Richard Holloway - Bishop of Edinburgh and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church

In the late fourth and early fifth centuries AD, one of the great psychological controversies of all time took place. It had to do with what we today should call the ‘Theory of Original Sin’. Specifically, the question at issue was whether a certain sin of the ancestor of the race, namely Adam, was carried by inheritance to all his offspring through all the ages.

One of the parties to the controversy was a man named, Pelagius. According to his view, Adam’s will to disobedience ended where it began. Because, under a momentary temptation, he had misbehaved, there was no reason, Pelagius argued, why every child born thereafter was fated to inherit this same will to misbehavior.

Each child in the world, he maintained, starts with his own powers and carries in him no weight of sin produced by a single ancestral misdemeanor.

St. Augustine, on the contrary, held that Adam’s act of disobedience started a long train of psychic inheritance. Every child born thereafter was cursed with sin that began with Adam’s act of disobedience. Adam’s original sin, in short, became a universal and inherent tendency to commit sin. From this tendency the individual could be saved only by Divine favor.

When we think now of the conditions under which this debate was carried on, we wonder at the deep seriousness with which it was taken – and continues even yet to be taken. There was no attempt at research or rigorous experiment. In fact St. Augustine’s position was so flagrantly a projection upon the whole human race of his own uncontrollable lusts that a modern psychologist would have thrown out his contentions as untrustworthy and misconceived.

So the greatest question at issue in our human life – whether we start with powers that enable us to work out our destiny; or whether, by a mysterious curse, we are defeated at the outset and must appeal to a higher Power to help us out – was settled without the slightest attempt to search for relevant factual evidence. It was settled by sacred writings, by theological debate, and by theological politics.

We might almost say that the curse which, through all subsequent centuries, has rested upon humankind came, not from Adam, but from St. Augustine. To a peculiar degree, it was St. Augustine who denied to Christians the world over, the healthy blessing of self-respect. Augustine won this argument, not by decision of a competent body of scientific minds, but chiefly by his power to influence the leaders of the Church. He used his theological arguments so effectively that Pelagius was declared a heretic.

Did Augustine have the right of the argument? There was nothing in the procedure by which his view was make the truth and the opposite view was made false. When the rulers of the Church declared the Pelagian view a heresy they did not prove it to be an error. Yet once the declaration was made, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin became so strongly institutionalized that the question of its truth or falsity virtually ceased to arise. Institutional might… made it right.

If the same question were to arise today, it would doubtless be handled differently. In the first place, the ‘ancestor’ would not be a man called Adam but more likely a primordial cell-structure. In the second Place, we would look, first of all, for factual evidence. We would not likely take as our source authority an ancient, unverifiable creation-tale. Starting thus afresh, we might well conclude that each person comes into the world not only with the traces on him – physical and psychological – of what his ancestors have been and done, but also with his own powers. No man starts with a biologically and psychologically clean slate. To this extent Augustine was right.

On the other hand, no person, so far as we can judge from available evidence, starts life so specifically cursed by a will to evil that he has no chance to direct his powers toward decency and wholeness. To this extent Pelagius was right. The ‘will to disobedience’ that Augustine found in all of us appears to be merely the expression of the inevitable conflict between a helpless creature trying to grow into its proper independence and an environment that the child, in his immaturity, can neither understand nor master.

The time is at hand to re-view the whole situation. Christian religion as we know it took over as its own this premature psychological theory: a theory established long before there was any equipment of research or experiment to give it validation. In taking over this premature theory, Christianity condemned man to a psychological hopelessness to which Christ himself bore no witness. It declared humans to be basically impotent to work out our psychological salvation.

Instead of encouraging us to develop all the characteristically human powers within us, and so overcome inner contradictions and outer obstacles, it encouraged us to distrust ourself and malign ourself. It encouraged humankind to cast himself upon a power greater than himself – and to credit, not his own nature, but that mysterious power, with every virtue that seemed to reside in his own thoughts and behaviors. In short, it encouraged the individual to remain a dependent child.