium of human nature inherited ultimately from them, can the guilt of original sin be imputed as fault to each human being. As St. Thomas carefully explains:

If then the defect [of original sin] transmitted by way of origin to this [particular] man be considered according as this man is an individual person, then such a defect cannot have the nature of fault, for to have the nature of fault it must be voluntary. But if this generated man be considered as a member of the whole of human nature propagated by the first parent as if all men were one man, the defect does have the nature of fault, on account of its voluntary principle which is the actual sin of the first parent. . . . Therefore just as homicide is not said to be the fault of the hand but of the whole man, so this defect [original sin] is not said to be a personal sin but a sin of the whole nature, nor does it pertain to the person except inasmuch as the [fallen] nature infects the person.13

    Continuing this line of thought, Thomas succinctly argues: “The sin of the first man is, so to speak, a common sin of all human nature. . . .And for this reason when a person is punished for the sin of the first parent, he is not punished for the sin of another but for his own sin.”14

Generation Perpetuates a Damaged Nature

    Nearly all that we have discussed up to this point is authoritatively taught by the Church, and is, to that extent, not subject to debate. As we said at the beginning, there is legitimate room for difference of opinion regarding how precisely the perpetuation of the first sin through successive generations of individual human beings takes place. We may never know how, since God has not seen fit to reveal it to us; nor would our ignorance prevent us from humbly accepting the fact itself. The Christian theologian is allowed to offer an explanation consonant with Church teaching, and there is no harm in his so doing–as long as we, to whom the explanation is proposed, do not elevate any opinion to the status of dogma.

    For St. Thomas, the matter involved in fleshly generation provides an explanation. Thomas asks the following question: Is it possible for a damaged human nature, along with the guilt consequent upon it, to be transmitted by the material means of the seed of the generator? The point of departure for his answer is an analysis of how humanity as a nature is communicated in the act of generation, even though a soul is not transmitted to the offspring by its parents. “This [original] sin accompanies all human nature; consequently the subject of this sin is the soul according as it is a part of human nature. And therefore, just as human nature is transmitted although the soul is not transmitted, so also original sin is transmitted although the soul is not transmitted.”15 In other words, the matter contained in the seed is a partial principle of human nature coming-to-be–a principle on the side of matter or the body–and thus partly constitutive of the person. The matter so communicated is therefore virtually, though partially, causative of human nature itself. “The flesh is not a sufficient cause of actual sin, but it is a sufficient cause of original sin, just as also the transmission of the flesh is a sufficient cause, though in a material way, of human nature.”16

    Under this aspect, then, the transmission of flesh through generation can be seen as the proximate cause, though certainly not the singular cause, of the transference of human nature from the begetter to the begotten. On the human side, ex parte generatoris, generation materially causes human nature to come to be in the generatum. It follows from this that original sin cannot be construed as a sin belonging to the newly-conceived person qua individual; it can only be regarded as a peccatum naturæ (sin of the nature), of which the offspring is guilty because of its essential share in the human nature first contained in Adam, the common father of the human race.17 Yet it must be added that the sin so inherited is not merely imputed as a dishonor to the child, for then the guilt of sin would belong, properly speaking, only to the generator and not to the offspring, as is the case with the guilt of the fornicator who generates a child innocent of the guilt of fornication. Indeed, qua individual the child is innocent of original sin because he did not commit it in propria persona; only qua member of the collegium of human nature is he guilty of the sin, because in Adam, i.e., in the nature of which Adam is the principle, all human beings committed the same act of rebellion. Adam’s sin is a “sin of the nature” for which each subsequent member of the race is held guilty.18

    St. Thomas states that the contamination of original sin is transmitted materially, through the seed. One may then wish to know how a material cause can produce a moral defect. Original sin is held to be genuine guilt in the offspring, not merely an imputed or derivative fault; and guilt has the soul as its generic subject and the will as its specific subject. Thus by maintaining that the offspring is genuinely guilty, we also maintain that it bears this materially inherited evil in its soul after the manner of a moral defect.

    To answer this question, one should first distinguish a principal cause from an instrumental cause, in order to distinguish between human nature, which in the generator acts in virtue of its own form, and the carnal seed, which in the act of generation functions as an instrument moved by the agent to cause the nature materially to come-to-be in a new subject. “Cause is twofold: one, principal, which acts in virtue of its own form; and this cause is more noble than the effect, inasmuch as it is the cause. The other is the instrumental cause, which does not act in virtue of its own form, but inasmuch as it is moved by another; and this need not be more noble than the effect, as a saw is not more noble than a house,” St. Thomas explains. “And in this way carnal seed is the cause of human nature in the offspring and also of original fault in the offspring’s soul,” even though the soul is nobler than the seed or instrumental cause.19 Armed with this distinction it becomes possible to see how the seed works on behalf of the nature, in such a way that whatever pertains principally to the nature pertains instrumentally or virtually to the seed, as that by which the nature is communicated materially in the act of generation.

