From Original Sin to Original Love
Christians worldwide observe Lent as a season of fasting, prayer, and spiritual return to God. These six weeks create space for self-reflection, good works, and renewed appreciation of God’s grace. Beginning with the ritual of ashes—reminding us that we are dust and to dust we shall return—Lent invites spiritual renewal as we lament our transgressions.
The doctrine of original sin developed during the 3rd century in Irenaeus of Lyons’ struggle against Gnosticism and was significantly shaped by Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD), who first used the phrase “original sin.” Augustine’s influential teaching emphasized that humanity inherited a “stain of sin” from Adam’s disobedience, creating a state of moral corruption requiring Christ’s redemption. While the concept of original sin is not biblical, the inspiration for this idea is found in the Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve’s disobedience (Gen 3:1-24) against God’s command not to eat of the forbidden tree is the foundation for explaining sin and its consequences: suffering and death. In the late fourth century, Augustine characterized sin as a universal condition of inherited guilt, overcome only through God’s grace via baptism. This concept of fallen creation requiring salvation remains fundamental to Catholic doctrine. As Anselm of Canterbury wrote, “If Adam had not sinned, Christ would not have come.” Since all have fallen, all need redemption.
While interpretations have varied over centuries, the Catholic Church maintains that original sin is inherited guilt from a single couple (monogenism): “Original sin… proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own” (Humani generis, 1950, para. 37). Although the Church has a lukewarm reception to evolution, the Church distinguishes evolution of the body from the soul, which is created immediately by God (Humani generis, para. 36).
The conviction of sin is deeply embedded in Christian theology. This narrative unfolds against the backdrop of salvation history, culminating in Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. As Paul writes, “In Adam all have died; in Christ all are redeemed” (1 Cor 15:22). His Letter to the Romans establishes a parallel between the fallen Adam and Christ, the new person; Paul writes: “Just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned… much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many… For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ” (Rom 5:12, 15, 17). The doctrine of original sin is a cornerstone of Christian faith because it sets up a parallel between Adam and Christ, that is, between, fallen humanity and the need for a Savior. Hence, original sin is intertwined with Christology. While many theologians have recognized the need to modify or eliminate this doctrine, it remains entrenched in Christian doctrine because it is a linchpin to the Christian narrative. Simply put, no Adam, no Christ; if there is no need for Christ, then our faith is in vain.
Teilhard de Chardin considered original sin a static solution to the problem of evil. From a biological evolution perspective, no single moment or origin of sin creates a universal condition. While universal adaptations in life are driven by universal properties of matter (energy, entropy, interaction), evolutionary changes tend to be local rather than universal, primarily because creaturely life is local and shaped by environment and culture. We are not born in sin because of some aboriginal transgression by a primitive Adam, Teilhard argued. We are born into a world that is becoming; hence, “original sin” is the universe’s law, the cosmic condition of an evolving world. In a universe this vast, dead ends and wrong turns inevitably occur. No creative process exists without loss, suffering, death, and destruction. The immense suffering and death in biological life has made human emergence possible. After 13.8 billion years of cosmic life and 4.2 billion years of terrestrial life—with significant climate changes and cataclysmic extinctions—our very existence and capacity for reflection must be attributed to something more profound and resilient than original sin.
We have a need to explain evil in a “broken” world. The Fall narrative suggests we once existed in loving unity before turning from good by disobeying God’s command. Yet, this myth lacks credibility against our modern scientific understanding. Biological life is much more dynamic, relational, and resilient. To hold on to an outdated concept that defies modern biology distorts the meaning of the cosmic Christ. Moreover, the concept of depravity and fallenness has had serious consequences throughout history. It has kept believers doubtful of their spiritual experiences and dependent on Church authority for spiritual guidance, while fostering a deep sense of guilt and unworthiness. The ramifications of original sin extend from projected guilt and violence, such as Rene Girard’s concept of the Scapegoat, to technological transhumanism and the aim of digital immortality, to our current political climate of “Make America Great Again,” all of which are based on human weakness and the desire for power.
There is very little reason to maintain the doctrine of original sin and every reason to find alternate meanings to the question of evil and suffering. What if we replaced original sin with original love? Could we understand moral disorder as resistance to or rejection of love—not simply human love, but the unresolved God of love?
