The thing that surprises me is when Orthodox make this statement:
In the Roman Catholic understanding, it seems that Mary, who according to Roman doctrine had been exempted from the guilt of original sin [the Orthodox do not accept that humans share the guilt of the first sin but, rather, only the consequences] before all eternity, and
thus could not have sinned
OCA - Q & A - Sinlessness of Mary
I believe you expressed a similar concept in this thread -- that if Mary was conceived without original sin, that means she could not have sinned.
There is no logic in that statement as far as I could see. Adam and Eve were created without original sin, and we know how that went. If what is being expressed here is accurate, the world could never have fallen, because Adam and Eve had no original sin, so therefore never could have sinned.
That's the part that I don't see any logic to in Orthodox thinking, makes no sense, and yes, I can't see why some Orthodox would express an opinion that one's free will is removed and they therefore cannot sin if they do not have original sin. History proved that view wrong from the get-go.
No, that's not what we're saying...that one cannot sin because they do not have original sin. We all die - that's the consequence - the ancestral sin that Adam passed on, and through sinning, the result is death, yes. That's what happened with Adam and Eve. Mary was born like the rest of us - with free will to choose to sin or be obedient to God in everything and also dying one day, as she did. That's what ancestral sin is to us.
Mary was born not in the Garden, but after the Fall, so therefore, she was born like all the rest of humanity after the Fall, explained above. Yes, she was cleansed in preparation for the birth of Christ. Then, we believe she was ever virgin and was sinless through piety the rest of her days, which, as was pointed out, is not a dogma in our Church. Whether Mary was 100% sinless the rest of her life does not have a bearing on our salvation, and dogmas are there as borders, to keep us on the right path, and they are what is believed for our salvation. This is why the Assumption of Mary is also not dogma in our Church.
Here's an interesting link on the Garden and such:
We start with the Garden of Eden. Since in the Greek this is paradeisoz (Paradise) we may rightly understand the Garden and indeed Heaven as a real place in space-time but removed from the fallen domain of this world. In this dimension, our first Parents communed with the world, each other and God. The Fathers, (Sts. Theophilus of Antioch, Ephraim the Syrian, Hilary of Poitiers, Maximus the Confessor), insist that our first parents were created neither mortal nor immortal. Until the point of his disobedience Adam was sinless but not perfect and able to sin. He was not immortal but capable of achieving immortality through obedience. This is most important for what comes after and especially as we compare the biblical doctrine of our original state with what later emerged in the post-Orthodox west.
We learn from this starting point that Adam was like a child, fully capable of growing up in obedience to his Heavenly Father and achieving immortality. We know that he ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in disobedience to God’s Word and suffered death as a result. We are not dealing here with the Promethean myth of Greek paganism in which Prometheus stole fire from the gods and paid the price for his audacity. The fruit itself was not placed in Eden with a permanent exclusion zone around it leaving humanity in state of infantile innocence. God’s intention was that Adam should grow up through obedience until he received the necessary spiritual maturity to handle such things. Like a child he had to be taught. But like many children and adults he would not be taught. He wanted to be autonomous; to be God-like without God and he thereby brought death down upon his head.
Listen to St. Irenaeus:-
"Man was a little one, and his discretion still undeveloped, wherefore also he was easily misled by the deceiver."
St. Irenaeus and the Fathers generally, therefore, do not see death as a divine punishment for the disobedience of our first parents. This distortion arose later in the west under the influence of Augustine. The Fathers rather interpret the consequences of the Fall as something we brought on ourselves when we distanced ourselves from God. God still walks in the Garden. It is we who hide and shamefully cover our nakedness. Likewise, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and the angel standing guard with the flaming sword is not an act of divine retribution but a compassionate and merciful provision lest we eat of the second tree, the Tree of Life, and die eternally. The fruit of this tree, if we had eaten it, would have condemned us forever.
Listen to St. John Chrysostom:-
"Partaking of the tree, the man and woman became liable to death and subject to the future needs of the body. Adam was no longer permitted to remain in the Garden, and was bidden to leave, a move by which God showed His love for him … he had become mortal, and lest he presume to eat further from the tree which promised an endless life of continuous sinning, he was expelled from the Garden as a mark of divine solicitude, not of necessity."
