Is it possible to remove the cross from the grave? When are wreaths removed from a grave after a funeral according to church canons? When to erect a monument after a funeral? Which flowers are better, fresh or artificial?

ORIGINAL SIN.

“Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin,
so death spread to all men, because all sinned in him."
(Rom. 5:12)

The greatest tragedy of mankind was the Fall, when Adam and Eve transgressed the commandment of the Lord and ate the forbidden fruit. Having thus opposed his free will to the will of God, man moved away from the Creator, became mortal, and the powers of soul and body fell into discord. Human nature includes the “seed of aphids,” a hereditary corruption of nature that people receive from Adam through birth. This damage to human nature is called original sin. It is about the concept of original sin and the application of acquired knowledge in practical spiritual life that priest Mikhail Polikarovsky, teacher of Dogmatic Theology at the Saratov Orthodox Theological Seminary, will tell our readers.
The Fall of Adam.

"...And she took of its fruit and ate; and she gave it also to her husband, and he ate."
(Gen. 3:6)
Is the son responsible for his father?

“Behold, I was conceived in iniquity, and in sins did my mother give birth to me” (Ps. 50:7)

According to the teachings of the Church, conception and birth are the channel through which ancestral damage is transmitted. The very concept of “original sin” is of Western origin; the Eastern fathers speak of the “first damage”, the “disease of decay”, the “seed of aphids” that infects human nature. That is, anyone modern man inherited from Adam not sin, but fallen nature, the consequences of original sin. St. Cyril of Alexandria, commenting on the Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Romans, where the doctrine of the inheritance of original sin is revealed, says that Adam, as a result of the Fall, underwent corruption and desires for unclean pleasures. And all people became sinners, but not through participation in Adam’s sin - after all, they did not yet exist and could not sin - but through participation in nature, i.e. simply because they are his descendants. St. Maximus the Confessor argues that the inheritance of guilt for sin (as Western theology understands it) is impossible. Sin as such directly relates to Adam’s act, and we inherit its inevitable consequences: mortality as the need to die, passion as suffering, and corruption as a tendency to sin.
Orthodoxy denies the teaching that we, the descendants of Adam, bear personal responsibility for the sin of our forefathers as if it were our own. St. Maximus the Confessor says that sin is always a personal category, not a natural one. The resolution of the Council of Carthage in 252 states that “we should not forbid baptism for a baby who, having barely been born, had not sinned in anything, but only, having descended in the flesh from Adam, received the infection of ancient death through his very birth.”
By the way of the cross.

“I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6)

The Holy Fathers did not deny that we are punished for Adam’s crime, although not in the same way as for our personal sins. In particular, each of us is subject to the law of death. In addition, every person who has the nature of fallen Adam is deprived of the Kingdom of Heaven. This may seem unfair. However, Christ, with his redemptive feat, eliminated every reason for discontent. The Apostle Paul writes: “…Just as through the disobedience of one man many were made sinners, so through the obedience of one the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19); “As in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall live…” (1 Cor. 15:22) .
Christ on the Cross accomplishes the mystery of our salvation and gives every person the opportunity of rebirth, which takes place in the Sacraments, and above all, of course, in the sacrament of Baptism. Blessed Theodoret of Cyrrhus notes that the sacrament of Baptism is not limited to the forgiveness of sins - it is a promise of the greatest and most perfect gifts, and contains the promise of future joy. This is a preliminary experience of the coming resurrection, union with the passion of the Lord and participation in His Resurrection. Therefore, the Church baptizes infants not for the remission of sins they have not yet committed, but to give them a new immortal life, which their mortal parents cannot give them. In the sacrament of Baptism, a person receives the indelible seal of the Holy Spirit, restoring the hierarchy human existence, recreating the image of God. As a result of the Fall, man lost the possibility of becoming like God, but in the sacrament of Baptism he is again adopted by God. The Gospel uses an image grapevine- The Body of Christ, - to which, like a branch, a person is grafted and becomes a single organism. We get the opportunity, according to the word of the Apostle Paul, to portray Christ in ourselves ( see: Gal. 4:19 ).
However, no matter how great and significant the sacrament of Baptism is for the spiritual rebirth of a person, this - let us repeat the words of Blessed Theodoret of Cyrrhus - "the promise of the greatest and most perfect gifts", pledge of grace, given by God. Further restoration and development of a person’s spiritual life is impossible without his personal efforts and intense church life, which, first of all, is based on the sacrament of Confession (Repentance) and the Eucharist (Communion of the Holy Mysteries of Christ). In the sacrament of Repentance, a person is forgiven of personal sins he has committed. And in the Eucharist there is a real and closest union with Christ.
The Fall distorted human nature, but God's plan for man remains the same - deification. And deification is possible only through the communion of the Body and Blood of Christ, only through the Eucharistic life. The Lord Jesus Christ said this in the Gospel: "...Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is truly food, and My Blood is truly drink. He who eats My Flesh and drinks My Blood abides in Me, and I in him" (John 6:53-56) . Constant Communion, with the awareness of one’s sins and with hope for God’s mercy, brings a person into the closest connection with the mystical Body of Christ - with His Church, corrects, heals nature damaged by sin and makes a person a god by grace.
Prepared by Denis Kamenshchikov
Newspaper "Orthodox Faith", No. 21 (425)

