PAGAN ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE OF ORIGINAL SIN.

The Roman Catholic writers are unanimous in the opinion that it was the belief of a large number of Pagans that man had fallen from a higher state of existence. St. Augustine, more especially, lengthily and emphatically insists upon the general belief of the Pagans in original sin, when he writes against Pelage. However, we shall bring forth other testimonies, which will not leave, in the mind of the reader, any doubt that the Pagans generally believed in original sin.

Cicero, in his work De Republica, book third, after painting the grandeur of the human nature, and then contrasting its subjection to miseries, to diseases, to sorrow, to fear, and to the most degrading passions, was at a loss to define man. He called him a soul in ruins. It was for the same reason that, in Plato, Socrates reminds to his disciples that those who had established mysteries, and who, he said, were not to be despised, taught that according to their ancestors, any one who dies without having been purified is plunged into the mire of the Tartarus; whereas, he who has been purified dwells with the gods. Clement of Alexandria, in his Stromata, book third, writes, that, according to the testimony of PhilolaÜs, the Pythagorician, all the ancient theologians and poets said that the soul was buried in the body, as in a grave, as a punishment for some sin. It was also the doctrine of the Orphics, as can be seen in Plat., Cratyl., Opera, tome third.

In the pages 48, 50, and 51, of the treatise of Plutarch, on the Delays of Divine Justice, we read: "A State, for instance, is one same thing continued, a whole, alike to an animal which is ever the same, and the age thereof does not change the identity. The State then being one, as long as the association maintains the unity, the merit and the demerit, the reward and the punishment for all that is done in common are justly ascribed to it, as they are to a single individual. But if a State is to be considered in this point of view, it ought to be the same with a family proceeding from the same stock, from which it holds I do not know what sort of hidden strength; I do not know what sort of communication of essence and qualities, which extend to all the individuals of the race. Beings produced through the medium of generation are not similar to the productions of arts. In regard to the latter, when the work is completed it is immediately separated from the hand of the workman, and it no longer belongs to him: true it is done by him, but not from him. On the contrary, what is engendered proceeds from the substance itself of the generating being; so that it holds from him something which is justly rewarded or punished in his stead, for that something is himself."

According to the doctrine of the Persians, Meshia and Meshiane, or the first man and first woman, were first pure, and submitted to Ormuzd, their maker. Ahriman saw them and envied their happiness. He approached them under the form of a serpent, presented fruits to them, and persuaded them that he was the maker of man, of animals, of plants, and of the beautiful universe in which they dwelled. They believed it; and since that Ahriman was their master. Their nature became corrupt, and this corruption infected their whole posterity. This we find in Vendidat-Sade, pages 305, and 428.

Thus sin does not originate from Ormuzd; but, Zoroaster says, from the being hidden in crime. This testimony is found in the Exposition of the Theological System of the Persians, extracted from the books Zends, Pehlvis, and Parsis, by Anquetil du Perron. The following passage, "There are stains brought by man when he comes to life," is found in the 69th tome of the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions.

We read in the Ezour-Vedam, book 1, chapter 4, tome 1, pages 201 and 202: "God never created vice. He cannot be its author; and God, who is holiness and wisdom, can be the author but of virtue. He gave us his law in which he prescribes what we ought to do. Sin is a transgression of this law by which it is prohibited. If sin reigns on the earth, we ourselves are its authors. Our perverse inclinations have induced us to transgress the law of God; hence, the first sin which has induced us to commit others." The same author in book 5, chapter 5, tome 2, acknowledges that the first man was created in a state of innocence; and that he was happy because he controlled his passions and desires.

Maurice in his IndiÆ Antiquitates, vol. 6, page 53, proves that the Indians had a knowledge of the fall of the first man and of the first woman; he proves also that the dogma of original sin was taught by the Druids. Voltaire, on the seventeenth page of his work, Additions to General History, confesses that the Bramas believed that man was fallen and degenerated: "this idea," he adds, "is found among all the ancient peoples."

The Father Jesuit Bouchet, in a letter to the Bishop of Avranches, writes: "The gods," our Indians say, "tried by all means to obtain immortality. After many inquiries and trials, they conceived the idea that they could find it in the tree of life, which was in the Chorcan. In fact they succeeded; and in eating once in a while of the fruits of that tree, they kept the precious treasure they so much valued. A famous snake, named Cheiden, saw that the tree of life had been found by the gods of the second order. As probably he had been entrusted with guarding that tree, he became so angry because his vigilance had been deceived, that he immediately poured out an enormous quantity of poison, which spread over the whole earth."

