Olivia
Online
xonkius
@xonkius
Joined May 2026
66 Following
36 Followers
314 Posts
‘Incidentally, in his treatise on original sin, Anselm of Canterbury himself—the classic of “Latin juridical soteriology”—also connects “guilt” in original sin precisely with deprivation of righteousness, and not with the imputation to man, in the proper sense, of personal participation in Adam’s sin:
“This sin, which I call original (originale), I can understand only as the very deprivation (nuditas) of due righteousness which, as I have shown above, occurred because of Adam’s disobedience; because of this [absence of due righteousness] all are also children of wrath. [...] And the absence of righteousness (justitiae desertio) [...] is accompanied also by deprivation of blessedness (beatitudinis nuditas), so that those who do not have any righteousness at all also do not have any blessedness”[8].
“And that very righteousness which before Baptism was demanded from infants without any excuse is, after Baptism, no longer required from them as a debt. [...] Therefore if they die in such a state, they are not condemned, since they are no longer unrighteous, but are saved thanks to the righteousness of Christ, Who gave Himself for them, and to the righteousness of the faith of Mother Church, which believes on their behalf”[9].
As is evident, if one purifies Anselm’s text of its exceedingly severe and, in places, disturbing rhetoric for the Orthodox “taste,” as well as of the peculiarities of its language, in general his description will be sufficiently close to the one formulated by us. If such an understanding of “guilt” is present even in Anselm, how much more does it embrace the Latin fathers of the Church. The same understanding we also see among the Byzantine saints.’
![blessedmikko's tweet photo. ‘Incidentally, in his treatise on original sin, Anselm of Canterbury himself—the classic of “Latin juridical soteriology”—also connects “guilt” in original sin precisely with deprivation of righteousness, and not with the imputation to man, in the proper sense, of personal participation in Adam’s sin:
“This sin, which I call original (originale), I can understand only as the very deprivation (nuditas) of due righteousness which, as I have shown above, occurred because of Adam’s disobedience; because of this [absence of due righteousness] all are also children of wrath. [...] And the absence of righteousness (justitiae desertio) [...] is accompanied also by deprivation of blessedness (beatitudinis nuditas), so that those who do not have any righteousness at all also do not have any blessedness”[8].
“And that very righteousness which before Baptism was demanded from infants without any excuse is, after Baptism, no longer required from them as a debt. [...] Therefore if they die in such a state, they are not condemned, since they are no longer unrighteous, but are saved thanks to the righteousness of Christ, Who gave Himself for them, and to the righteousness of the faith of Mother Church, which believes on their behalf”[9].
As is evident, if one purifies Anselm’s text of its exceedingly severe and, in places, disturbing rhetoric for the Orthodox “taste,” as well as of the peculiarities of its language, in general his description will be sufficiently close to the one formulated by us. If such an understanding of “guilt” is present even in Anselm, how much more does it embrace the Latin fathers of the Church. The same understanding we also see among the Byzantine saints.’](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HKEjY4FW0AAQjyY.jpg)
@JustinusRomanus @m966021 Well an anathematization at an ecumenical council does not seem to be an err in matters of fact. What exactly is there to be questioned regarding the force of his personal condemnation? The condemnation of his beliefs was upheld, and his person was anathematized.
@JustinusRomanus @m966021 I am almost certain that your sect agrees with the proposition that Origen is a condemned heretic. Unless you follow after some unorthodox strain of thought within your own tradition.
@m966021 @MrAugustlw2c @JustinusRomanus As an Orthodox Christian you actually are required to submit to the Ecumenical Councils, and to accept the anathematization of Origen. There is no room for disagreement on this matter in the Orthodox Church.
@ThePolemikOne @ruckusofantioch @KalebAtlanta @yahunna9 @Soulful76_Leaf @JohnDavidNash Well the council explicitly denies the culpability of infants (nobody believes that infants are culpable). The Council actually uses extremely patristic language when speaking about Original Sin.
@blessedmikko This is wonderful. I find it interesting that he says this discussion spilled into the Russian-speaking world because of the American disputes about it.
