The Inheritance of the Ancestral Sin

By Archimandrite Maximos Panagiotou,

Holy Monastery of Panagia Paramythia in Rhodes

We did not inherit the guilt of the original ancestral sin, but its consequences. With this, due to our remoteness from God, the entire human race is fallen and is in corruption with the tendency towards evil. This can be given a parallel example: if our natural environment due to our current irrational use of it is irreversibly damaged, the next generations of people will have no responsibility for the evil they were born in, but they will inherit the corruption of nature.

Synaxarion for the Sunday of Cheesefare

By Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos

SUNDAY of CHEESEFARE

On the same day, we commemorate the banishment of Adam, the First-formed man, from the Paradise of delight.

Verses

Let the world lament bitterly with our first ancestors,
For it fell together with those who fell by a sweet repast.


Synaxarion

Our Holy Fathers appointed this commemoration before the Holy Fast, as if to show in actual fact how beneficial the medicine of fasting is to human nature, and also how great is the shame of gluttony and disobedience. Passing over all the individual sins committed in the world on account of him, as being without number, the Fathers set forth how much evil Adam, the first-formed man, suffered from not fasting even for a brief time, and how much evil he thereby brought upon our race, clearly pointing out also that the virtue of fasting was the first commandment that God gave to mankind. Not keeping this commandment, but yielding to his belly, or rather, through Eve, to the deceitful serpent, Adam not only did not become God, but also incurred death and transmitted corruption to the whole human race.