The universal, basic question "Where does evil come from?" is answered by the Church with the Genesis story of Original Sin. Evil entered the human race very soon after the first humans were created, when, in response to an attack from outside, humans made a free choice to turn away from the good. Since that first rupture in human nature, its brokenness is passed down through natural generation. Only Christ can, and does, heal the rupture and redeem us.
The story aims at explaining something that we really do know about human beings. We do choose evil over good, or harmful over beneficial, not always but often --- and starting when we are pretty young. Nobody on earth has yet managed to figure out how to raise a child so that he or she turns out "all good," never choosing the bad.
The story raises an obvious question that doesn't have a good answer: How exactly is this brokenness transmitted from generation to generation?
It's very tempting to think that we transmit it through culture alone. The Church has already specifically condemned this tempting idea as heresy --- Pelagianism, to be specific. Original sin is transmitted, somehow, biologically --- from parent to child, from body to body. But this seems absurd --- that individuals can purely physically pass a spiritual aspect from one to another. How can this be?
The first analogy that comes to mind is the sacraments: these are physical actions that we say give spiritual grace. But unlike generation, they're not merely physical; they're social interactions too, cultural rituals. Baptism, confession, marriage, all have words, meaning is transmitted, so the analogy is imperfect. The sacramental graces simply aren't transmitted the same way that original sin is.
Maybe it's because, when it comes to eternal, physical human nature, we're really not "individual" organisms at all. Spread out in time as God sees us, as CS Lewis wrote, we're really something more like a many-branched tree, one flesh all the way back and all the way forward, all our moving about on earth nothing but the waving of tiny frondlets. Maybe when "our first parents, Adam and Eve, committed the first sin on earth," the rupture came between divinity and all that humanity, between timeless God and the body of humans spread out over the whole dimension of time.
Can this be something like what is meant by "In Adam we all sinned?"
It leads naturally to thoughts of being grafted... onto a Vine. But not to the popular, individualistic imagery of being grafted one single branch at a time. If eternally we're all one body, particularly in the sense in which we are detached from the source of life, perhaps we have been reattached en masse. (Not so that we lose our capacity to choose whether to remain part of that graft, however. The transcendentalists got it backwards: the bodies of humans are all one, the souls are purely individual.)
But maybe the idea of grafting is a red herring. After all, one of the branches (physically speaking) is what turned out to be the Vine.
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