[Hom. in Gen XVIII, 3 PG 53 151]
The sin of Adam and Eve was one of disobedience born out of a demonically induced pride and we know from St. Paul that wages of such sin is death [Romans 6:23]. Cast out of Eden and barred from re-entry for their own good, Adam and Eve, in their mortality are now subject to the corruption of death. Corruption here does not merely mean physical decay, it describes the fallout from the Fall as death spawns yet new evils. As St. Paul taught in the context of the resurrection as the remedy for sin and death, ("O death where is thy sting …?"), "the sting of death is sin." [1 Corinthians 15:55-56]
Listen to St. Cyril of Alexandria :-
"Adam had heard: ‘Earth thou art and to the earth shalt thou return,’ and from being incorruptible he became corruptible and was made subject to the bonds of death. But since he produced children after falling into this state, we his descendents are corruptible coming from a corruptible source. Thus it is that we are heirs of Adam’s curse."
[Doctrinal Questions and Answers, IX, 6 in Cyril of Alexandria, Selected Letters]
Notice that there is huge difference between this belief that we share in Adam’s curse through the corruption of death and the view common in the west since Augustine that we are punished by death for an original sin in Eden. The west came to believe that this original sin was transmitted to subsequent generations through sexual reproduction and that we inherit thereby not only the sin of Adam but the guilt as well. This view is first found in Augustine.
" … now when this (the Fall) happened, the whole human race was ‘in his loins’ (Adam). Hence in accordance with the mysterious and powerful natural laws of heredity it followed that those who were in his loins and were to come into this world through the concupiscence (lustful desires) of the flesh were condemned with him." [Treatise against Julian the Pelagian]
Aquinas and later the Reformers for whom Augustine was all felt constrained to repeat :-
" … the commingling of the sexes which, after the sin of our first parent, cannot take place without lust, transmits original sin to the offspring." [Aquinas: Comp. Theol., 224]
This is not Orthodox. We are responsible for the sins that we commit, not the sins of our forefathers and not the sins of our first parents. Moreover, the Fall is not a taint in our character transmitted by sex, nor is sex itself necessarily tainted by lust. Orthodox refer instead to "ancestral sin," by which we mean our participation in the disobedience of the first Adam as inherited through death, not sex. It is a curse that the Law exposed in the inability of humans to fulfil the Mosaic Covenant. It is a curse which has been redeemed by Christ. [Galatians 3:13].
Some western commentators criticise the Orthodox understanding at this point by reminding us that,. according to Psalm 50(51):5 "behold I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me." (NKJV: Masoretic text). As stated, this is capable of being interpreted either in the "western" manner or in the Orthodox manner. However, the Septuagint (LXX) version of the Psalm translated into English reads: "Behold I was brought forth in iniquities, and in sins (plural) did my mother conceive me." This makes it quite clear that sin is endemic to the human condition from birth to death. It says nothing about transmission, let alone transmission by sex. We must assume that the Jewish scholars in Alexandria knew what they were doing when they translated the Hebrew text into Greek. The Orthodox Church certainly accepts their scholarship and, importantly, there is nothing in Judaism then or now that comes anywhere close to the Christian west's understanding of original sin which is rather important if one wants to understand St. Paul's teaching on Adam and Christ the New Adam in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. After all, St. Paul like our Lord, was a Jew by birth and by training, adept in the Law.
This, then, is the characteristic understanding of the Fall in the Orthodox Church: sin generated by the corruption of death. In the post-Orthodox, post Christian west however, many people see death as both the natural created state of man and an unacceptable reality. This mental bind is also not Orthodox. Death, being the curse of Eden, is an unnatural enemy, neither designed into Creation by God nor desired by Him. Death, as the ultimate threat causes people to flee from their brothers, their sisters and their God in a selfish pursuit of earthly things as if these will put off the evil day. "Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die," as the saying goes. This is the real death, the death of the spirit from whence death itself has cast a longer and longer shadow over the God-less secularism of western materialism.
For the rest:
Ancestral Sin
