Traditionally, original sin comes primarily from St Augustine, who tried to understand how evil exists in the world, and despite so many opportunities to choose what is good, true and beautiful, humans instead make disordered choices towards the evil, the false, and the ugly. To some extent this problem was well understood by Greek Philosophers before him, though they tended (following Plato) to explain evil in terms of the immaterial and immortal soul ‘falling’ into the realm of matter, and needing to be ‘freed’ from its bodily prison to re-ascend to the world of Forms and the highest reality Platonists called ‘The Good’ or ‘The One.’
St Augustine though, could not accept either the fall from the soul from a pre-existing realm into matter as the solution to evil, not could he accept the Manichean belief that the universe was somehow the product of warring supernatural forces. Nor could Augustine accept on the Biblical claim that all God made was ‘good’ that the world itself was somehow evil.
Augustine then laid the source of evil in human free choice. To explain why evil seems so common in the world in which he lived, Augustine traced the root of human evil to the choice to disobey God by Adam and Eve back in the Garden. This had already been used by Fathers before Augustine, though the Greek Fathers tended to see the fall as a loss of the possibility of life in and with God, and hence the consequence of sin was the spreading of death and corruption into human nature, as well as the ‘infection’ of human being with nothingness and a gravity towards death and unbecoming, while Latins including Augustine saw the fall more in terms of disobedience to divine law and God’s punishment (through death, imputed guilt and divine punishment) which was only properly dealt with by the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, which atones for human sin, removes guilt from humanity, and justifies sinful humans baptised in Christ before God.
The doctrine of original sin implied that all human beings not incorporated into Christ were in a state of sin before God and were hence bound to suffer the ongoing consequences of sin, including death, corruption, and damnation. Eastern Christianity tended to stress more death and corruption, while Latin Christianity focused more on damnation. This is particularly the case in the work of St Anselm and medieval theologians, who were very ‘logical’ about how God gave or refused grace according to who or who is not justified in rather legal terms.
In more recent times, the Church has tended to stress more the mercy of God as well as the idea of deifying grace, which is very strong in Eastern Christianity, to balance the focus on judgement and guilt which comes from the Western tradition of the Church. Pope Benedict seems to be indicating that the idea that infants who are not baptised will go to hell will not be official church doctrine, though some conservatives might feel it should remain so. From my own viewpoint, I would like to see this idea go and be replaced with the doctrine Eastern Christianity has; infants are baptised so they can participate as soon as possible in the life of God.
While baptism of parents may remove sin from the baptised parent and infuse them with deifying grace, without baptism this process cannot occur, at least in terms the Church knows; as the Catechism says, 'The Church knows of no other way of salvation but that through baptism, but God’s mercy is not entirely bound by the sacrament (so other means may be possible) and it also states that infant baptism is a ‘priceless grace that cannot be refused’ yet we should ‘entrust the fate of the unbaptised to God’s mercy.’ Baptism then should not solely be seen just as a legal procedure to buy God’s justification for the sinner, but also as a precious gift the infant is given to be united intimately with Christ and hence in the Trinitarian life itself.