www.eparhia-saratov.ru

(from here - another common term:Fall of Adam). For this, Adam and Chava were expelled from the Garden of Eden - Gan Eden. One of the consequences of sin was that people, having tasted the forbidden fruit, became mortal. Unlike the Christian concept of Original Sin, Judaism does not look at the material world as irreparable because of the sin of Adam and Chava, but at man as born with the original guilt for this sin.

Just about the concept of Original Sin

Original sin goes much deeper
meaning than meets the eye

Everyone knows the story that Chava and Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden by eating the forbidden fruit. Were their motives and intentions as they might seem at first glance?

What is the spiritual root of this transgression?

Touching upon the topic of primary sin, it should be noted that its complete and deep meaning is very far from our understanding, and lies in the plane of Sod - the secret interpretation of the Torah. Here we will only speak accordingly simple understanding(behind which, like behind a robe, lies the deep), based on the words of the great commentator Rashi. We also note that the purpose of the Torah in mentioning the sins of the past is to teach us the right way and warn against the tricks of the Evil Origin.

It is said in the Torah (Bereishit 3:6) “And the woman saw that the tree was good for food and a delight for the eyes, and desirable for the development of the mind, and she took from its fruit and ate, and also gave it to her husband with her, and he ate.” Rashi explains: the first part of the sentence describes how the woman was tempted and trusted the words of the Serpent (mentioned by the Torah above) that, having bitten off the tree, people would become like the Creator and be able to create entire worlds like Himself, i.e. the woman was driven by a thirst for spiritual uplift and additional features service to the Creator. But immediately after the Fall the situation changed dramatically: “and she gave the same to her husband with you“- what is said “with myself” reveals Her intention - so that she does not die alone, but he remains alive and takes another! That is, having already realized her mistake, instead of looking for ways to correct it, she deliberately pulled her husband along with her, based on a selfish desire not to die alone!

How can one understand such a polar reversal, such dramatic changes in impulses?

The answer is that as a result of committing a sin, the forces of evil that had previously acted on a person “from the outside” entered his soul, and since the essence of sin was precisely what to put in the center of attention - the desires of the Almighty or one’s own, the violation immediately awakened selfish thoughts in the woman that obscured everything else!

And if this is true in relation to the first people, directly created by the Creator, and who, at least in the beginning, possessed colossal spiritual perfection, then even more so in relation to us! How much one should beware of the evil inclination and its temptations, and how often what at first glance looks so harmless and even useful turns into impurity and sin!

