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The Pelagian view was rejected by the Church, and the Scholastics in general thought along the
lines indicated by Augustine, the emphasis all the while being on the transmission of the
pollution of Adam’s sin rather than on that of his guilt. Hugo St. Victor and Peter the Lombard
held that actual concupiscence stains the semen in the act of procreation, and that this stain in
some way defiles the soul on its union with the body. Anselm, Alexander of Hales, and
Bonaventura stressed the realistic conception of the connection between Adam and his
posterity. The whole human race was seminally present in Adam, and therefore also sinned in
him. His disobedience was the disobedience of the entire human race. At the same time
generation was regarded as the sine qua non of the transmission of the sinful nature. In
Bonaventura and others after him the distinction between original guilt and original pollution
was more clearly expressed. The fundamental idea was, that the guilt of Adam’s sin is imputed
to all his descendants. Adam suffered the loss of original righteousness, and thereby incurred
the divine displeasure. As a result all his descendants are deprived of original righteousness,
and as such the objects of divine wrath. Moreover, the pollution of Adam’s sin is in some way
passed on to his posterity, but the manner of this transmission was a matter of dispute among
the Scholastics. Since they were not Traducianists, and therefore could not say that the soul,
which is after all the real seat of evil, was passed on from father to son by generation, they felt
that something more had to be said to explain the transmission of inherent evil. Some said that
it is passed on through the body, which in turn contaminates the soul as soon as it comes in
contact with it. Others, sensing the danger of this explanation sought it in the mere fact that
every man is now born in the state in which Adam was before he was endowed with original
righteousness, and thus subject to the struggle between the unchecked flesh and the spirit. In
Thomas Aquinas the realistic strain again appears rather strongly, though in a modified form.
He pointed out that the human race constitutes an organism, and that, just as the act of one
bodily member — say, the hand — is regarded as the act of the person, so the sin of one
member of the organism of humanity is imputed to the whole organism.
2. AFTER THE REFORMATION.
While the Reformers did not agree with the Scholastics as to the
nature of original sin, their view of its transmission did not contain any new elements. The ideas
of Adam as the representative of the human race, and of the “immediate” imputation of his
guilt to his descendants are not yet clearly expressed in their works. According to Luther we are
accounted guilty by God because of the indwelling sin inherited from Adam. Calvin speaks in a
somewhat similar vein. He holds that, since Adam was not only the progenitor but the root of
the human race, all his descendants are born with a corrupt nature; and that both the guilt of
Adam’s sin and their own inborn corruption are imputed to them as sin. The development of
the federal theology brought the idea of Adam as the representative of the human race to the
foreground, and led to a clearer distinction between the transmission of the guilt and of the
pollution of Adam’s sin. Without denying that our native corruption also constitutes guilt in the