    Having made this distinction, Thomas then argues that the seed, as an instrumental cause in which the motion of the generating soul and the reality of human nature is present “intentionally,” i.e., in a way that transfers the nature in a lesser or inferior mode, is capable of transmitting to the offspring the defect of the principal cause (the generator qua child of Adam and part of Adam’s collegium), in the manner of a moral defect adhering to that common nature. “An agent is ‘in act’ in many ways: in one way according to its own form, which either contains the form of the effect according to a likeness of species, as fire generates fire, or according to power only, as the sun generates fire; in another way as moved by another, and in this way an instrument acts like a being in act,” Thomas notes, concluding: “And in this way too the seed is in act inasmuch as the motion and intention of the generating soul is in it. . .and by reason of this it has the power to cause both human nature and original sin.”20

    A final word should be said concerning St. Thomas’s explanation of the difference between what descendants of our first parents inherit from Adam and successive fathers, and what they inherit from Eve and successive mothers. According to Thomas, Adam’s seed (and all other male seed thereafter), as a true contributory cause of the transmission of human nature in the act of generation, bears the defect which perpetuates the fallen condition, whereas Eve (and all mothers thereafter) supply the matter upon which the seed works to form the body of the embryo. Of course this explanation can no longer stand in light of more modern biological discoveries. But Thomas’s account in no way rests upon exploded tenets of Aristotelian biology, as some of his tendentious critics have maintained. If Thomas had had the knowledge afforded by modern biology, he would have simply acknowledged that the “seed” of Eve, that is, the egg, is also necessarily involved in the transmission of human nature.21 The point is actually less important than it seems, since, for St. Thomas, a single defective partial cause in the order of nature is adequate to account for the transmission of a deprived or wounded nature.22 Because all men are traced back to Adam as their first father and inherit the human nature as he possessed it, to bring about the fall of mankind it was sufficient that Adam, the head of mankind, fall from God.

Peter A. Kwasniewski is studying for a Docorate in Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, concentrating on medieval philosophy.


End Notes
1    As St. Thomas says, “peccati originalis in humano genere probabiliter quaedam signa apparent” (Summa contra gentiles IV.52).
2    De Malo (DM) 4.1 corp. Texts are taken from Disputed Questions on Evil, trans. Jean Oesterle (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
3    DM 4.1 ad 18.
4    DM 4.1 corp.
5    DM 4.1 ad 11.
6    Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, trans. Patrick Lynch, ed. James Bastible (Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books and Publishers, 1974), 112.
7    DM 4.1 corp.
8    “The Problem of Evil” in God and the Supernatural (London: Sheed & Ward, 1954), 109-110.
9    “Problem of Evil,” 111.
10    From concupiscere, to desire strongly, usually in reference to goods of the senses.
11    The main thing to bear in mind is that it is not wrong or sinful for the sense appetites to desire sensible goods simply speaking; for that is what those appetites are ‘built for,’ in man no less than any other animal.
12    Substantial forms admit of no degrees. A certain creature is either fully a man, or not a man at all; there is no in-between. The ability of a nature to act can be damaged, but not the nature itself.
13    DM 4.1 corp. As Thomas says: “every man who begets transmits original sin inasmuch as he generates as Adam, not inasmuch as he generates as Peter or Martin, that is, in virtue of what he has from Adam, not in virtue of what is proper to himself” (DM 4.1 ad 8).
14    DM 4.1 ad 19.
15    DM 4.1 ad 2.
16    DM 4.1 ad 3.
17    Ott summarizes: “As original sin is a peccatum naturæ, it is transmitted in the same way as human nature, through the natural act of generation. Although according to its origin it is a single sin (D790), that is, the sin of the head of the race alone. . .it is multiplied over and over again through natural generation whenever a child of Adam comes into being” (Fundamentals, 111).
18    Thomas notes: “The defect contracted by way of origin has the formal aspect of being from another if it be referred to the person, but not if it be referred to the nature, for in this way it is, so to speak, from an intrinsic principle” (DM 4.1 ad 5).
19    DM 4.1 ad 15.
20    DM 4.1 ad 16.
21    St. Thomas was aware of the provisional character of his explanation, noting in the body of Summa Theologiae qu. 81 art. 5 that “in the opinion of the philosophers, the active principle of generation is from the father, while the mother provides the matter.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks mostly of Adam’s sin (No. 402-405), but in No. 417 refers to “Adam and Eve.”
22    “As Dionysius says, good results from a whole and integral cause, but evil from any single defect. And therefore a defect on the part of the body is sufficient to deprive human nature of its integrity” (DM 4.1 ad 13).