However, R. Obadiah of Bartinura explains the woman's behavior differently (in fact, he writes that this is exactly what Rashi meant). Realizing that she was doomed to death, Chava wanted to correct the situation and that is why she gave her husband a taste of the fruit! Her logic was as follows: all the time that she alone sinned, the Almighty has no reason to have mercy on her, because, despite the fact that Adam needs to give birth to children, G-d can create another wife for this, just as he created her, and the purpose of creation will be achieved in any case. But if Adam sins with her, then the threat of death hangs over both of them, and this will call into question the whole essence and purpose of creation, and may serve as a mitigating argument in their favor!

For committing the Original Sin, Adam and Chava were expelled from the Garden of Eden - Gan Eden

From here it also becomes clear what Rashi concludes with his words: “Hava fed these fruits not only to her husband, but also to all the animals and birds”! At first glance, it is completely unclear why she needed this, but in the light of what has been said, she wanted, as it were, to “force” the Almighty to have mercy on the world, all the inhabitants of which were to be put to death. She hoped that this argument would soften the sentence and save the world from destruction at its very beginning.

But as we know, the Almighty has everything calculated in advance, and the possibility of sin in no way cancels His plans, but only turns them around. world history in a different direction, providing humanity with a much longer and more complex path to achieve the originally set goal!

Original sin

What is original sin? This is an ancestral sin that the first people committed. The sin of Adam and Eve had on humanity special meaning and could not be compared with our personal sins. At the moment of the creation of the world, people were in a primitive, absolutely pure state, and here, for the first time in history, the union between God and man was broken.

Saint John Chrysostom

“Whoever just says: “I am a sinner,” but does not imagine his sins individually and does not remember: “I have sinned in this and that,” will never stop sinning. He will often confess, but will never think about his correction.”

As a result of the destruction of this connection, what theologians later called original sin arose. Damage to human nature and distortion of its properties contributed to the transformation of anger at evil into anger at man. A good feeling, a desire for an ideal, have been distorted, turning into evil that arises in relation to what is best in one’s neighbor. It is this distortion of good properties human nature contributed to the further splitting of human nature into opposing body, mind and heart. And all this taken together led to the current state of the world.

The history of all mankind, as well as the life of each of us, testifies to the fact that we indeed constantly sin both against our minds and against our lives. Thus, we are all partly guilty of original sin, which is not someone’s personal sin, but only the sin of our first parents Adam and Eve, which is generally of little comfort. Just as the fact that one of us is not to blame for being born blind or hunchbacked is of little comfort. After all, it is much more pleasant to be sighted and healthy.

Because of original sin, we are in a state where our mind tells us that we need to act according to the law, the heart is drawn to the opposite, and the body does not want to take into account either the heart or the mind, so that the whole person is, as it were, fragmented. We do not experience any joy from this, and from here chaos begins in our lives, both personal and social, family or state. This is what original sin means to us, that is, damage to human nature itself. Athanasius the Great wrote that “by sin personal person caused corruption of nature,” that is, damage to one’s natural nature. This is what original sin is.

We have fallen ill with death, which the Holy Fathers call corruption, so today there are no immortals, and every person is born mortal. Now it becomes clear how exactly Christian salvation differs from non-Christian salvation. Christianity calls people to eternal values, which cannot be taken away from a person. All other values are transitory: a person holds, for example, a piece of gold or a diamond, and that’s enough. With death all this will disappear, like soap bubble. However, while we are alive, we carefully inflate this soap bubble in order to acquire one thing, then another, a third, without thinking that at the hour of death all this will instantly “burst.” This is mental damage. After all, after we see the same thing happening before our eyes, how can we then object to the words about the frailty of all things?

The Christian Church is trying to tear its members away from the mirage called earthly good, trying with all its might to show that when the right attitude to him, everything earthly can become for a person a step to eternal blessings. But here is the conclusion that theologians, our contemporaries, make: “It is clear that the sin of Adam is not identified by the church with original sin, but is considered only the cause of the latter.” That is, original sin became a consequence of the personal sin of our forefather Adam.

