QUESTION 42
How is it that we are said to commit
sin and to know that we have sinned, while the Lord is said to have “become
sin” without knowing sin? And how is sinning, and knowing that one has sinned,
not a graver offense than sinning and not knowing it? For it says: “He who did
not know sin, was made sin for us.”
Response
42.2. Because Adam’s natural power of
free choice was corrupted first, it corrupted nature together with itself,
losing the grace of impassibility. And thus the fall of free choice from the
good toward evil became the first and blameworthy sin. The second sin, which
came about as a result of the first, was the blameless alteration of nature
from incorruptibility to corruption. Thus two sins came about in the forefather
through his transgression of the divine commandment: the first was blameworthy,
but the second was blameless, having been caused by the first. The first was a
sin of free choice, which voluntarily abandoned the good, but the second was of
nature which involuntarily and as a consequence of free choice lost its
immortality. Our Lord and Savior corrected this mutual corruption and
alteration of nature when He assumed the whole of our nature, and by virtue of
the assumed nature He too possessed passibility as something adorning the
incorruptibility of His free choice. And for our sakes, through the passibility
of nature, He became sin, but He did not commit voluntary sin, thanks to the
immutability of His free choice—to the contrary, He corrected the passibility
of nature through the incorruptibility of His faculty of free choice, making
the end of nature’s passibility, by which I mean death, into the beginning of
the transformation of our nature into incorruptibility. In this way, just as
the alteration of nature from incorruptibility to corruption came to all men
through one man, who voluntarily turned his free choice away from the good, so
too, through one man, Jesus Christ, who did not turn His faculty of free choice
away from the good, the restoration of nature from corruption to
incorruptibility came to all men.
42.3. The Lord, then, did not know my
sin, that is, the turning away of my free will: He did not assume my sin,
neither did He become my sin, but [He became] sin because of me; that is, He
assumed the corruption of nature which came about through the turning away of
my free choice, and He became, for our sake, man passible by nature, abolishing
my sin through the sin that came about because of me. And just as in Adam, the
individual free choice for evil rescinded the common glory of nature’s
incorruptibility—since God judged that it was not good for man, who had used
his free choice for evil to have an immortal nature—so too, in Christ, the
individual free choice for good took away the common disgrace of corruption,
with the whole of nature being recreated incorruptible through the resurrection
on account of the immutability of the faculty of free will, since God judged
that it was good for man again to receive an immortal nature, in that he did
not turn away his free will. By “man” I am referring to the incarnate God the
Word, on account of the flesh endowed with a rational soul that He united to
Himself according to hypostasis. For if the turning away of the faculty of free
will in Adam brought about passibility, corruption, and mortality in nature, it
follows quite naturally that the immutability of the same <capacity> in
Christ brought about, through the resurrection, a return of impassibility, incorruptibility,
and immortality.
42.4. The condemnation of Adam’s
freely chosen sin was thus the alteration of nature toward passibility,
corruption, and death. Man did not receive this alteration from God from the
beginning, but it was rather man who made it and knew it, creating the freely
chosen sin through his disobedience, making his free will into something
sinful, the offspring of which is clearly his condemnation to death. The
condemnation of my freely chosen sin—I mean, of human nature’s passible,
corruptible, and mortal elements—was assumed by the Lord, who for my sake
became “sin” in terms of passibility, corruption, and mortality, voluntarily by
nature assuming my condemnation—though He is without condemnation in His free
choice—so that He might condemn the sin of my free choice and nature as well as
my condemnation, simultaneously expelling sin, passibility, corruption, and
death from nature, bringing about a new mystery concerning me, who had fallen
through disobedience: the dispensation of Him, who for my sake and out of His love
for mankind, voluntarily appropriated my condemnation through His death,
through which He granted that I be called back and restored to immortality.
42.5. In many ways, I think, it has
been succinctly demonstrated how the Lord “became sin” without “knowing sin,”
and how man did not become sin, but rather committed and knew sin, both in his
free choice, which he himself initiated, and on the level of his nature, which
latter for his sake the Lord accepted, while being completely free of the
former. Consistent, then, with the understood aim of my argument, and with the
proper distinction between the two senses of the word “sin,” we can say that
committing and knowing sin is in no way superior to “becoming” sin. For the one
brings about separation from God, inasmuch as the faculty of free will
voluntarily drives away from itself divine things, while the second quite often
hinders evil, not permitting the evil intention of our free choice to proceed
to the level of action.
Scholia
[1] The sin of nature, he says, is
death, according to which we withdraw from existence even against our will. The
sin of free choice, on the other hand, is the choosing of things that are
contrary to nature, according to which we willingly fall away from well-being.
[2] He says that even though the Lord,
when he became incarnate, was corruptible (insofar as He was man, according to
which He is also said to have “become sin”), He nonetheless is naturally
incorruptible according to His free choice, inasmuch as He is without sin.
[3] The death of the Lord, he says,
became the beginning of the incorruptibility for the whole of nature.
[4] The sin of which we are the cause
is the corruption of nature, while our own sin is the constitutive turning away
of our free choice. This is why man became mortal, being subjected to the just
judgment of natural death, unto the destruction of the death of his free will.
[5] The first sin, he says, is the
turning away of free will, which the Lord did not possess, even if He indeed
assumed the passibility of human nature, which was the punishment for the
turning away of Adam’s faculty of free will. This is why He alone was “free
among the dead,” for He was without sin, through which death came into being. (Maximus
the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to
Thalassios [trans. Maximos Constas; The Fathers of the Church 136;
Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018], 241-45)