In the Ta-Hio, or Moral of Confucius, page 50, Confucius, after saying that reason is a gift from heaven, adds, "Concupiscence has corrupted it, and it is now mixed with many impurities. Therefore take off those impurities so that it resume its first luster, and all its former perfection." The philosopher Tchouangse taught, in conformity with the doctrine of King or sacred books of the Chinese, "that in the former state of heaven, man was inly united to the supreme reason; and that he practiced all the works of justice. The heart relished the truth. There was in man no alloy of falsity. Then the four seasons of the year were regular. Nothing was injurious to man, and man was injurious to nothing. Universal harmony reigned in all nature. But the columns of the firmament having been broken, the earth was shaken in its very foundations. Man having rebelled against the heavens the system of the universe was deranged; evils and crimes flooded the earth." This testimony is extracted from the Discourse of Ramsey on Mythology, pages 146, and 148.

M. de Humboldt, in the tome 1, pages 237 and 274, and also in the tome 2, page 198 of his Views of the Cordilleras and of the monuments of America, says, "That the mother of our flesh; the serpent Cihuacohuati, and her are famous in the Mexican traditions. Those traditions represent the mother of our flesh fallen from her first state of innocence and happiness." Voltaire, in Questions on Encyclopedia, says; "The fall of man degenerated is the basis of the theology of all the ancient nations."

There were nearly among all nations expiatory rites, to purify infants when they were born. Usually this ceremony was done in the day when the child was named. Macrob informs us, in his Saturn, book 1, that "that day, among the Romans, was the ninth for the boys and the eighth for the girls. That day was called lustricus, because of the lustral water used to purify the new born child." In the Analysis of the Insc. of Rosette, page 145, we read that the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Greeks had a similar practice. In Yucatan the new born child was brought in the temple, where the priest poured on his head the waters destined to this use; and then he gave him a name. In the Canary islands the women performed this priestly function. Caril, in his American Letters, tome 1, pages 146, and 147, speaks of these ceremonies. A law prescribed these expiatory rites among the Mexicans.

M. de Humboldt, Views of the Cordilleras, and of the Monuments of America, tome 1, page 223, writes: "The midwife, in invoking the god Ometeuctly, (the god of celestial paradise,) and the goddess Omecihuatl, who live in the abode of the blessed, poured water on the forehead and on the breast of the new-born child. After pronouncing several prayers, in which water was considered as the symbol of the purification of the soul, the midwife called near her the children who had been invited to give a name to the new-born child. In some provinces a fire was kindled at the same time, and they did as if really the child was passed through the flame to purify him both with water and fire. This ceremony reminds the practices whose origin, in Asia, seems to be immemorial."

Likewise, the Thibetans have similar expiatory rites: this we find in the thirty-first page of the preface of the Thibetan Alphabet. We extract the following from the Works of the Society of Calcutta: "In India, when a name is given to a child, his name is written on his forehead, and he is plunged three times into the water of the river. Then the Brama exclaims, 'O God, pure, one, invisible and perfect! to thee we offer this offspring of a holy tribe, anointed with an incorruptible oil, and purified with water.'"

In the mysteries, the Hierophant taught the doctrine that our nature had been corrupted by a first sin. The sixth book of the poem Eneida is nothing but a brilliant exposition of this doctrine; and perhaps antiquity offers nothing that proves more the power of tradition on the human mind, than the passage in which the poet, following Eneas in the abode of the dead, describes in magnificent verses the dismal spectacle which first strikes his gaze. If there is any thing in the world that wakes up in our mind the idea of innocence, assuredly it is a child who has been unable neither to know nor to commit sin; and the supposition that he is subject to punishment and to suffering, is a thought which our soul abhors. However, Virgil, in the 6th book, verses 426, and 429, places the children dead when yet nursing, at the entry of the sad kingdoms, where he represents them in a state of pain, weeping and moaning—vagitus ingens. Why those tears, those cries of sufferings? Which faults do those children, to whom their mothers had not smiled, expiate? (Virgil, Ecloga 4, verse 62.) What has inspired the poet with this surprising fiction? On what does it rest? Whence does it originate, if not from the ancient belief that man was born in sin?

Therefore, the doctrine of original sin was generally believed by the Pagans.

We stated, at the commencement of this chapter, that the Roman Catholic writers are unanimous in the opinion that it was the belief of a large number of Pagans, that man had fallen from a higher state of existence. However, a small number only of the same writers are of the opinion that the Jews believed in the doctrine of original sin; and they find no other proof of the assertion than the ceremony of circumcision, which, as is familiar to all, was a mere legal and national observance, and had not the virtue of remitting sin. In the first centuries of the Christian era, baptism was considered as a mere ceremony for initiating catechumens to the Christian profession.

