It's always important to remember that in Genesis, Adam and Eve were created in grace.
St. Thomas thinks we were always meant to live in God's grace.
It was grace that gave Adam and Eve what St. Thomas calls an original ordering or an original rectitude,
in which man's reason was subject to God, the lower powers of his emotions and his body
were subject to reason, and the body was subject to the soul.
St. Thomas teaches that in Eden, Adam and Eve would have possessed every virtue,
everything would have been rightly ordered, and that this was a gift of grace.
But Adam and Eve sinned in their pride. And in Adam and Eve, we all sin.
And because they sin and because we are born with original sin,
we are no longer born in grace.
That's what original sin is for St. Thomas Aquinas.
It's the privation of that ordered relationship, that graced relationship with God that Adam and Eve had in Eden,
that you and I were always intended to have.
It's not a pure privation. We still have our powers.
We can still think, we can still choose, we can still pursue truth and good and pleasures.
But, now because there are so many true and good things and so many pleasures,
we can jump, and we do jump, from one to the other, not keeping them rightly balanced,
and rightly ordered, and directed towards God.
Original sin removed the obstacle that there once was to acting immorally and inordinately.
It's a habit of disintegration and disharmony. We're all discombobulated.
T. C. O'Brien, a famous Dominican who once commented on the Summa, said that,
"After original sin, human nature with its powers as derived from Adam is now just itself.
It's left to itself. We're all on our own."
Original sin is leaving us to our own devices.
It's not a direct inclination to evil.
It's simply leaving us to ourselves, which we were never meant to be.
And because we are no longer rightly ordered, the powers of our soul, while they
are not destroyed, they are diminished.
The mind is darkened, and the will is weakened, and our passions are inflamed.
They can often overrule the will and the reason.
It's precisely because there are so many goods and truths and pleasurable things in this world
and precisely because our powers are conflicted among all of them and pursuing all of them,
that original sin doesn't direct us to failure, but keeps us confused and discombobulated.
And that's why we need grace after Adam and Eve sin.
We need grace not only to be united to God, which even they would have needed.
They would have needed grace to join the beatific vision, which is beyond anything that human nature can achieve or even imagine.
But you and I now, we also need grace even to do the things we should naturally be able to do.
We need grace to be able to direct and order our lives to God, to order all the things we pursue towards God:
to order marriage towards God, career towards God, vocation towards God, study towards God.
Everything that we do to be ordered to God. We need God's healing grace.
And so we now need grace, not only to be united to God, but actually to become truly human once again.
And that's not going to be perfect in this life.
In the New Testament, St. Paul teaches that grace works in the mind.
St. Thomas picks that up and argues that because the body is always affected by original sin,
which is why we still grow old, why we have health issues, and why we die,
we can never get over venial sin in this life.
We'll always be slightly askew even as we want to be directed to God.
The good news is this: St. Thomas teaches that with grace, we can get over mortal sin,
over those deliberate sins that we know, and we voluntarily choose,
those sins that turn us away from God.
With grace, we can become more and more steadfast in clinging to God, in pursuing God,
in allowing ourselves to be drawn by God, even as for the rest of our lives,
we deal with the small temptations, the small struggles, and the small sins of our lives.
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