Presentar el aporte científico de la investigación.

Original sin originated in the abuse of free will, considered so extensively by Hugh. If the proper end of free will is to love God and keep his will, then the truly upright free will would always choose to obey a command instituted by God. Therefore, God permitted man to be tempted against his command in order to demonstrate whether

M. Huftier, ‘Libre arbitre, liberté et péché chez saint Augustin,’ RTAM 33 (1966), 206-8. Ibid., 231-58.

‘Libertas eligendi bonum vel malum.’ Honorius, Elue., II.3.

or not he had an upright will/"** Adam’s decision to disobey was thus a fully free decision and merited a severe punishment. Before turning to this punishment, Hugh first examined the mechanics of sin within this original sin of Adam.

Within Adam’s sin, Hugh detected four stages which are mirrored in the will of every individual when he sins: suggestion, delight, consent, and defence. Adam first sinned by suggestion when he did not immediately resist the suggestion of sin, although he did not delight in it nor consent in it, as if he had listened to someone suggesting treason against his lord or betrayal of his friend without reprimanding him. From there his sin grew increasingly serious, for he followed this sin of suggestion with a feeling of delight centred on this suggestion. At length, he consented to the suggestion and ate of the fruit. But he was not finished here, for he compounded that sin by defending it with excuses and a shift of the blame to Eve.*"*^ Hugh’s analysis of the psychological nature of sin demonstrates that Abelard was not the only individual in the early twelfth century who was actively concerned with the role of intention. Hugh refused to reduce the definition of sin to a purely objective, observable act. For although this act was an

intrinsic element of sin, sin itself went much deeper, into the very motivations and desires of the individual committing it.

Now if original sin consisted in this act of disobedience in Adam’s free will, why is the rest of mankind subject to it? Hugh returned to Genesis for the answers, where Adam and Eve saw their nakedness and covered themselves in fig leaves out of shame.

Hugh, D ial, IV.13,1189B-C. Ibid.,IV.14-15,1189C-90C. Gen. 3:7.

He explained that they were now besieged by concupiscence in their bodies and had shame incorporated into their members.*"*"* Matthew, confused by this result, inquired why sin was located in the genitals when Adam’s first sin was through the ears by which he heard the suggestion of the devil. Hugh responded that it was not sin, but the

punisliment of sin that he obseiwed there, and that it rages most intensely in the genitals because it is tlirough them that humankind descends.*"*^ At this point he only described this descent as the mystery by which God punishes the sons of sinners, as with the cursing of Canaan for his father Ham’s sins.*"*® Only in the following book did he describe the mechanism of this transmission. There he explained that because every individual is engendered in this concupiscence, he is beset by both weakness in the mind (ignorantia) and the body (debilitas or concupiscentia), and only by the grace of God can he be fi'eed.*"*^ But he did not settle on being begotten in concupiscence as the only means of transmission, for further on he affirmed (through Matthew’s words) that the very flesh of Adam is extended through the inheritance of his seed, and thus by being part of Adam’s flesh all mankind shares in Adam’s guilt and punishment.*"*^

In viewing concupiscence as the constitutive element of sin, Hugh followed Augustine closely, as did most of his contemporaries. Yet many of them, especially the compilers of various sentence collections emanating from the school of Laon, saw

Hugh, D ial, IV .15,1191A-B.

Ibid., IV. 16 , 119IB-C. The author o f one sentence asked a comparable question: ‘Et quare non omnia membra circumciduntur, cum omnia iugitur offendant?’ The response is that it would have been hideous, or cruel, or intolerable to circumcise the nose or eyes. Dubitatur a quibusdam, in Weisweiler, Das Schriftum, 331,11. 5-8.

Ibid., II9ID; Gen. 9: 25. Ibid., V.4,1194C-D. Ibid., V.I2,1205D.

concupiscence as the actual sin of Adam.*"*® Hugh emphasised that the actual sin of Adam consisted in disobedience, a truly grave fault for a follower of the Rule of St. Benedict. Furthermore, he doubled the role of original sin in Adam’s descendants, for there it could be found in ignorance and concupiscence. Hugh of Saint-Victor took a similar stand in explaining the double role of original sin. He wrote that Adam sinned through

disobedience brought on by pride, and because of this, men are afflicted with ignorance in the soul and concupiscence in the body.*^® Peter Lombard later reduced it again to the sole explanation of concupiscence,*^* which remained the decisive explanation until later theologians, following Aquinas, would emphasise in turn that concupiscence was only an effect of original sin. Under this definition, original sin actually consisted in a deprivation of the grace of God. Accordingly, as a consequence of original sin and not a constituent aspect, the presence of concupiscence came to be defined as not sinful in itself. *^^

