Pano Kostouros

So it has recently become clear that a certain subset of people here still do not grasp the Orthodox understanding of original sin, nor are they even remotely familiar with the historical background of Orthodoxy in the 18th century, especially as it pertains to the Kollyvades movement and religious education. Blessed Neophytos Kafsokalyvitis (1689-1784), who is considered the leader of the Kollyvades movement and the first of the Kollyvades Fathers, had explicit disagreement with Eugenios Voulgaris on various matters, original sin being one of them. Now, recently I have been posting many works from Voulgaris, some of what I posted, are from his Theologikon, which are his earlier works. Since it has been shown that there is no doctrine of PSA in Voulgaris' works, they decided it's better to try and prove that we at least hold to the same views as the West on original sin, but this myth will also be dispelled. "Mikko" imagined it absurd for Voulgaris to teach scholastic dogmatics and then to admit that it went against tradition to do such thing. Well, if he had actually read the letters of Voulgaris, instead of getting all his information from discord compilations of faulty OCR translations (which I'll show) then he would know that this in fact was the case. Voulgaris disavowed his early works, he was disgusted to have written them, and wished that they would never be published. This includes his treatment on original sin in which, when he was writing this work early in his life, he lovingly criticised Neophytos for not affirming that we transgressed with Adam. And as we can see from the letter (which he himself references in his book 'On Creation') that Voulgaris sent from Kozani in the 1740s, he was made aware that Neophytos did not believe in the Latin view of original sin, in fact, Neophytos argued that we do not participate in Adam's sin in any way and that we only inherit the consequences, this is the Orthodox position and as we will see, Saint Athanasios Parios, a student of both Neophytos and Voulgaris, will agree with Neophytos on this. Now according to Latinising detractors on X (Twitter), they would consider this view of Neophytos to be "filthy modernism". Yet, Neophytos' theology on original sin is what came to be vindicated by the Church, and obviously Neophytos cannot be considered a "modernist" nor did anyone ever accuse him of such a thing, in fact, a letter from Voulgaris in 1793 showed that he had now come to believe in the same view of original sin as Neophytos. Voulgaris no longer believed in his literalist/covenantal theory and finally, he began to soften his view on our state after the fall by choosing to refer to it as an ill-condition, as we see in his later confession of faith (1760); this was requested in order to refute a Jansenist who claimed Orthodox teach the same soteriology as they do, but the confession was still deemed too Latinised to be endorsed by the Synod of Constantinople and thus it never circulated. As I mentioned in a previous post, Eugenios Voulgarios was actually forced out of Mt Athos in 1759 and was accused of being a Latiniser for his views and his attempt to introduce a Western-style education to Mt Athos and the rest of Greece. In brief, the theology of the Kollyvades Fathers prevailed, Voulgaris would soften his views and today the Orthodox world as a whole commemorates the Kollyvades movement. The reason why I made so many posts with a florilegium of quotes from Voulgaris was because I found it interesting that despite his Western education and scholastic methodology, he always found room to criticise deviations from Patristic tradition, even early on in his career, when he was the most "Latinised". What I also found interesting were: his defence of the essence-energy distinction, his defence of man having free will and needing to cooperate with divine grace by his own volition, his therapeutic view of the Passion of Christ and perhaps most strikingly; his view of linking nominalists back to Thomism. So with that being said, I never claimed all of his other early views to be infallible and I in fact highlighted the problems from the start. So with that being clarified, we can say with certainty that Voulgaris' view on many other things in his early works, including original sin, were incorrect and imprecise. He also made imprecisions as it relates to his scholastic method when writing about God's attributes. Overall however, we can still regard Voulgaris as an authority on Orthodox theology due to the fact that he retracted his early views, later in his life. So it is a great shame for people to quote Voulgaris' early views on original sin considering that he himself wished these works would never be published. Clearly, far too many are willing to expose the mistakes of their Fathers in order to push their subversive agenda in the Church. As for Saint Athanasios Parios, he would explicitly reference the huge effort he made to edit the previous works of Voulgaris and to remove the Latin errors. Despite this, Parios would still give charity to Voulgaris and respect, as he was his former student. Scholars who studied the literature on 18th century Greek Orthodoxy also note the departure of Latin exegesis in the Epitome of Parios. What is absent in the Greek theological treatises on original sin is also the rigid Latin distinctions of reatus and culpa, Latin theology on original sin hinges on these distinctions. As it follows in both Augustine and Aquinus, guilt (reatus) without blame (culpa) is unjust, therefore, infants must be culpable of sinning in Adam. Augustine is very clear that all souls (before individualisation) were present with Adam and sinned in him. Aquinas