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The Descent of Christ into Hades in Eastern and Western Theological TraditionsBy Bishop Hilarion (Alfeyev) - A lecture delivered at St Mary's Cathedral, Minneapolis, USA, on 5 November 2002

In other words, grace is natural to man. The divine power is a part of man's NATURAL integrity. There is not a set of gifts given to "nature" and then another set of gifts given to "supernature". When our parents "fell from grace" there was not a fall into "nature" stripped of "supernature," rather it is something UNnatural (this means that there is no concept of 'natura pura' either actually or theoretically). The fall is a fall into dialectic. I cannot be a human person without grace. We stand within the Incarnation and understand this question and we can equally say with Michael Baius - against the Thomistic tradition on some conception of the "absolute gratuity of grace" without reference to the Incarnation - that given that God wills the mystery of His embodiment in Jesus Christ, God could not have created me other than I already am. The vision of God is natural to man, what God does in Redemption, He does in Creation. God intention in Creating was to will the mystery of His embodiment in Jesus Christ.

Christian resources bible church tools - Early Church Fathers Collection

Man was created with free will. Its power was compromised by the fall. It is further dimished by delusion and the passions. We escape them through true faith, worship and fasting. Our freedom increases as these negative forces decrease.

Orthodox Christians must not confuse this realization of the effect of the ancestral sin with the sectarian teaching about "Original Sin". There is no doctrine of "Original Sin"In the Holy Church, for it is not possible to inherit Adam's guilt. Nowhere do the Fathers mention "Original Sin,"but they refer to the ancestral sin, which caused, as Metropolitan Philaret shows here, not a guilt, but a hereditary disease, namely, the inclination to sin: man's state of separation from God, etc.