Tongue in cheek — I don’t mean "good" or "bad," but is it something added or something subtracted?
Pontificator (who just celebrated his first Mass as a Catholic Priest after converting from Anglicanism — congratulations!) posts a citation from John Henry Newman about the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, i.e., the doctrine that Mary was from the first moment of her life free from sin. I was struck by Newman’s characterization of the differences between Catholics’ and Protestants’ concepts of original sin:
Our doctrine of original sin is not the same as the Protestant doctrine. “Original sin,” with us, cannot be called sin, in the mere ordinary sense of the word “sin;” it is a term denoting Adam’s sin as transferred to us, or the state to which Adam’s sin reduces his children; but by Protestants it seems to be understood as sin, in much the same sense as actual sin.
We, with the Fathers, think of it as something negative, Protestants as something positive.
Protestants hold that it is a disease, a radical change of nature, an active poison internally corrupting the soul, infecting its primary elements, and disorganizing it…
[B]y original sin we mean, as I have already said, something negative, viz., this only, the deprivation of that supernatural unmerited grace which Adam and Eve had on their first formation,—deprivation and the consequences of deprivation.
Newman goes on to explain how the "negative" view of original sin, plus the ancient understanding of Mary as the "new Eve," leads naturally to a position that the Immaculate Conception of Mary is not unreasonable.
I realize that I have always had an unconscious acceptance of Original Sin as "stain," i.e., something added to the soul. So what if I try to change my philosophy towards it, so that it becomes a kind of emptiness, primarily a cavity to be filled rather than primarily a spot to be washed away?
A number of interesting distinctions follow. For one, it removes the mistaken idea of Christian doctrine that is sometimes phrased "we are judged because of Adam’s sin." It means, rather, that Adam’s sin took something away from us, something we need to reach God where He is (a chasm overcome by His coming to where we are).
It rings truer to me to assert that our babies are conceived with a deficiency than to assert that they pick up in the womb some kind of infection of the soul. Such an idea transforms the sacraments. (However, the idea of baptism as a "washing" is so common from the earliest traditions that we’d be ill-advised to throw it out — surely there’s something to that symbolism too.)
Yes, "the lamb of God … takes away the sins of the world." But this refers to actual sins, no? It’s plural (peccata) and original sin is always singular (peccatum), unless I’m mistaken.
The idea of original-sin-as-negative also helps guard against the heresy that concupiscence is "meme" rather than "gene" — that is, that the tendency to sin spreads from person to person through culture rather than through human reproduction, a tempting heresy to be sure. (And not much more than re-warmed Pelagianism.)
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