Dr. Peter Pashkov @ PSTGU on Original Sin as guilt:
‘We continue the conversation about the concept of original sin in patristic and contemporary theology. For those who are only now joining the discussion, let us recall that the discussion began with the transfer into the Russian-language online sphere of the disputes of American Orthodox Christians concerning the legacy of St. Augustine, Archpriest John Romanides (not so popular among us, but playing an important role in discussions among Orthodox Christians in the West), and, in general, the understanding of the atonement and original sin in contemporary Orthodox thought.
In general, the category of “guilt” seems to me not the most convenient one for discussing the question of original sin in our time. Contemporary confessionally Orthodox theology (some features of which we discussed above using the example of Archpriest John Meyendorff, although, of course, he, like other contemporary theologians, is sufficiently subtle and does not think so unambiguously and “flatly”) often defines the inheritance of fallen Adam in humanity through opposition to the idea of “guilt”:
“...we can speak of the hereditary transmission only of mortality, but not of guilt, as Western theology maintains. Augustine, who exerted a strong influence on Western scholastic theology and, in particular, on the doctrine of the inheritance of death, maintained that we all inherited the very sin of Adam, whereas from the patristic tradition it is evident that we inherit only the consequences of sin, that is, corruption and mortality, which are transmitted by means of carnal birth”[1].
Critics of “Augustinianism” and “scholasticism” often formulate their position precisely in this way: “we inherit not guilt, and therefore not sin, but mortality” (although subsequently they often introduce certain clarifications).
Using the example of the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas on the “forefathers’ curse”, we have already shown earlier that the patristic teaching describes the inheritance of fallen Adam in humanity with somewhat different emphases: the holy fathers wrote of the “inheritance of sin (πταῖσμα)”, the “forefathers’ curse” (προγονικὴ ἀρά), “our just abandonment by God” (δικαία τοῦ θεοῦ ἐγκατάλειψις), “punishment”, and “spiritual death” (and not simply physical mortality).
Properly speaking, these concepts are sufficient for the description of the Orthodox teaching on original sin as not simply “mortality”, but as a state properly sinful, in my opinion; by them the patristic “juridicism” is quite adequately described. The term “guilt” here, in my view, provokes additional objections.
Nevertheless, in patristic texts on original sin there are also encountered concepts connected with the category of guilt. St. Gregory Palamas himself writes that “Christ, the Liberator of nature... assumed our guilty nature and... showed it to be guiltless and justified”[2]. Besides, to reject the teaching of the Western holy fathers, including Blessed St. Augustine, merely on the ground that they are Western would be somewhat strange. The Orthodox Church is not the Church of the East—she is the Catholic Church and is obliged to correspond to this self-definition.
Therefore I would like to propose the following reasoning concerning original sin as guilt.
What Is Guilt? Metropolitan Macarius (Bulgakov), whom one may safely take as the standard of traditional dogmatics, writes:
“‘Original sin,’ we read in the Catechism of St. Peter Mogila, ‘is the transgression of the law of God given in paradise to the forefather Adam. This hereditary sin passed from Adam into all human nature, since we were all then in Adam, and thus through the one Adam sin spread to all of us. Therefore we are conceived and born with this sin’ (Pt. 3, Q.20).
The only difference is that in Adam this deviation from the Law of God and from his own destination was free, voluntary, whereas in us it is hereditary, necessary—with a nature that has deviated from the law of God we are born; in Adam it was a personal sin, a sin in the strict sense of the word—in us it is not a personal sin, it is not properly sin, but is only the sinfulness of nature, received by us from our parents; Adam both sinned, that is, freely violated the commandment of God, and thereby became a sinner, that is, caused his whole nature to deviate from the Law of God—whereas we did not personally sin with Adam, but became in him and through him sinners (‘By the disobedience of one man many were made sinners’, Rom. 5:19), receiving from him a sinful nature, and we come into the world by nature ‘children of wrath’ (Eph. 2:3)”[3].
In other words, original sin is not for us a personal sin, but a “state of sinfulness”. This is a state, identical to the state after grave sin (the absence of gracious immediate communion with God), in which every human being finds himself from conception, without having committed any personal sin. At the same time, the commonly used understanding of the word “guilt” implies a personal offence; the personal offence which caused that state of sinfulness in which every human being is conceived was committed not by us as persons, but by the forefather Adam (according to Metropolitan Macarius, “original sin in us... is not properly sin”).
