SIN

SIN. In both Hebrew and Greek the word means literally “to miss the mark” (cognate terms: transgression, parabasis; fault, paraptoma; crime or offense, eggklima). In Orthodox tradition sin may be conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary. Further, sin, from Paul through the Church Fathers (q.v.), is understood as a personal force or power that has usurped the government of the world and infected creation from the Fall of Adam. Christ came to deliver humanity through his death and resurrection from this force and its accompanying corruption, i.e., the rule of the devil and of death. Baptism (q.v.) into Christ delivers the believer from the cosmic aspect of sin, but he or she is left to engage with those remnants of a diseased world still at work in his or her soul and environs. Thus the inescapable role of asceticism (q.v.) in the Christian life and, in addition, the insistence of the Orthodox tradition that sin, insofar as each person sins, is always personal in nature. Each is called to account for what he or she has done or left undone. This differs significantly from the place that original sin has held in the Christian West since, in particular, Augustine of Hippo (q.v.). It is with the examination and tracing out of sin’s unconscious and unsuspected roots that the enormous literature of monastic spirituality is primarily concerned.