Madam,
The views expressed about Original Sin from Fr Daniel O'Leary (3 October) onwards perhaps miss a point. They critique one idea, one interpretation, of Original Sin, rather than the concept itself. It is capable of having a number of takes in theology and the imagination.
Quite rightly, we need to recognise that we live in an evolutionary world where mortality and suffering, imperfection, were present from the beginning and did not come from the lapse into sin of our first parents. The history of the homo species has been long and several levels of development can be discerned in the fossil record, the latest being Homo naledi. Something like us was walking the earth and thinking long before Homo sapiens. Thus language of incarnation and resurrection speak more to moderns about fulfilment and final purpose than restoration of lost grace, at first glance.
Also, the Eden and Fall story uses the imagery of the mythical and the magical to denote an Everywhere Place with Adam and Eve as Everyman and Everywoman on one level of interpretation. We are disordered, out of harmony and imperfect. We do indeed incline to selfishness and sin, having what the Rabbis call the 'yetzer ha'ra', an inclination, or a weakness for evil. We are not born good and whole but rather incomplete and broken.
We are not what God would want us to be, and this, at least, we can affirm and speak of as 'Original Sin' for it is the condition that our species has always existed in from primordial times.
We can discount some of St Augustine's ideas about 'Original Guilt' and the role of concupiscence in causing this to infect us, though our passions are indeed disordered and out of harmony. We can speak of being in the state, or consequences of Original Sin with imperfection, the leaning to evil and mortality as we experience it, though. This is perhaps more in line with Orthodox, Eastern understandings.
It is also that of C.S.Lewis in his popular but intelligent attempt to account for a Fall within evolution in his The Problem of Pain. There he toys with the notion that early hominids were offered an Encounter, a Gift, in a zone of Blessing as they had reached a stage to respond to the Creator.
They rebelled, and we have all been of their fallen, imperfect lineage ever since in the sense of having more of an animal make up than a spiritual one. Perhaps mortality for them, pre Fall, would have been a peaceful moving on, coming up higher, and not an immortality on earth all the time.
Thinking about the incarnation, if they had drawn closer to God all that time ago, then a form of incarnation, a marriage of the spiritual and the material, could well have occurred then. Jesus has now brought this Gift again and restored hope.
Finally, let us remember that the Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms both the metaphorical nature of the Genesis story but also teaches a primeval event behind it. How and when that happened is left totally open. Let the theologians speculate, imagine and play!
Yours sincerely,
Fr Kevin O'Donnell, Rottingdean
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