Jung offers a psycho-religious approach to fallen nature and suffering that departs from traditional Christian theology. In his “Answer to Job,” he explores how humans connect with religious depths through the unconscious. While traditional Christianity views God as immutable and impassible, Jung conceptualizes God as the principal archetype of the unconscious, similar to Paul Tillich’s notion of God as the “unconditional ground.” For Jung, evil stems not from a privation of good or fallen human nature, but from an incomplete union between divinity and humanity. Jung proposes that God needs humankind to achieve wholeness and completion. Through incarnation, God acquires an expanded and higher consciousness. Divine love exists when God becomes God within us—it is a potential energy that must be activated to demonstrate its power. The individuation processes of God and person are interconnected, suggesting God is inseparable from the self.
Evil, according to Jung, originates from God’s dark side—the “wild” and “unrequited” God who seeks completion in the human soul. God and humans require each other for life’s wholeness. Jung suggests they unite in human consciousness as the deep meaning of history, both personally and collectively. By understanding evil at the psychic level rather than from a primeval fall, we can better comprehend Jesus’s life as one who reconciled his psyche with the inner energy of divine love. Jesus, confronting darkness and doubt, showed the human potential for divine love. Christ embodies the ideal self—the psychic totality of the individual. His life demonstrates how freedom in love disrupts boundaries of division, showing that costly love demands depth and courage.
Without integrating evil, there is no totality—what remains unconscious manifests externally as fate. While original sin binds us to weakness and guilt, “original love” empowers freedom and choice. Adam and Eve symbolize the internal forces of male power (anima) and feminine receptivity (animus). Without reconciling these forces through integrated consciousness, they manifest themselves outwardly as patriarchy and submission. Without integration of the self, the world is godless chaos.
If original sin represents a split psyche of good and evil, original love expresses wholeness and deep relationship. We need a new season of wholeness and love, a realization that God needs us to become whole and complete. The symbol of Christ is the individuation of God and person: God becomes something new in us and we become something new in God. This new person is the Christic, the person of new life, committed to the energies of love and the creation of a new world. For what we are, the world will become.
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Battered yet Unbroken? Tending to the Ethereal, the Visceral, and the Extraterrestrial in Christology
An essay by William Kuncken (a graduate student of Sr. Ilia Delio’s) Introduction A few Lents ago, I attended a parish talk titled “Unveiling the Truth of Christ’s Passion according…
Traditional religion has over-theologized ‘love’ and deprived it of its incarnational reality. In doing so we have coopted it and defined it to its own purpose- disembodied, self-less and its ‘degree’ measured by the pain endured by the ‘lover’. It is de facto, the enemy in the war against so-called secularism. Even as we attempt to recapture its reality we seem to remain in the realm of platitude, euphemism and emotive. Love is prime; it is primitive. We need to recapture the primitive and experience it so that its elan can be re-released and recognized as it is being once again experienced so that its explanation and its being taught finds its core where it has its origin. Then, only then can we begin to understand Jesus as the preeminent teacher of humanity and the godliness within our ‘we’-ness. Otherwise Christ love will continue to be sectarian, divisive and tied to bias and institutional self-interest elevated to theology, dogma, rite and ritual.
Sister Ilia, this may be one of your most important essays even though some of it has been covered in your previous writings, especially “The Not-Yet God”. Your explications on Teilhard’s work have made his thought extremely relevant to the development of my own spiritual life. As with you and Teilhard, I agree that the concepts of the original creation and fall as expressed in Genesis and their subsequent development into the notion of original sin are less than helpful— dare I say inaccurate and wrong— given what we now know about creation through the process of evolution. Teilhard tells us that evil is a necessary shadow side of a creation through the process of evolution where creation itself is always in a process of becoming that is dependent upon a precedent loving union of elements. He makes this explicitly clear in his essay “Fall, Redemption, and Geocentrism” p.40 in the text “Christianity and Evolution” (1969) which, as you know, is a compilation of many Teilhardian essays. In that essay Teilhard states: “By the very fact that he creates, God commits himself to a fight against evil and in consequence to, in one way or another, effecting a redemption.”. In a subsequent essay of the same book in a section entitled “III. Cross of Expiation, And Cross of Evolution” Teilhard writes:
And then, when we have really grasped this new evidence, let us turn back to the Cross—and look at a crucifix. What we see nailed to the wood—suffering, dying, freeing—is that really still the God of original sin? Is it? or is it not the God of evolution? Or rather, is not the God of evolution—the God for whom our neo-humanism is looking—precisely and simply, taken in the fullest sense of the words and in a generalized form, the very God of expiation? And this because, if we consider the matter carefully, ‘to bear the sins of the guilty world’ means precisely, translated and transposed into terms of cosmogenesis, ‘to bear the weight of a world in a state of evolution’ (p. 218-219).”
