On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin

Written for Boso, it argues that original sin lives in the will and not in the flesh, and that no guilt passes down through the body.

by Anselm of Canterbury64 passages held

Latin, the original language

Original title: De conceptu virginali et de originali peccato
First published: 1099(aged 66)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

Pope Pius IX defined in 1854 that Mary was conceived free of original sin. Anselm did not believe that, yet ideas from this short treatise became part of the ground the doctrine was later built on. He wrote it in 1099, in exile from England, for Boso, the monk of Bec who had done more than anyone to make him publish Why God Became Man and who appears in that book as his partner in argument. Why God Became Man had given one explanation of how God could take a human nature from a race infected by sin without taking on its sin, and Anselm expected that Boso, reading it, would see that another explanation was possible and want to know it. Here he gives it, and with it an account of original sin. Sin, he argues, exists only in a rational will. There is no more guilt in the seed from which a child is conceived than in spit or blood, even when the act that produced it came from disordered desire. What an infant inherits is a nature that owes God two debts it cannot pay: the justice Adam abandoned, and satisfaction for abandoning it. Earlier theologians, following Augustine, had tied the passing on of original sin to the desire in the act of conception; Anselm moved it into a debt carried by human nature. Christ was free of that debt, Anselm argues, because his conception came from the will of God and not from the ordinary course of generation, and not because a sinful mother could not bear a just child. Even so, he writes, it was fitting that the Virgin should shine with a purity greater than which none can be conceived beneath God.

Key concepts

What is original sin, according to Anselm?

Original sin is the sin each human being has from the moment they become a person: the absence of the justice that human nature owes God, caused by Adam’s fault. It is not anything done, felt or wanted by the infant. Anselm adds that it is equal in everyone, since every child born in the ordinary way inherits the same lack and the same inability to make it good.

What is the difference between original sin and personal sin?

Personal sin is committed by a person; original sin is received with the nature. In Adam the order ran from person to nature: he sinned, and human nature lost its justice. In every later child it runs the other way: the nature, already without justice, makes the person a sinner. That is why an infant can be unjust before ever choosing anything.

Why can sin exist only in a will?

Because sin is injustice, and injustice is the absence of a justice that ought to be there. Only a rational will can have justice, so only a rational will can lack it. A body, a seed or a feeling is neither just nor unjust in itself. This is how Anselm can deny that anything bodily passes on guilt and still hold that every infant is born owing justice.

Do children inherit their parents’ sins?

Anselm separates Adam’s sin from the sins of later ancestors. Only Adam’s sin enters original sin, because only he stripped human nature as a whole of justice. The sins of parents and grandparents are their own and are not counted against their children. Where they seem to harm the children, it is because God sometimes rescues the children of the just and leaves others to their own sins.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Guilt Without a Deed

How can a newborn who has willed nothing be guilty of anything? The answer moves inherited sin out of the body and into a debt that human nature owes.

Sin, Anselm argues, exists only in a rational will, so nothing bodily can carry it: there is no more guilt in the seed than in spit or blood. What passes down is a debt. In Adam a person stripped human nature of the justice it had received, and the stripped nature now makes every person who comes from it a debtor, owing the justice Adam abandoned and satisfaction for abandoning it, and able to pay neither. Only Adam’s sin enters original sin. The sins of nearer parents do not, and nobody bears a father’s sin, only their own.

original sin
inheritance
inherited guilt
inherited sin
personal sin
human nature
sin
will
rational soul
justice
injustice
divine justice
moral responsibility
ancestry
generation

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A Child Free of the Debt

If every child inherits Adam’s debt, how could one child be born without it? Anselm answers without needing a sinless mother, and still honours her.

Why God Became Man had explained Christ’s sinlessness one way; here Anselm offers another and shows how the two agree and differ. The debt passes down through the ordinary course of generation, and Christ’s conception from a virgin was the work of God’s will, outside that course. So he was free of it, and not because a sinful mother could not bear a just child. John the Baptist, also conceived by a miracle, was not freed by it. Even so, Anselm writes, it was fitting that the Virgin shine with a purity greater than which none beneath God can be conceived.

virgin conception
conception
incarnation
miracles
grace
salvation
atonement
divine goodness
causation
nature

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Within this work

passages held: 64
distinct concepts: 88
by passages held, corpus-wide: #603

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “human nature” and “original sin”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 77 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
human nature	original sin	17
justice	original sin	14
inheritance	original sin	9
human nature	justice	8
moral responsibility	sin	7
moral responsibility	original sin	6
human nature	inheritance	5
justice	moral responsibility	5
human nature	incarnation	4
inheritance	justice	4
moral responsibility	will	4
justice	will	3
original sin	sin	3
original sin	will	3
sin	will	3
incarnation	original sin	2
inheritance	moral responsibility	2
justice	sin	2
human nature	will	1
incarnation	justice	1
inheritance	sin	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1076 Monologion
The earliest of Anselm's books about God and the longest he wrote at Bec, composed in the mid-1070s while he was still prior there.
LA
1078 Proslogion
The book by which Anselm is known: twenty-six short chapters composed at Bec in 1077 and 1078, a year or two after the Monologion.
LA
1078 Reply to Gaunilo (Liber apologeticus contra Gaunilonem)
A treatise Anselm did not choose to write: his answer to a critic of the Proslogion, in which he restates its argument point by point.
LA
1080 De Grammatico (De grammatico)
The odd one out on Anselm's shelf: a short exercise in logic for beginners, of disputed date, which he refused to count among his dialogues on Scripture.
LA
1080 On Truth (De veritate)
The first of three dialogues Anselm wrote at Bec in the 1080s and later arranged as a set, with On Freedom of Choice and On the Fall of the Devil.
LA
1085 On Freedom of Choice (De libertate arbitrii)
Builds on the definition of justice reached in On Truth, and supplies the account of the will that On the Fall of the Devil then tests on the first sin of all.
LA
1085 On the Fall of the Devil (De casu diaboli)
The longest of the three dialogues from Bec and Anselm's fullest account of evil, worked out on the case of the angels who fell.
LA
1094 On the Incarnation of the Word (Epistola de incarnatione Verbi)
A letter turned treatise, begun by the abbot of Bec around 1092 and finished by the Archbishop of Canterbury two years later, addressed to the pope.
LA
1098 Why God Became Man (Cur Deus homo)
The founding text of the satisfaction theory of the atonement, in two books, completed during Anselm's first exile from England.
LA
1099 On the Virgin Conception and Original Sin (De conceptu virginali et de originali peccato) you are here LA
1102 On the Procession of the Holy Spirit (De processione Spiritus Sancti)
Given first as a speech at a council and written up four years later: the treatise in which Anselm argues not with a pupil or a critic but with another church.
LA
1107 De Concordia (The Compatibility of God's Foreknowledge, Predestination, and Grace with Human Freedom) (De concordia praescientiae et praedestinationis et gratiae Dei cum libero arbitrio)
Anselm's last completed treatise, written in 1107 and 1108 after his second exile, and his answer to a question the student had raised in On Freedom of Choice more than twenty years before.
LA

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