Therefore, as it seems to me, guilt in application to original sin is spoken of not in the commonly used sense. It must be defined apart from connection with our personal offence, through the concept of a “sinful state”.
Guilt before God as a state is a certain quality of our relations with God, when we are unworthy to be with Him in gracious union and He, in Justice, is not present in us. And this is unconditionally so: no human being from conception deserves salvation of himself and has no lawful right to it. We are saved only by the mercy of God. Properly speaking, this is why grace is called grace.
Guilt as a state, consequently, is not some positive quality. Guilt is the absence of righteousness (according to the concordant teaching of the saints, expressed especially vividly in the Areopagite and in the same St. Augustine, evil is always the absence of good)—the absence of the merit which would give us the right to return to gracious communion with God after Adam had lost that communion and begot us deprived of it.
From our side such a quality of relations is called “guilt”; this guilt proceeds from the sin of Adam, who lost the primordial righteousness implanted in him by God and brought into the world the human race deprived of this righteousness, existing in a state objectively deprived of righteousness.
From God’s side such a quality is called “Wrath” or even “offence”. In the expression of St. Nicholas Cabasilas, “sin brings offence (ὕβριν φέρει) to God Himself”[4]. The Council of Constantinople of 1157 uses the same language, and so, in general, do all the holy fathers who speak of the “Wrath of God”. It is important, however, to remember that the Wrath of God is nothing other than His just withdrawal from the one who has no righteousness: “Wrath is our just abandonment by God (δικαία τοῦ θεοῦ ἐγκατάλειψις)” (St. Gregory Palamas)[5].
What, then, does a sinner need in order to become righteous, in order to fill up his deficiency, his loss of righteousness? He needs to offer sacrifice to God, to take upon himself an ascetic feat. It is precisely this that is called the satisfaction of Divine Justice. Our guilt is, if one may express it very roughly, that “measure of ascetic feat” and sacrifice which would have had to be fulfilled in order to fill up the deficiency of righteousness and return to union with God after Adam’s fall.
However, as the same righteous Nicholas indicates, “for the insignificant there is nothing easier than to offend the great, but to compensate with honour (τιμῇ) for the offence inflicted he cannot—especially when his debt is immense, and the one offended so surpasses him that it is impossible even to measure the distance between them. For he who wishes to remove the accusation must compensate the damage inflicted upon the honour of the offended one, and moreover with an excess, so as both to restore what was lost and to add over and above it, in compensation for the insult inflicted”[6].
Moreover, without the grace of God, which outside Christ is not fully accessible to fallen Man, Man is not capable of doing spiritual good necessary for salvation: “the rational soul, if it is separated from God... is struck by incapacity for good actions (ἀργίαν πάσχει τῆς πρὸς τὸ ἀγαθὸν ἐνεργείας)”[7]. Without grace, in other words, one cannot acquire grace.
Salvation, however, consists in the fact that Christ covered our poverty by His sacrifice. His obedience is an ascetic feat of infinite price, and His Blood, shed on the Cross, is an infinite sacrifice, which filled up our deprivation of righteousness. Therefore in Baptism (in which we enter into the death and resurrection of Christ) guilt as a state of rupture with the Lord is removed: we enter into union with Him in Whom our deficiency of righteousness is filled up with infinite excess, by Whom the merit has been accomplished which was needed so that we might return through Him into union with God. The Cross, therefore, is true atonement.
Original sin as a state, in its content, is the deprivation of the grace of God consequent upon Adam’s loss of righteousness. Guilt is the name given to the fact that a human being, deprived of righteousness from birth, without the grace of Christ can in no way become righteous and cannot merit the return of grace.
As it seems, the language of “guilt” interpreted in this way, despite all the aversion to it in Orthodox thought of the twentieth century, may constitute a certain supplement to the notion, popular in contemporary theology, of mortality as the inheritance of fallen Adam, and also to the patristic teaching on the “forefathers’ curse”: original sin as a state of alienation from God, “spiritual death”, and the loss of the grace of deification.
