Are Men Born Sinners? - Library of Theology

e disciplined and purified. He taught that this estrangement of fallen spirits would some
day come to an end, and all men would be saved. Even the devil and demons would
someday be restored to God. Origen believed in a purgatorial fire where souls would be
punished and prepared for the presence of God. In the end, all spirits in heaven and in
earth including the demons, would be brought back to God, after having ascended from
stage to stage through seven heavens. Origen believed that sin is rooted in the human
nature of man. He believed that sin is a necessary consequence of man's material nature.
Origen later assumed the existence of a sort of hereditary sin originating with Adam and
added this idea to his belief in a preexisting fall. And he, like Augustine after him,
supposed that there was an inherent pollution and sinfulness in sexual union.
Augustine himself was deeply imbued with the heathen philosophies of his day. He first
became a disciple of the Manichaeans. The Manichaeans were a Gnostic-Christians sect,
with the Christian elements reduced to a minimum. They taught, among other things, that
all matter is inherently evil. Because of this view, they also taught that Christ's bodily
manifestations were only apparent, and that he did not actually come in the flesh. They
denied the real incarnation of Christ, as well as his bodily resurrection, because of their
view of the essentially evil nature of all matter. Augustine's nine years with them
accustomed him to regard human nature as essentially evil and human freedom as a
delusion.
Augustine next fell under the influence of Neo-Platonism, and his theological views were
strongly influenced by this philosophy as well. However, his doctrine of sin shows the
obvious influence of the Gnostic teachings of Manichaeism, in which he assumes the
most ridiculous teaching of all the heathen philosophies the teaching that matter can be
sinful. And this is the source of his doctrine that sin can be passed on physically from one
person to another. Harnack says:
We have, finally, in Augustine's doctrine of sin a strong Manichaean and Gnostic
element; for Augustine never wholly surmounted Manichaeism.
Albert Henry Newman also remarks:
Augustine, the greatest of the Latin Fathers, was for many years connected with the
Manichaeans and his modes of thought were greatly affected by this experience.
Augustine's doctrine of sin, with his belief in the inherent sinfulness of the physical
constitution, is wholly Manichaean. His idea that sin is propagated through the marriage
union, that sexual desire is sin and that sexual lust in procreation transmits sin is also
Manichaean. Augustine built his doctrine of original sin upon this premise that sexual lust
in procreation transmits sin. Harnack says:
The most remarkable feature in the sexual sphere was, in his view, the involuntariness of
the impulse. But instead of inferring that it could not therefore be sinful and this should
have been the inference in keeping with the principle "omne peccatum ex voluntate" he
rather concludes that there is a sin which belongs to nature, namely, to natura vitiata, and