denies this, as Augustine was relying heavily on Traducianism & Neoplatanism, but Aquinas still finds a way to make infants culpable by declaring their voluntariness in the sin through the will of the ancestor, as members of the same body (corporate theory). What is fascinating is that on the topic of original sin, Parios does not cite St Augustine a single time, despite the fact that Augustine was the most cited writer in the works of original sin that Voulgaris wrote. Parios instead chooses to cite Saint Theophylact of Ohrid as his main authority on the topic. Parios never labels Voulgaris as a heretic, but he was sad to see his works being so full of Latinising errors, and in the words of Parios: "And when I had done this, [correcting the Theologikon] in a first and a second course of teaching, the book became a misshapen and unsightly monster, with so many deletions, other additions, and in very many places outright refutations." Firstly, let's look at both Parios' view of original sin and how he refutes the view that humanity sinned in Adam: "By what means did the transgression of our Forefather Adam spread and continue to spread to the entire [human] race?... [death reigned] from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression. And again: as by the disobedience of one man the many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one the many will be made righteous. What is the 'all sinned'? asks the holy Theophylact. He answers: 'That is, on account of Adam (ἐπὶ τῷ Ἀδάμ) all sinned. For when he fell, even those who had not eaten from the tree became mortal from him, as though they themselves had fallen, because he had fallen'. But, as I said, the dogma is beyond dispute, as coming from the divine faith, and to spin out a long discourse on what is agreed is, I think, superfluous and vain. It is very reasonably asked, however, by what rationale the condemnation for the disobedience passed also to those who did not transgress, that is, who did not eat the forbidden fruit. For it is properly and primarily the soul that sins: Adam's soul sinned first by consenting to eat, and then the body ate. How then, they ask, did Adam's sin pass from his soul into the souls of his sons? For Adam's soul did not beget the soul of Abel and of Seth. Rather, just as in the beginning God created the soul by itself through His divine breath and joined it to the body formed from the earth, so too with Adam's sons: the soul of each one is brought in from God into the bodies formed from Adam's seed, as his was formed from the dust, and so always with those who follow. If, then, the soul is brought pure and sinless from God into newly formed bodies, how and from where does it afterwards become tainted in the forefather's sin? ... even if we do not know what the most ancient and greatest Teachers say about this, [what their followers teach] seems adequate to me. 'By such generative power,' he says (Theophanes, companion of St Gennadios), 'the curse of the first-formed Adam reaches down to us, like wheat that is sown bare, without any covering, but which grows and comes to maturity with the ancient husks handed down from its parents, and these picture the ancient sin, which always follows the seeds.' What made, and still makes, the ancestral sin and penalty transmissible is above all the seed (nature), as a succession from that root...So by reason of the seed, as the sin that dwells with the flesh is passed on to us from those first ones, the soul too is tainted by it; by transmission, at once, not by its own activity... See how excellently these most wise teachers explain the ancestral sin, and by what rationale it becomes transmissible to the whole race, in no way making the divine will the cause, as those mentioned above do. By no means [were we with Adam]. How is it possible that all the seeds of the race were contained in the Forefather? We should rather say that the generative power was in him, as it is in all living things. (Note: At the time he was writing this, Parios seemingly does not have access to a large corpus of Greek Fathers on the topic of the mechanism by which sinful nature spreads. If he did, it is fair to assume his view would be fleshed out much more, but that is not entirely important.) Refuting the idea that we transgressed with Adam and against the idea of imputation (in the form of a dialogue): "Voulgaris: 'He subjected them, in the soul of the forefather, to the ordinance about abstaining from the tree, and through him made a covenant with the whole nature, extending His covenant over all men in the one first man, and resolving that whatever he chose should be reckoned to all.' Parios: 'But if we refer the matter to the incomprehensible judgments of God, and grant that this alone, the divine will, is the solution of the difficulty, then it is finished; everything that follows is superfluous.' Voulgaris: 'So God willed; seek no further reason. For who, as it says, has resisted His will?' Parios: 'But is it then safe to say that for no reason at all, but by the divine vote alone, all who are from Adam shared, and share, in his ruin? And how, or where, will justice be preserved, if those who have sinned in nothing undergo penalties and punishments?' Voulgaris: 'But they sinned in Adam.' Parios: 'How, when they did not eat of the forbidden tree?' Voulgaris: 'But the Creator of all so judged, that those born of him should be liable for whatever he sinned.' Parios: 'How then does He say in the prophet Ezekiel —The soul that sins, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, nor the father the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him? How does the same God legislate contrary things for those