Ilia, these astounding words of Teilhard make all the difference in the world to me. They convey the notion of the necessary redemption that accompanies creation that Teilhard mentioned in his earlier essay. Christ “bears the weight of a world in the state of evolution”— and he continues to bear that weight in and through his entanglement with us and the whole cosmos.
Indeed, it is the Creator’s never-ending Original Love.
Though I have some familiarity with Jung’s work I am far from knowledgeable about the nuances and intricacies of his thought. Having said this, my sense is that the last three paragraphs of your splendid essay deserve a great deal more clarification to be helpful to
psyches like mine.
Gratefully & Respectfully ,
Bill Eidle
People who think there is only one way to explain human life, i.e., by explicating the Bible, are imagining with a handicap. What would be offensive in saying that people who compiled the Bible from many different sources over centuries thought in a particular way, and it makes sense, in general, as a story with a beginning, much of different kinds in the gradually developing middle, and an end in which the character who represents a great good for all people triumphs and brings all people together for all eternity? It is a fiction, which we trust as true and valid because it has a history very meaningful to countless people. Accepting this explanation should not keep people of broad mind and good will from entertaining the evolutionary telling of a different sort in which millions of years rather than thousands bring the human species to center stage, instead of the people of Israel and the community that became Christians and from the first century until now have become prominent to us and ambivalent to the rest of the world. Granting that Christians among other humans have moral and intellectual flaws shows that progress is very slow and often regresses. Evolution has rather far to go before we reach a horizon most would call the realm of heaven. And yet faith tells us it is at hand, and some can truly, confidently say that it is demonstrably so and has been throughout history, that joy has been experienced often and throughout the wide world, even if not universally for each person yet. That some cultures attribute infinite bliss to a divine being with a personality (or a trinity) who aids and guides humans should not rule out a mysterious presence which humans conceive to be intangible yet knowable and relatable in ways that some can express but most find inexpressible. Respect for different views and faiths is humble wisdom.
Ilia Delio is echoing Israel Knohl who writes in “The Divine Symphony: The Bible’s Many Voices”… ‘the Eden story should not be perceived primarily as a story of “fall” or “original sin.”
It is true that Adam and Eve disobeyed the divine commandment and were punished for their disobedience. However, it is also true that Adam and Eve did not yet have “knowledge of good and evil.”
When they made their decision to disobey God, they lacked moral judgment… We can see them as having the intellectual awareness of very young children.
It seems that God’s hidden wish was to help the man and woman to grow up and become like God, who knows good and evil.
I am who I am, which simply means that this mortal creature who manifests before you is never separate from the One who creates, redeems and sustains me.
I/Thou is who I am.
Oneness is where we live; One Home, One Body, One Life in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit to the glory of God the Creator.
This kind of growth for me is when you mix two ingredients…..the growth of self and growth of others as they become each others yeast!
Beautiful. Original sin has affected we view children and how they are taught. Taoist and Buddhist conceptions are more positive e;g we all have Buddha Nature
So delighted with the understanding that this brings. I am 93 years old and have tried to convey to my 8 children what I learned with contemplation and Merton’s true self and false self. This explains so well the realization I have tried to promote. I am so grateful. Thank you so much.
June Grifo
This is a mind shift but not a heart shift for me. Thank you; I’ll be chewing on this for awhile.
What you say here resonates with me. But I struggle then with how to keep attending Mass or any affiliation with Christianity when what they teach seems so wrong. How does Ilia stay connected to the church she is challenging? Does she go to Mass regularly? This is a serious concern for me.
I had the same problem so now I attend Mass in a Roman Catholic Womanpriest Movement community where the words of the Mass are aligned with my ‘new’ theology and Christology.