It is important to note that thereby no task is set of overthrowing authorities or condemning Fr. John Meyendorff, Metr. Hierotheos Vlachos, or even Fr. John Romanides. All of them have their merits before Orthodox thought. The matter is only that the emphases placed by them within the framework of polemic against real or apparent “Latin influence” on Orthodox theology stand in need of correction and supplementation.’
–Dr. Peter (Pashkov), Original Sin as Guilt
![blessedmikko's tweet photo. Dr. Peter Pashkov @ PSTGU on Original Sin as guilt:
‘We continue the conversation about the concept of original sin in patristic and contemporary theology. For those who are only now joining the discussion, let us recall that the discussion began with the transfer into the Russian-language online sphere of the disputes of American Orthodox Christians concerning the legacy of St. Augustine, Archpriest John Romanides (not so popular among us, but playing an important role in discussions among Orthodox Christians in the West), and, in general, the understanding of the atonement and original sin in contemporary Orthodox thought.
In general, the category of “guilt” seems to me not the most convenient one for discussing the question of original sin in our time. Contemporary confessionally Orthodox theology (some features of which we discussed above using the example of Archpriest John Meyendorff, although, of course, he, like other contemporary theologians, is sufficiently subtle and does not think so unambiguously and “flatly”) often defines the inheritance of fallen Adam in humanity through opposition to the idea of “guilt”:
“...we can speak of the hereditary transmission only of mortality, but not of guilt, as Western theology maintains. Augustine, who exerted a strong influence on Western scholastic theology and, in particular, on the doctrine of the inheritance of death, maintained that we all inherited the very sin of Adam, whereas from the patristic tradition it is evident that we inherit only the consequences of sin, that is, corruption and mortality, which are transmitted by means of carnal birth”[1].
Critics of “Augustinianism” and “scholasticism” often formulate their position precisely in this way: “we inherit not guilt, and therefore not sin, but mortality” (although subsequently they often introduce certain clarifications).
Using the example of the teaching of St. Gregory Palamas on the “forefathers’ curse”, we have already shown earlier that the patristic teaching describes the inheritance of fallen Adam in humanity with somewhat different emphases: the holy fathers wrote of the “inheritance of sin (πταῖσμα)”, the “forefathers’ curse” (προγονικὴ ἀρά), “our just abandonment by God” (δικαία τοῦ θεοῦ ἐγκατάλειψις), “punishment”, and “spiritual death” (and not simply physical mortality).
Properly speaking, these concepts are sufficient for the description of the Orthodox teaching on original sin as not simply “mortality”, but as a state properly sinful, in my opinion; by them the patristic “juridicism” is quite adequately described. The term “guilt” here, in my view, provokes additional objections.
Nevertheless, in patristic texts on original sin there are also encountered concepts connected with the category of guilt. St. Gregory Palamas himself writes that “Christ, the Liberator of nature... assumed our guilty nature and... showed it to be guiltless and justified”[2]. Besides, to reject the teaching of the Western holy fathers, including Blessed St. Augustine, merely on the ground that they are Western would be somewhat strange. The Orthodox Church is not the Church of the East—she is the Catholic Church and is obliged to correspond to this self-definition.
Therefore I would like to propose the following reasoning concerning original sin as guilt.
What Is Guilt? Metropolitan Macarius (Bulgakov), whom one may safely take as the standard of traditional dogmatics, writes:
“‘Original sin,’ we read in the Catechism of St. Peter Mogila, ‘is the transgression of the law of God given in paradise to the forefather Adam. This hereditary sin passed from Adam into all human nature, since we were all then in Adam, and thus through the one Adam sin spread to all of us. Therefore we are conceived and born with this sin’ (Pt. 3, Q.20).