Hugh had to return again to the subject of original sin, for while he had covered its effects on the body and mind, he still had not answered just how the soul is affected by sin. This issue, which he had already treated thoroughly in his Epistola Gravioni, arose in the midst of his discussion on Baptism, where he addressed four errors about the soul.*^^ The first of these was that God makes souls not out of nothing, but out of his very substance, and thus the soul cannot be affected by the errors of the body. The second was

See Dom Odon Lottin, Problèmes de morale, in Psychologie et morale aux X lf et X IIf siècles,

vol. IV, Part I (Gembloux; J. Duculot, 1954), 11-76. Hugh o f Saint-Victor, De sacramentis, I.vii.26-8. Lombard, iSe/îr., IV.XXX.8-I0.

Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals o f Catholic Dogma, translated by Patrick Lynch, ed. James Canon Bastible (Cork: Mercier Press, 1955), 11.22.1.

The first three o f these four errors also appeared briefly in Grav., 11. 22-9 (833B-C). See supra,

that the soul is a body, wliich it cannot be because it is a spirit, a rational and intellectual being made in the image of God. The third error was that a soul can merit good or evil before it is joined to a body, which Hugh regarded as ridiculous given that a soul is not proven to pre-exist and cannot sin unless joined to flesh. Finally, the fourth of these errors was that unbaptised children were not damned.*^"*

When he had eliminated these various possibilities for how a soul is held accountable for original sin, Hugh acknowledged that no authoritative decision had yet been made as to how each individual received a soul. Was it inherited from Adam through propagation as was the body? Or did God create a new soul for each individual as he had for Adam and Eve?*^^ In answering these questions, Hugh went beyond the noncommittal treatment found in his Epistola Gravioni, and made his sole reference to be found in the Dialogues to a Church Father. Mentioning that Jerome held the second of these views, and since the Chuich had largely upheld it, he proclaimed, ‘we, who aie sons of the Church, by no means ought to reject his o p i n i o n . B u t Hugh then acknowledged that the creationist view of the soul proved to be difficult to reconcile to Scripture, which states: ‘Through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death; and so it passed into all men, in whom all sinned.’ For if the soul, created good by God, necessarily sinned upon being joined to a body, then God himself would be acting

Ibid., V.I2,1205D-1206C. See infra, pp. 108-09, for a discussion o f this in the context o f the sacraments.

Ibid., 1206C-D.

See Grav., II. 95-133 (835C-38C); and supra, chapter 2.

‘Nos itaque, qui filii sumus Ecclesiae, nequaquam ejus debemus sententiam reprobare.’ Hugh,

Dial., V .12,1207A. The author o f the Sententie Anselmi also mentioned Jerome’s anathama upon those who claimed souls were propagated, p. 76.

unjustly.'^® Hugh argued that the two views, creationism of the soul and the actuality of sin in every soul, must be harmonised rather than treated as opposing propositions, as is done by those who are guilty of prejudice and choose one side, declaring the other to be heretical/®®

In this section of the Dialogues, not only do we have Hugh’s only explicit mention of a Church Father, but also his only example of that growing trend during his period to harmonise various authorities, the need for which was demonstrated by Abelard but actually put into practice by figures such as Peter Lombard and Gratian. Matthew thus asked Hugh for harmonisation of the two views,*®* and Hugh gave it by stating that the newly created soul sins not out of necessity, but out of its own will. When united to the body and faced with the overwhelming power of concupiscence, the soul chooses to sin out of its own will. Gradually, it falls under the habit of sin and eventually sins out of necessity. And thus, neither Adam nor God is to blame for the sin of a soul. To the soul itself pertains all the blame. *®^

Even Augustine, with his clever mind and dexterity at finding solutions for so many theological difficulties, never discovered a satisfactory conclusion to the mystery of the soul’s origin. And Jerome, although deciding in favoui* of a creationist explanation, declared himself ready to accept whatever Augustine adopted.*®^ Nevertheless, Jerome’s

Ibid., 1207B-C. Ibid., I207D-08A. Ibid., V.13,1208A.

Ibid., 1208A-B. Once again, the views are the same as those in his letter to Gravion, although slightly more developed: Grav., 1129-71 (833C-35A). See supra, chapter 2.

Pontes, 182-88.

statement in favour of creationism as well as a false attribution of such a stance to Augustine eliminated the possibility of other explanations for most of the theologians of Hugh’s period,*®"* Peter Lombard took this same stance,*®® as did Hugh of Saint-Victor.*®® Honorius Augustodunensis, while also taking a creationist stance, added the explanation that all souls were created simultaneously from the same material, then distinguished and united to bodies.*®^