And now we have come close to an extremely important question, without solving which we will not be able to understand the meaning of the Savior’s sacrifice. The fact is that the sacrifice could only be carried out thanks to the incarnation of God into human nature. The nature of the Divine is impassive, therefore the Lord took on human nature so that thanks to it it would be possible to accomplish what would be the source of healing - the salvation of all mankind. The sacrifice could only be made in human nature.

Another very important question is what kind of nature the Lord assumed: damaged by sin or undamaged, pristine. If God accepted pristine nature, then the question arises, what was the sacrifice of Christ, if His nature is pure, immaculate and holy. Catholic theology followed this path, which, by the way, was condemned by the church back in the days of theosophical disputes.

For example, Pope Ganorius, condemned by both the Western and Eastern churches, wrote in the 7th century: “We confess in the Lord Jesus Christ one will, for it is clear that our nature was accepted by the Divine, not sinful, not that which was damaged after the fall, but a nature created before the Fall” (Acts of the Ecumenical Councils). And here are the words of the heretic Arch Aftarodaket, who writes that “at the incarnation, Christ accepted soul and body in the form in which Adam had them before the Fall.” However, this suggests a conclusion: if the Lord assumed an immaculate nature, then He could not die, because before the Fall people were immortal. Moreover, He could not suffer and did not experience hunger or thirst.

According to the heretic Julian, if Christ was hungry, tired or cried, he did it because He wanted to. But remember the episode with the fig tree. Did the Savior really just want it and curse the barren tree? Julian was not at all embarrassed by this formulation of the question, but the seriousness of this circumstance eluded the heretic. After all, if the Savior accepted human nature intact, then what did He do for humanity?

Saint Athanasius the Great

“If Christ has not risen, then he is dead: then how can he cast out, persecute and overthrow the false gods, who, according to unbelievers, are alive, and the demons they honor?”

The answer was found very quickly: the sin of our forefathers caused the wrath of God, which spread to all generations of Adam's descendants. Of course, you can start arguing and say that this is unfair, but it is true. The guilt lies with everyone, and from this it follows that the Lord took on a vicious nature at His will in order to suffer for us and accept death. Having suffered, He brought satisfaction to God's justice, and this is a perfection inaccessible to a mere mortal.

The Lord, having become incarnate, took on our damaged nature and took upon ourselves human sins, which means that He also took on original sin. For example, as if one of us, being healthy, took on someone else's illness. And here a completely different meaning of Christ’s sacrifice is revealed: through suffering and death on the cross, He resurrected our pristine nature and healed it. This is the essence of Christ's sacrifice. The Savior took our “damage” with all its ailments and infirmities. He really got tired and cried, not because He “wanted it so much,” but because He really experienced fatigue or sorrow. Jesus, by His nature, is consubstantial with man, which is the fundamental thought of Orthodoxy and an immutable Christian truth.

Church understanding this issue reflected not only in the statements of the Church Fathers, but also in the tradition of liturgical creativity. What is worth just one excerpt from the prayer behind the pulpit of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts: “To the King of the ages, Christ our God, our poor perceived nature, you are not involved in passion according to the Divinity of nature, unless you were clothed with our passionate and mortal nature freely.”

What else can be said after this? Unanimous teaching of the Fathers Orthodox Church does everything to make it clear to us what Jesus Christ did and for whom. It turns out that it is very important what kind of nature the Lord accepted: if it is immaculate, then there is, in fact, nothing to heal, but if it is sinful and damaged, then only then can we talk about the salvation of the world.

From the book Dogmatic Theology author Voronov Liveriy

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Original Sin The Orthodox Eastern Church has always understood original sin as that “seed of aphids,” that hereditary corruption of nature and the tendency to sin, which all people receive from Adam through birth. Conception and birth - the channel through which it is transmitted

QUESTION: What is original sin and what does Baptism have to do with it?

ANSWER: We must distinguish between the original sin of our first parents Adam and Eve and the original sin that we have all inherited. In the first case, it is a committed original sin, and in the second, it is a received sin. The original sin committed by Adam and Eve was an act of pride. Our first parents, tempted by the devil, imagined themselves in the place of God, that is, they pretended to decide instead of Him what is good and what is evil. God forbade man to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: “In the day that you eat from it, you will surely die,” God warned (Genesis 2:17).

