Against Those Who Say That Men Sin by Nature

This is a lost work. Theodore of Mopsuestia, the Antiochene biblical interpreter who served as bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia from about 392 until his death in 428, wrote a treatise in Greek against those who taught that human beings inherit sin from Adam. The Greek original does not survive, and the date of composition is unknown. What we know of it comes from the patriarch Photius, who read it in the ninth century and summarized it in his Bibliotheca, where it appears under the title Against Those Who Say That Humans Sin by Nature and Not by Choice. The Latin title now in circulation is a later convention. The treatise belongs to the Antiochene reaction against the hardening doctrine of inherited guilt, a conversation that reached its sharpest form in the West in the same decades, when Augustine and Pelagius were contending over grace and the will.

The argument, as Photius reports it, is that sin cannot belong to nature. If human beings sinned by nature, Theodore reasoned, the fault would lie with the Creator who made that nature, and sin would be neither blameworthy nor correctable. Sin must therefore be a matter of the will, a choice made freely and repeatable freely, and that is what makes both judgment and repentance meaningful. Theodore did not deny that Adam's fall had consequences for the race. In his surviving commentaries, he teaches that Adam's disobedience brought mortality into the world, and that death in turn makes sin more likely, since a mortal creature is more easily drawn toward self-preservation, desire, and fear. But on his account humanity inherits death and weakness, not guilt, and each person answers for his or her own transgressions. Christ's work is then understood as the beginning of a new creation, in which immortality is given and the struggle against sin is made winnable by an inward strengthening.

The treatise matters chiefly as evidence of a road not taken in Western theology. It is one of the clearest early statements of the Eastern position that the effects of Adam's fall are mortality and weakness rather than inherited guilt, a view that shaped Greek patriarchal tradition ever after. It also bears on the history of Pelagianism, since Julian of Eclanum and others looked to Theodore's teaching for support, and the later condemnation of Theodore's person and writings at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 was partly an extension of the Western debate. Because only a summary survives, readers meet his argument at second hand.

Who should read this: students of the doctrine of original sin who want to see how the Antiochene tradition framed the question before and apart from Augustine, and historians of the Pelagian controversy. It is not for readers seeking a devotional text or a complete treatise, since all that remains is a ninth-century digest of a lost work; those wanting Theodore at length should turn to his surviving biblical commentaries and catechetical homilies.