Ancestral Sin vs. Original Sin

East and West confess the same event: a real fall with consequences no human being escapes. The divergence is in how those consequences are named. The Greek Fathers speak of the propatorikon hamartema — the "ancestral sin," the sin of our forefathers — and of what flows from it to us: mortality, corruption, a darkened nous, a weakened will. The Latin West, above all after Augustine, spoke of peccatum originale, "original sin," and came to include in it not only the inherited wound but — in Augustine's strongest formulations — a share in the guilt of Adam's act itself.

A single verse sits near the center of the difference. In Romans 5:12, St. Paul writes that death passed upon all men, and the Greek concludes eph' ho pantes hemarton — "for that all have sinned," as the King James Version renders it, a phrase the Greek Fathers generally heard as: death spread to all, and all in turn sin. The old Latin text Augustine read, however, said in quo omnes peccaverunt — "in whom all sinned," as though all humanity had somehow sinned inside Adam. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this passage in Greek, took it the other way: asked what "sinners" means in Romans 5:19, he answered that it means liable to punishment and condemned to death — mortal, not personally guilty.

Orthodoxy teaches that what we inherit from Adam is a condition, not a conviction. We are born mortal, into a disordered world, with an inheritance of corruption that inclines us toward sin — and every one of us then sins in fact, needing no help from Adam's ledger. But guilt attaches to persons for their own acts: "The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father" (Ezekiel 18:20). When the Church baptizes infants, it does not do so to scrub a guilt they cannot carry; baptism is birth into Christ, entry into His Body, the beginning of new life — which is exactly why it is given to babies who have never sinned at all.

This emphasis shapes the whole Orthodox account of salvation: humanity's plight is described first as captivity to death and disease of nature, and Christ comes as victor and physician more than as prosecutor satisfied. It should be said honestly that the East's language is not purely medical — the services speak freely of condemnation, of Adam's curse undone, of the handwriting of our sins blotted out. The difference is one of center of gravity, not of two separate religions.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) did not invent the problem out of nothing. Against Pelagius, who taught that Adam left us only a bad example and that human beings can obey God unaided, Augustine pressed an unanswerable pastoral question: if newborns carry nothing of Adam's sin, why does the Church baptize them for the remission of sins? His answer — that all humanity was somehow present in Adam and shares his guilt — secured the point that no one, at any age, is saved apart from the grace of Christ. Whatever Orthodoxy declines in his formulation, it agrees wholeheartedly with that point, and with much else Augustine held: that we inherit mortality, disordered desire, and a nature in need of healing.

It is also only fair to say what the West teaches now. The Roman Catholic Church's modern catechism explains that original sin in Adam's descendants is a state, not an act — human nature deprived of original holiness and justice, transmitted by propagation, not a personal fault in any child of Adam. Scholars of both traditions have increasingly cautioned that the tidy opposition "East teaches inherited mortality, West teaches inherited guilt" — a framing that became especially common in twentieth-century Orthodox writing — flattens both sides: Greek Fathers can speak of a common condemnation in Adam, and Latin theology has always contained more than its harshest sentences. Real differences of accent remain. Orthodoxy never received Augustine's conclusion that unbaptized infants are condemned, and it never developed a dogma like the Immaculate Conception — a teaching that presupposes an inherited stain from which the Theotokos needed exemption. But the difference is best measured where it actually lies, not where polemic puts it.

Strip away the vocabulary and a large common confession remains: every human being is born into a fallen condition it did not choose and cannot repair; no one is saved by their own effort; Christ alone heals what Adam broke; and the Church rightly baptizes all, infants included, into His death and resurrection — "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22). Orthodoxy's quarrel has never been with the claim that Adam's fall reaches us all. It is with any accounting that would make God the punisher of children for a deed done before their birth — because the Gospel the Church preaches is not that we are born condemned, but that we are born captive, and that the Captor has been overthrown.