under Him, He who is hymned as just, the very fountain of justice? He who does all things with reason has never been found to punish anyone without reason. But great is the harmony of divine Scripture in all things, says the divine Cyril of Alexandria. For in Deuteronomy too He declares the same: Fathers shall not die for their children, nor shall sons die for their fathers; each shall die for his own sin.' [End.]" "He willed, and brought the flood. He willed, and burned the cities of Sodom … But each of these was liable to God's just wrath, and suffered what their deeds deserved. And what they bring forward to establish this opinion of theirs, from the commandment about circumcision given to Abraham, by which God threatens destruction to those who will not keep it, has not a single likeness, as they call it, or parallel, to Adam's case at all. For how are the descendants of Abraham, who set aside God's covenant by not being circumcised, in the same case as us who are from Adam, who never touched the forbidden tree, when he alone transgressed the commandment given to him? How then did the penalty of Adam, who transgressed the commandment, become, and still become, the penalty of the race born from him, without some reason, that is, some cause? For both the commandment and its transgression are circumscribed and bounded: both were given and carried out while the forefathers were inside Paradise. Once they had come to be far from Paradise and its goods, each was doing his own deeds, using the natural law alone... We believe, then, that holy baptism cleanses both the ancestral sin, which is unchosen, being a common consequence of nature, and all chosen sins without exception, if the one baptized happens to be of mature age." Refuting the view of punishment as held by Calvin: "[Calvin says] 'It had been predestined that Adam should be conquered by sin and perish, both he and all his descendants, and be subjected to eternal death'. 'Since we cannot attribute this to human nature', he says, 'it is evident that it depends on the wonderful counsel of God.' [To this we say] for just as the Kingdom of heaven is, and is called, the wage owed for good works, so in countless places of divine Scripture eternal punishment is called the recompense of sins. For [the Scriptures] cry out more clearly than any trumpet that sinners, doing evil of their own free will, go of their own free will into punishment. So God is angry with the people that has sinned, let 'anger' mean the bringing on of discipline. For the sin does not happen because of the punishment that follows; the punishment is brought on because of the sinning. So, lest we fall into such impieties, we believe that God's sovereignty rejects those whom it rejects not without cause but most justly, for the things they sinned willingly, with no one compelling them, and we never separate God's simple will from right order. (Note: Eternal punishment is the result of freely chosen evil. When Parios means eternal punishment he says so: αἰώνιος κόλασις is "the recompense of sins", sins committed "of their own free will" [αὐθαιρέτως] here, and "willingly, with no one compelling them" [ἑκουσίως]. Nowhere in his treatment of ancestral sin does he call the inheritance from Adam "eternal punishment". What he names there is death & the deprivation of grace, which is a separate kind of condemnation and penalty, not eternal punishment.) On the defence of free will and synergism: "Predestination is a divine command from above, according to sure and unchangeable foreknowledge, calling the worthy to justification and eternal glory...He lays no necessity on the predestined, who are by nature rich in self-determination, but calls, justifies and glorifies those He knew from eternity as "called according to purpose", that is, those who choose the good and obey His divine commands. We must show, against the evil-minded, that [the elect] are chosen not arbitrarily nor without reason, but on account of their own virtue. So men are justified also by showing forth their own good works, and not by the absolute will and sovereignty of God alone, as the followers of Calvin babble." "In truth by grace and choice is saved the saved, as says Macarius the Egyptian and the divinely inspired Damascene On Orthodox Faith (book 2, chapter 30): without His concurrence and aid impossible for us to will or do good; but in our power either to remain in virtue and follow God calling to this, or depart from virtue." On wrath: "'But here' says Clement, the most wise author of the Stromata, 'some attack us, saying that the Lord is not good, because of the rod, the threat and the fear. For how, they say, if the Lord loves mankind and is good, is He angry and does He punish? … Many of the passions are healed by punishment, and by the imposing of sterner commands … Reproof is like surgery of the soul. … Reproach is like medicine, dissolving the calluses of the passions … restoring man to health and truth. Admonition, then, is like the diet of a sick soul … And all these things tend to salvation and eternal health.'" Against scholasticism and a correction of the Latinisation of Eugenios Voulgaris: "I did not consider it fit to entitle the whole book "Theology" or "Theologikon", as these newer men, I mean the scholastics among the Latins, like to call it...since I want, and want very much, always and in everything to follow my divine Fathers, and not the novel inventions of these new, and newer, men." "[Regarding John of Damascus] his work is 'scholastic', then, but not after the reckless abuse, now prevailing in divine matters, of the most absurd hypotheses and antitheses, and of the dialectic that has intruded from outside...It is not scholastic