Three Rogue Dominicans on Original Sin
Part Two: Robert Holcot
Last week, as a Lenten theological reflection, I began a series on three “rogue” Dominican theologians who departed from the standard Thomistic interpretation of the doctrine of original sin. In last week’s article, I presented the Augustinian-Thomistic theory of original sin, which is sometimes mistakenly equated with the doctrine itself, and then described the early fourteenth-century Dominican Durandus of Saint-Pourçain’s theology of original sin. Durandus challenged the notion that original sin is passed on through a kind of corruption in the father’s sperm in the act of procreation. He instead proposed that original sin is passed on as something lacking; Adam had forfeited the grace originally provided to him by God, and this lack of grace is passed on to each generation.
In this second article, I’ll discuss Robert Holcot’s theology of original sin, and then in a concluding article I’ll present Ambrogio Catarino Politi’s theory. Both, like Durandus, challenged aspects of the Augustinian-Thomistic theory which had the official backing of the Dominican Order to which they belonged, and I would argue that all three encourage us today to think of original sin in new ways.
Robert Holcot was born around the year 1290 in the English village of Holcot. After joining the Dominicans, he came to Oxford to study in 1326, completing his studies in 1335 or soon after. He continued teaching there until at least 1338, after which he possibly began teaching at Cambridge (the historical record is unclear). He died of the Plague in 1349 while serving the community near the priory in Northampton, where he had originally taken his vows. Probably his most important theological works are his Commentary on the Sentences, written in the 1330s, and his Commentary on the Book of Wisdom, written around 1340.
Rather than being a strict disciple of Thomas Aquinas, Holcot was more influenced by the philosophy and theology of the Franciscan William of Ockham, who had studied and taught at Oxford, prior to Holcot’s arrival, before leaving for Avignon to defend his controversial theses and to participate in the controversy over Franciscan poverty. Ockham’s influence persisted at Oxford, however, shaping Holcot’s own theological formation. Of course, it was unusual for a Dominican like Holcot to so heavily rely on the rival Franciscan theological tradition, and he often cited Aquinas as an authority even when departing from his conclusions in crucial ways.
For example, on the question of original sin, Holcot was significantly influenced by the line of thought developed by John Duns Scotus and adopted by Ockham. This is particularly true on the question of Adam’s condition in the state of innocence, before the Fall. As I noted last week, both Augustine and Aquinas had argued that in this original state, Adam and Eve existed in a state of natural rectitude, in which the reason guided the will and, in turn, the will exercised dominion over the passions. They had also been granted sanctifying grace to assist them in growing closer to God. As a result of original sin, however, in this view, Adam and Eve not only lost this sanctifying grace, but human nature was also weakened, leading to disorder in the passions.
One potential weakness of this position is that it is difficult to understand how, given this abundance of divine assistance, Adam and Eve could have fallen into sin in the first place. Scotus and those influenced by him, including Holcot, instead argued that in humankind’s natural state, there is already a kind of tension between the will and the sensual appetites. In the state of innocence, however, God provided supernatural assistance enabling humankind to establish an ordered relationship between the will and the appetites, a condition known as “original justice.” Adam and Eve had not yet, however, been provided with sanctifying grace—a thesis linking this school of thought to the theology of the 2nd-century Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons, who likewise proposed that Adam and Eve were only in the beginning stage of a gradual process eventually culminating in the deification of the human race.
In this condition of original justice, Adam and Eve were nevertheless capable of resisting God’s assistance, and therefore fell into sin. This led to the loss of original justice, leaving humankind in its natural state. This leads to an important point of contrast with the Augustinian-Thomistic approach. In the Scotistic approach adopted by Holcot, as I just noted, original sin leaves humankind in its natural state. In the Augustinian-Thomistic approach, original sin leaves humankind not in a purely natural state, but a state in which human nature has been corrupted or weakened (although not in a state of “total depravity” as in the later Calvinist tradition). On the other hand, the practical effects are much the same: for both schools of thought, as a result of original sin, the human will is turned away from its true good, the passions are unruly, and humankind lacks the grace necessary to remedy this situation.
I already mentioned one advantage of the theory of humankind’s original state adopted by Holcot: it provides a potentially more realistic account of how Adam and Eve could have been tempted to fall into sin. From a contemporary perspective, this theory may also be attractive because it is arguably more compatible with our current understanding of humankind’s biological origins through evolution. For example, a theological understanding in which humankind evolved with biological instincts and urges inherited from our evolutionary ancestors in tension with our emerging self-consciousness and self-direction seems more plausible than trying to explain how the earliest humans arrived on the scene, evolutionarily speaking, in a natural, pristine state of moral rectitude. That being said, the notion that there’s an element of tension or even disorder inherent to human nature, even apart from sin, may seem uncomfortable to Catholic theologians trained in a tradition deeply influenced by Aquinas. Also, the introduction of original justice as a type of divine assistance distinct from sanctifying grace adds a level of complexity to this account of the state of innocence.