The only difference is that in Adam this deviation from the Law of God and from his own destination was free, voluntary, whereas in us it is hereditary, necessary—with a nature that has deviated from the law of God we are born; in Adam it was a personal sin, a sin in the strict sense of the word—in us it is not a personal sin, it is not properly sin, but is only the sinfulness of nature, received by us from our parents; Adam both sinned, that is, freely violated the commandment of God, and thereby became a sinner, that is, caused his whole nature to deviate from the Law of God—whereas we did not personally sin with Adam, but became in him and through him sinners (‘By the disobedience of one man many were made sinners’, Rom. 5:19), receiving from him a sinful nature, and we come into the world by nature ‘children of wrath’ (Eph. 2:3)”[3].
In other words, original sin is not for us a personal sin, but a “state of sinfulness”. This is a state, identical to the state after grave sin (the absence of gracious immediate communion with God), in which every human being finds himself from conception, without having committed any personal sin. At the same time, the commonly used understanding of the word “guilt” implies a personal offence; the personal offence which caused that state of sinfulness in which every human being is conceived was committed not by us as persons, but by the forefather Adam (according to Metropolitan Macarius, “original sin in us... is not properly sin”).
Therefore, as it seems to me, guilt in application to original sin is spoken of not in the commonly used sense. It must be defined apart from connection with our personal offence, through the concept of a “sinful state”.
Guilt before God as a state is a certain quality of our relations with God, when we are unworthy to be with Him in gracious union and He, in Justice, is not present in us. And this is unconditionally so: no human being from conception deserves salvation of himself and has no lawful right to it. We are saved only by the mercy of God. Properly speaking, this is why grace is called grace.
Guilt as a state, consequently, is not some positive quality. Guilt is the absence of righteousness (according to the concordant teaching of the saints, expressed especially vividly in the Areopagite and in the same St. Augustine, evil is always the absence of good)—the absence of the merit which would give us the right to return to gracious communion with God after Adam had lost that communion and begot us deprived of it.
From our side such a quality of relations is called “guilt”; this guilt proceeds from the sin of Adam, who lost the primordial righteousness implanted in him by God and brought into the world the human race deprived of this righteousness, existing in a state objectively deprived of righteousness.
From God’s side such a quality is called “Wrath” or even “offence”. In the expression of St. Nicholas Cabasilas, “sin brings offence (ὕβριν φέρει) to God Himself”[4]. The Council of Constantinople of 1157 uses the same language, and so, in general, do all the holy fathers who speak of the “Wrath of God”. It is important, however, to remember that the Wrath of God is nothing other than His just withdrawal from the one who has no righteousness: “Wrath is our just abandonment by God (δικαία τοῦ θεοῦ ἐγκατάλειψις)” (St. Gregory Palamas)[5].
What, then, does a sinner need in order to become righteous, in order to fill up his deficiency, his loss of righteousness? He needs to offer sacrifice to God, to take upon himself an ascetic feat. It is precisely this that is called the satisfaction of Divine Justice. Our guilt is, if one may express it very roughly, that “measure of ascetic feat” and sacrifice which would have had to be fulfilled in order to fill up the deficiency of righteousness and return to union with God after Adam’s fall.
However, as the same righteous Nicholas indicates, “for the insignificant there is nothing easier than to offend the great, but to compensate with honour (τιμῇ) for the offence inflicted he cannot—especially when his debt is immense, and the one offended so surpasses him that it is impossible even to measure the distance between them. For he who wishes to remove the accusation must compensate the damage inflicted upon the honour of the offended one, and moreover with an excess, so as both to restore what was lost and to add over and above it, in compensation for the insult inflicted”[6].
Moreover, without the grace of God, which outside Christ is not fully accessible to fallen Man, Man is not capable of doing spiritual good necessary for salvation: “the rational soul, if it is separated from God... is struck by incapacity for good actions (ἀργίαν πάσχει τῆς πρὸς τὸ ἀγαθὸν ἐνεργείας)”[7]. Without grace, in other words, one cannot acquire grace.
Salvation, however, consists in the fact that Christ covered our poverty by His sacrifice. His obedience is an ascetic feat of infinite price, and His Blood, shed on the Cross, is an infinite sacrifice, which filled up our deprivation of righteousness. Therefore in Baptism (in which we enter into the death and resurrection of Christ) guilt as a state of rupture with the Lord is removed: we enter into union with Him in Whom our deficiency of righteousness is filled up with infinite excess, by Whom the merit has been accomplished which was needed so that we might return through Him into union with God. The Cross, therefore, is true atonement.
