Augustine's West, the Greek East, and Two Other Readings

The atlas keeps four readings in view without ranking them. The Western position, developed by Augustine and defined at the Council of Trent, holds that Adam's descendants inherit both a corrupted nature and a real guilt, remitted in baptism. The Eastern position of the Greek fathers, retained in the Orthodox churches, speaks rather of ancestral sin: what is inherited is mortality and a bias toward sin, not Adam's personal guilt, since guilt is not the kind of thing that can be transmitted. The Pelagian position, that each person begins morally intact and Adam's sin injures only by bad example, was condemned in the fifth century and survives under no continuing body. The Jewish reading has no doctrine of a fallen nature at all: the rabbinic tradition speaks of the yetzer hara, an inclination to evil present in every person and to be mastered rather than a stain requiring rescue.

The divide is not merely historical. Because East and West disagree about what is inherited, they disagree in turn about what baptism does, what human freedom retains after the Fall, and how grace must operate, which is why this doctrine sits upstream of the arguments over grace and predestination.