Last week, I mentioned that Durandus ran into trouble because he denied that Adam’s descendants are culpable for the original sin we inherit, even if we are worthy of punishment because of it (at least until we are justified by the waters of baptism). Indeed, explaining how original sin can be an “impersonal fault,” as Pope Pius XI put it in his 1937 encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, that is, something that is involuntary but for which we are nevertheless culpable, is a difficult task for any theology of original sin. Scotus and Holcot agree with Durandus that original sin is an inherited lack, but, for the former two, it is the lack of original justice, or in other words, the lack of right ordering in the will, and therefore a moral fault. Original justice, in this view, is something owed to God, and the fact that its absence is experienced particularly as a disorder in the will explains how we are culpable for its absence, even if we didn’t cause it. And this remains true for small children and others who are not capable of exercising the full exercise of the will, since the disorder is in the will itself and not in any particular act of the will.
Before ending this discussion of Holcot, I want to introduce a concept only indirectly related to his theology of original sin but that would become central for Politi’s approach to the doctrine, which I will discuss in a later article. The medieval scholastics, going back at least to Peter Lombard in the twelfth century, distinguished between God’s ordained power and absolute power. God’s ordained power pertains to the orders of Creation and salvation as God has actually willed them; in this sense, God can only will in a way consistent with what He has willed to be in the order of Creation and the order of salvation. God’s absolute power, on the other hand, refers to everything that God could will, or could have willed; given God’s omnipotence, God could have willed anything that does not entail a logical contradiction. God’s absolute and ordained powers are not really two separate powers of the divine will, but rather two characteristics of God’s will.
John Duns Scotus was the first medieval theologian to make more than occasional use of this distinction. He used it to emphasize the contingency of particular elements of the economy of salvation. For example, Scotus argues that, although by His ordained power God offered Adam and Eve the gift of original justice, according to God’s absolute power, God could have created humankind in a purely natural state, without offering such assistance. Likewise, according to His absolute power, God could have offered us salvation without requiring any cooperation on our part, even though, in the actual order of salvation, God requires us to cooperate with divine grace as a condition of our salvation. The late medieval theologians associated with the via moderna (sometimes referred to as the nominalist school)—such as Ockham, Holcot, Pierre d’Ailly, and others—took this notion even further, associating this notion of the order of salvation with the biblical concept of covenant (in Latin, pactum).
For Holcot, the covenant is God’s response to the fallen condition in which humankind finds itself as a result of Adam and Eve’s sin. Indeed, according to Holcot, following the biblical witness, there have been multiple covenants, culminating in the New Covenant of Jesus Christ. Each covenant represented a contingent way of ordering humankind’s participation in the divine act of salvation. As John T. Slotemaker and Jeffrey C. Witt point out in their study of Holcot, this represents a shift from the Augustinian view in which the Old Covenant simply foreshadows the New; instead, each covenant represents a distinct means of salvation, even if salvation always ultimately comes through the Word.
As I already noted, for Holcot, these successive covenants represent God’s response to humankind’s fallen state. Ambrogio Catarino Politi, however, writing two centuries later, expands the notion of covenant to include the original relationship between God and Adam, and then uses the concept to help explain the nature of original sin. But further explanation must await the final installment in this series.
I’ve done more extensive background research for this series than usual, so I want to make sure I acknowledge my sources:
Cross, Richard. Duns Scotus. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Dezza, Ernesto, OFM. “Original Sin according to John Duns Scotus.” In Franciscan Studies 79 (2021): 111-32.
Slotemaker, John T. and Jeffrey C. Witt. Robert Holcot. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Of Interest…
Last week, Cardinal Mario Grech, the head of the Vatican’s General Secretariat of the Synod, announced that Pope Francis had called for a further stage of the synodal process. In October, 2028, there will be a post-synodal assembly of representatives from around the world to discuss how the conclusions of the Synod on Synodality, conducted in 2023 and 2024, are being implemented in the various local Churches. This news is noteworthy not only because it shows how active Pope Francis has been in continuing to lead the Church despite his hospitalization, but also because it emphasizes that synodality is an ongoing process of Church renewal. It also provides encouragement to local Churches to take seriously the implementation of the Synod’s recommendations.
At America, James T. Keane has an article on the American theologian Catherine Mowry LaCugna, who died in 1997, at the young age of 44. Keane has been regularly writing excellent profiles of 20th-century theologians, and this one is no exception. I first became aware of LaCugna when I was assigned her edited volume Freeing Theology: The Essentials in Theology in Feminist Perspective in graduate school; the book provides a systematic overview of Catholic feminist theology written by several top scholars. As Keane notes, however, LaCugna’s most important contribution to theology was her work on the Trinity, God For Us: The Trinity in Christian Life, which traces the history of Trinitarian thought and argues for a more fully relational way of understanding the personhood of the three Persons. Keane’s article clearly shows that LaCugna’s was a theological vocation well lived, even if tragically cut short.
Coming Soon…
The third installment of the series of original sin, focusing on the work of Ambrogio Catarino Politi, will be coming soon, but in the meantime, for next week I want to write on this year’s Los Angeles Religious Education Congress. The Congress is already almost a month past, so I don’t want to let any more time go by before I offer some commentary on the prominent themes in the plenary addresses.
Between now and then, I’ll have another article for paid subscribers only, subject matter to be determined. Thanks for everyone who read last week’s article on Bishop Robert Barron!