Original sin as a state, in its content, is the deprivation of the grace of God consequent upon Adam’s loss of righteousness. Guilt is the name given to the fact that a human being, deprived of righteousness from birth, without the grace of Christ can in no way become righteous and cannot merit the return of grace.
As it seems, the language of “guilt” interpreted in this way, despite all the aversion to it in Orthodox thought of the twentieth century, may constitute a certain supplement to the notion, popular in contemporary theology, of mortality as the inheritance of fallen Adam, and also to the patristic teaching on the “forefathers’ curse”: original sin as a state of alienation from God, “spiritual death”, and the loss of the grace of deification.
It is important to note that thereby no task is set of overthrowing authorities or condemning Fr. John Meyendorff, Metr. Hierotheos Vlachos, or even Fr. John Romanides. All of them have their merits before Orthodox thought. The matter is only that the emphases placed by them within the framework of polemic against real or apparent “Latin influence” on Orthodox theology stand in need of correction and supplementation.’
–Dr. Peter (Pashkov), Original Sin as Guilt](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HKEjYQbXkAA6J73.jpg)
@HayastanPapist Alot of the faux history about Tsar Nicholas II's supposed incompetency is propoganda. That being said he is well-respected mostly for his pious life, his martyrdom, and due to being a symbol of Christian Monarchy. (which is now lost)
this is very easily disproven simply by being in the presence of any pothead male
@QuodSemperEst @OrthodoxEthos @OrthodoxPole81 @ruckusofantioch And using Aristotelian categories to give a basic understanding is not an issue. It is just saying that the characteristics of bread and wine are maintained while in substance it is the Body and Blood of our Lord.
@QuodSemperEst @OrthodoxEthos @OrthodoxPole81 @ruckusofantioch Well the version that had pan-orthodox approval included the word accidents. The only difference in St. Philaret's translation which was also recieved by the ROC but did not recieve pan-orthodox approval, is that it doesn't include the word accidents.
@MaknChiz2 A wonderful Saint of the Church.
“He transformed the theological school of Kyiv into a college where Orthodox youth were taught rhetoric, philosophy, and Roman law according to Jesuit educational standards. The idea was remarkably bold in its simplicity: if you want to defeat the Jesuits in their own courts,
When I became Orthodox I completely accepted the “ancestral / original sin distinction” that I was taught. I had no reason at all to question it, which is why I didn’t for years. Thousands of pages of patristics later, I realized it was just a modern novelty with no precedent in the Saints or Councils.
They broke his bones, gouged his eyes out, cut out his tongue and castrated him. He died of a heart attack after being set on fire and dragged himself 50 meters across the floor.
@m966021 @inconnu0connu Forgive me but I cannot understand how you can be an Orthodox Christian and claim that the Council of Chalcedon formally taught an error. Lord have mercy.
100% of babies with Down syndrome are aborted in Iceland
67-85% in the US
90% in Canada
90% in England/Wales
These babies deserve to live
Last Seen Users on Sotwe
Trends for you
Most Popular Users
Elon Musk 
@elonmusk
240.2M followers
Barack Obama
@barackobama
119.3M followers
Donald J. Trump
@realdonaldtrump
111.6M followers
Cristiano Ronaldo
@cristiano
108.9M followers
Narendra Modi
@narendramodi
107M followers
Rihanna
@rihanna
97.3M followers
NASA
@nasa
92.1M followers
Justin Bieber
@justinbieber
90.6M followers
KATY PERRY
@katyperry
86.8M followers
Taylor Swift
@taylorswift13
80.6M followers
Lady Gaga
@ladygaga
72.2M followers
Kim Kardashian
@kimkardashian
69.4M followers
YouTube
@youtube
68.6M followers
Virat Kohli
@imvkohli
68.5M followers
Bill Gates
@billgates
63.4M followers
The Ellen Show
@theellenshow
62.5M followers
CNN
@cnn
61.9M followers
Neymar Jr
@neymarjr
61.1M followers
X
@x
60.9M followers
Selena Gomez
@selenagomez
59.9M followers