of religious and philosophical accounts that developed
independently of Christianity. A sense that something
is amiss has been widespread, pace James Boyce, in all
human cultures, not just in the West. And, in the West,
neither rejection nor ignorance of the Christian doctrine
of original sin guarantees the formation of a more positive
outlook on the human condition. As it happens, pessimistic
accounts of the human condition, resting on some notion
of a primordial or ancestral fault, are common everywhere.
It is important to understand that the revealed expla-
nation of the existence of evil offers a correction, or at least
an alternative, to common theories, religious and otherwise,
about the source of moral evil. The account of creation
and the fall in Genesis itself is clearly intended to counter
prevailing dualistic views in ancient near eastern cultures.
Features of the Genesis account “give to the Hebrew concept
of Creation a fundamentally optimistic character which
paves the way…to the solution of the problemof the origin
of evil.”
21
Genesis affirms the essential goodness of cre-
ation as the fact that “the unique sovereignty of God over
what he has made, a power limited by no antagonistic
primordial principle” with “no suggestion that material
nature is imperfect.”
22
Moreover, with regard to creation
and the fall of man, Genesis clearly affirms that “God is not
the author of evil and that his creatures were not defectively
made in the first place.”
23
The exclusion of these erroneous
theories remains a critically important aspect of Catholic
proclamation.
In short, we need the Catholic doctrine of original
sin today precisely in order to counter the pessimism and
21 Sheffczyk, 9
22 Ibid., 6, 9
23 Ibid., 8-9