in that way, which the Fathers find abhorrent and repugnant...For our faith is not from the principles of reason, but comes from divine Revelation... New dogmas are unacceptable even to hear...so it is not permitted to us to think or teach anything other than what has been handed down by the divine Apostles...Scholastic theology is not necessary: without it the Church of old flourished and shone in both respects, in piety and in life." "A book came into my hands some years ago, bearing the title 'Theology' but no author's name … put together, it seemed, from the scholastics among the Latins, though clean of papal impurities. But somehow the book was full of other defects. … I found many things in it open to censure: some not correct, some said off-key, some set down in disorder, some wrong in other ways. This was [the book of] the most wise Eugenios, who drafted these things in his youth in Ioannina, and later would not even consider them worth remembering... Since this scholastic form has spread among the Italians … our teacher too, imitating those newer men, worked this treatise out in a more scholastic manner. … On this it must be understood that one may use a newer method in theology, but by no means [newer] dogmas: innovation in dogma, being heresy itself, falls under anathema." "What some of our own teachers say to this not only fails to touch the solution at all, but also falls into outlandish notions. Lord Eugenios wrote this when quite young, from Kozani, to Neophytos on Athos who had asked him about it. The reply is very long." "[Unfortunately] the solutions that some [of our teachers] give of ancestral sin lead to outlandish notions." (Note: In his own handwritten list of his works, Voulgaris calls the Theologikon an ἔκτρωμα, 'a miscarriage'. When Ioannis Pezaros wanted to publish it in the 1780s, Voulgaris discouraged him, thinking it would bring him shame and reproach. In a letter to the physician Andreas Konstantinides dated 7 January 1793, he discouraged publication by saying 'Do not shame my old age.' The phrase was reported by Sophocles Oikonomos, and Spyros Papageorgiou (1904) identified the letter. In letters of 1770–71 to Neophytos Kafsokalyvitis and Nikephoros Theotokis, Voulgaris admits his reserve towards dogmatic theology and his relative inability to reach the depth of patristic texts. It is also important to note that the works of St Nikodemos on original sin in the Rudder may be inspired by the more incorrect teachings of Voulgaris, and Parios actually warns readers that certain texts of the Rudder have been corrupted by those with a Latin agenda: '[It] would certainly have been useful, if they had stayed as the one who laboured on them set them out. But now, through the spite of the hater of good, an enemy has sown tares in them, seeds of his own evil-mindedness, and there is fear that whoever pores over them will reap no small harm instead of benefit.') In conclusion, it is a complete fable to suggest that before the 20th century, Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox had the same view of original sin. Even Voulgaris himself found the Protestant view repugnant, not only because of certain extremists such as Matthias of Illyricum, but because the view itself, as he says, makes our good nature evil and necessitates that we cannot choose what is good from our own free will. That is what the reply of Patriarch Jeremias II to the Lutheran delegation also mentions: 'For we must first choose the good; and then He leads us to His own. He does not anticipate our choice, lest our free-will should be outraged. But when we have chosen, then great is the assistance he brings to us. I declare that everyone is capable of virtue. For whatever a person is not able to do, he is not able to do even if forced. But if a person is able when forced to do what he is doing, then it is by his own choice that he is not doing it.' There is no need to list out all Orthodox responses and condemnations of the Lutheran position nor to lay out in depth what the Protestant position is in terms of being held by Satan as guilty in nature because it obviously falls on its face and is not worthy of disproving similarity in a great effort, anyone who thinks there is similarity between that and the Orthodox position are not sane. Regarding the Roman Catholic view, that is the Papist view, their modern view of original sin comes much closer to the Orthodox view due to the fact that Rome has officially abandoned its historic understanding of original sin, that is, Rome no longer views infants as culpable as per their catechism: "Original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants." This is a deviation from Aquinas who says: "A defect received through birth, apart from the will, would cease to be a guilty stain." So if anything, our views are now closer because Rome decided to follow Augustine, Aquinas & its previous councils less rigidly on the matter, although Aquinas already set the stage for not following Augustine on everything, but Aquinas did not drop the reatus/culpa distinction. Orthodoxy however, never had this issue because it never had the systemisation of reatus/culpa that existed in the West in the first place. Man inherits a fallen nature, one that has a loss of grace, and is liable to death, these are the condemnations that follow. Parios makes no such declaration of eternal suffering except when talking about the personal sins of adults. Nor do we view ourselves as having actually sinned in Adam, as Parios also refutes. I would argue that these are the two most major differences, as well as the defects being a consequence of nature itself, not relating to any committed or actual transmitted sin.