The doctrine of original sin — the idea that Adam's sin transmitted both guilt and a corrupted nature to all his descendants — is largely an Augustinian construction, though it builds on earlier traditions. Second-century Fathers like Irenaeus spoke of human immaturity and the damage of sin without Augustine's sharp categories of transmitted guilt and total corruption. Augustine's reading of Romans 5:12 (in the Latin translation "in whom all sinned") anchored his account of inherited guilt, a position not universally accepted in the East, where original sin tends to mean inherited mortality and tendency rather than inherited guilt.
Earliest systematic defense of inherited guilt and infant damnation apart from baptism — Augustine's argument that even unbaptized infants are subject to damnation because they carry Adam's guilt became the most contested aspect of his doctrine.
'All have sinned in Adam, as it were in the mass; for he himself was corrupted by sin, and all whom he begot were born under sin' — Augustine's foundational statement of transmitted original guilt, the position the Council of Orange (529) ratified as Western theological orthodoxy, closing the Semi-Pelagian controversy.
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