Annotatio CLXXX

”For behold, in iniquities was I conceived.” — Psalm 50:7

Euthymius, in the commentaries on the Psalms, expounding this sentence, affirms that Adam’s sin was the cause of human conception and generation;¹ for unless he had sinned, there would have been no carnal union, nor the joining of male and female. For he thus writes: “If Adam had not sinned, it would never have behooved Eve to be joined to him; sin, therefore, begot the union, and the union in turn produced those who were born of Adam and Eve; and so thereafter others, down to David. And although marriage be now held in honor, yet [things] of nature come forth from sin: ‘from sin, therefore,’ says David, ‘was I conceived and begotten.’” In the same manner the Author of the Imperfect Work on Matthew expounds the present passage, in the first homily. We have confuted this opinion above, in Annotations 20 and 21.

There are [some] who think that Euthymius applied this exposition to this little verse of set purpose, lest he be compelled to confess that sin which the royal Prophet in this place chiefly deplores — that is, original sin, which we constantly believe to have been transfused from the first parent into all [his] posterity. That this opinion did not altogether please Euthymius, those things testify which were written by him in the second volume of the Panoplia, title twenty-two, where — the words of Gregory Nazianzen being also borrowed — he thus speaks of Adam’s sin: “Therefore, for the transgression of the precept, and for the sin of the first parent, are appointed diseases, and death, which the transgression and sin brought about; which death indeed indicates the benignity of God — for it is the cause that, sin being cut short, the evil be not perpetual, as Gregory the Theologian says. But the eternal punishments are not appointed for the first transgression, but for the individual men who bind themselves with sins — or who, from the first parent even unto the consummation [of the world], applied no cure to [their] sins.” Some attribute this opinion of Euthymius to Chrysostom, but wrongly and unjustly, as one may see in Annotation 236 of the sixth book.