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolizes the insurmountable limit of man as a creature. And this limit must be recognized and respected with trust in God. Man depends on the Creator, he obeys the laws of creation and moral rules that regulate the use of freedom.

Man's original sin is disobedience to God's commandment and lack of trust in His goodness. And every human sin also carries with it this double stigma: disobedience to God and lack of trust in His goodness.

Original sin entailed numerous consequences: Adam and Eve, having disobeyed God, lost His friendship, the grace with which they shone and which made them like God. By disobeying God, they became disobedient towards themselves, and their relationships with others were also disrupted. People lost the power of the spirit over the body: they saw themselves naked and felt the need to protect their dignity with primitive clothing. Since the Fall, relations between man and woman have become tense: Adam and Eve immediately began to blame each other. Their relationship also included mutual enslavement.

Having lost unity with God, the source of life, people doomed themselves to death and all the circumstances that prepare for it, that is, suffering, inconvenience, illness. Thus death entered the history of mankind.

Adam and Eve stand at the origins of the human race. And just as a contaminated well can only produce contaminated water, a humanity corrupted by sin produces an equally corrupt humanity. This is the received original sin, which all people inherit.

As for the transmission of the sin of Adam and Eve to their offspring, there are no explicit statements about this in the Old Testament, but the concept of the transmission of original sin is present in the Book of Genesis and in subsequent books of Holy Scripture: they show that the disobedience of the first parents gave rise to not only physical and material disastrous consequences , but also moral: hatred, revenge, greed, envy, fornication and so on.

The doctrine of original sin is clearly stated in the New Testament. St. Paul writes, addressing the Romans: “Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, so death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Rom 5:12). And again: “Both Jews and Greeks are all under sin” (3:9). That is why all people need salvation, which is given only by Jesus Christ: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,
whom God offered as a propitiation by His blood through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness in the forgiveness of sins previously committed" (Rom. 3:23 ff.).

The doctrine of original sin has occupied an important place in Christian catechesis from the very beginning of the Church. And the first who, based on three arguments, developed the doctrine of original sin was St. Augustine. These three arguments are Holy Bible(The Book of Genesis and the Epistles of the Holy Apostle Paul, as we have already discussed); the practice of infant baptism, which was, of course, based on the conviction that children are born not in a state of innocence, but in a state of sin; and, finally, the universal experience of evil and pain, which clearly testifies to the universal guilt of which every person is an accomplice.

The doctrine of St. Augustine became one of the core aspects of Catholic theology. In turn, St. Thomas Aquinas reflects it in his writings, placing greater emphasis not on the tendency to evil, but on the absence of sanctifying grace (provided by God for all people).

Let us quote from the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“Man, seduced by the devil, allowed trust in the Creator to die in his heart and, disobeying Him, wished to become “like god” without God, and not to live according to the will of God (Genesis 3:5). So Adam and Eve immediately lost – both for themselves and for all their descendants – the primordial grace of holiness and righteousness.”

Original sin, in which all people are born, is a state of deprivation of original holiness and righteousness. This sin is “received” by us, not “committed”; This is a state from birth, not a personal act. Due to the unity of the human race, it is transmitted from Adam to descendants along with human nature, “not by imitation, but by procreation.” This transmission remains a mystery that we cannot fully understand.

Due to original sin human nature, without being completely corrupted, is damaged in its natural powers and subject to ignorance, suffering, the power of death, prone to sin. This tendency is called lust.

After the first sin, the world was flooded with sins, but God did not leave man in the power of death, but, on the contrary, mysteriously predicted - in the First Gospel (Genesis 3:15) - that evil would be defeated, and man would be raised from his fallen state. This is the first proclamation of the Messiah the Redeemer. Therefore, the Fall will even be called a happy fault, since it “deserved such a glorious Redeemer.”