It was only towards the end of the third century, that the belief of the transmission of Adam's sin to all his descendants was introduced in the Church of Rome, which already considered herself the mistress of the other churches. Soon afterwards the dogma that baptism had the virtue of remitting original sin was established. As proof of these two facts, we have the testimony of more than twenty-three Christian sects of the first centuries, which did not admit the dogma of original sin; and did not believe that baptism had the virtue of remitting sin. We quote a few of those sects: the Simonians, the NicolaÏtes, the Valentinians, the Basilidians, the Carpocratians, the Ophites, the Sethians, the Pelagians, all the Gnostic sects, etc.

Therefore, the Church of Rome borrowed the dogma of original sin from the Pagans. To this many Roman Catholic writers say: true the Pagans held this doctrine, but we did not borrow it from them; we found it in the first chapters of Genesis. We rejoin that even the fathers of the fourth century did not understand those chapters literally, and thereby as teaching the dogma of original sin. St. Augustine, in his work, City of God, avers that it was a general opinion among Christians, that the first three chapters of Genesis are allegorical, and that he himself is inclined to think so. He confesses that it is impossible to take them literally without hurting piety, and ascribing to God unworthy actions. Origen says: "Where is the man of good sense, who can ever believe that there have been a first, a second, and a third days, and that those days had each an evening and morning, though there were not yet neither sun, nor moon, nor stars? Where is the man credulous enough to believe, that God was working like a gardener, and that he planted a garden in Orient; that the tree of life was a real tree, whose fruit would preserve life?"

Origen compared the temptation of Adam to that of the birth of Love, whose father was Porus, or Abundance, and whose mother was Poverty. He adds that there are in the Old Testament facts, which, if understood literally, are absurd, and which, if understood allegorically, contain valuable truths. We refer the reader for the above to the following works: See St. Augustine, De Civitate Dei, liber xi, cap. 6, et liber 2, cap. xi, No. 24.—De Genesi ad Litteram, liber 4, No. 44.—De Catechis Rudibus, cap. 13. The opinion of St. Athanase can be found in his Oratio Contra Arium, No. 60.—That of Origen, in his work De Principiis, liber iv, No. 16, contra Celsum, liber 6, No. 50, 51. That of St. Ambrosius, in his Hexam, liber one, cap. 7, et Sequentia. That of Theodoret, in his Quest. in Genes. interpr. cap. v. et Sequentia, and that of St. Gregory in his Moral, in Job, liber 32, cap. 9.

The Fathers and the Christian sects named above, did not take the first three chapters of Genesis literally, because it would imply absurdity and blasphemy. The idea of God, namely, of the supreme and eternal cause, who clothes our clay for the pleasure of walking in a garden; the idea of a woman conversing with a serpent; listening to its counsels and heeding them; that of a man and a woman organized for reproduction, and yet destined to be immortal on earth, and to procreate a mathematical infinity of beings, immortal like themselves, who also will infinitely multiply, and will all find their food in the fruits of the trees of a garden where they will all dwell; a fruit culled that is to kill Adam and Eve, and to be transmitted as a hereditary crime to all their descendants, who did not participate to their disobedience, crime which will be forgiven only in as much as men will commit another crime, infinitely greater, a deicide—if such a crime might exist; the woman who since that time is condemned to bring forth with pain, as if the pains of childbirth were not natural to her organization, and were not common to her, as well as to the other animals which have not tasted the forbidden fruit; the serpent forced to crawl, as if a footless reptile could move any other way: so many absurdities and follies, heaped in those first three chapters, they could not believe and ascribe them to God.

Maimonide, one of the most learned Rabbins of the Jews, thus wrote in the twelfth century: "We ought not to understand literally what is written in the books of the creation; nor entertain about the creation the opinions generally agreed. It is for this reason that our wise men urged upon us to keep their true teaching secret, and not to lift up the veil of allegory which conceals the truths they contain. If taken literally the relation of the creation gives us the most absurd and extravagant ideas of the Deity. Whoever will find out their true teaching, ought to keep it to himself; this is the earnest recommendation of our wise men, and more especially in regard to the first six days. Those who know ought to speak about it but obscurely, as I do myself, so as to let their hearers guess if they can."

The above facts and proofs lead us to the conclusion that the Church of Rome borrowed the dogma of original sin from the Pagans.

As the Protestants, who call themselves Orthodox, borrowed it in the sixteenth century from the Church of Rome, it follows that they also hold it from the Pagans.

Therefore, the doctrine of Original Sin is of Pagan origin.