On the Imputation of Adam's First Sin · §122 · Josué de la Place (Placeus)

Chapter 10: Garissoles’s sense of peccasse; habitual guilt; extrinsic vs intrinsic

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On Garissoles's reading, to have sinned with Adam means the sin is imputed, and imputed ahead of the inherent blot: otherwise those reasons would not touch us. But once that imputation is set aside, can aversion from God, in anyone, fail to deserve rebuke? The child's fault is not that he was born so, but that he is so constitutioned — base, godless, God's enemy. That is a great fault indeed: not actual guilt as they speak of it, yet habitual. From actual disobedience he is called disobedient from without, by the cause that produced it; from habitual disobedience, from within, by the subject that bears it. So the infant is not guilty from a nearby act but from a habit: not because he did some evil deed, but because he himself is evil and set for evil doing.

Latin

Ex mente D. Garissolii peccasse cum Adamo est peccatum imputari, & quidem imputatione vitium inhaerens antecedente: alioqui nos istae rationes non oppugnarent. Jam autem sublata ista imputatione, potestne aversio a Deo, in quocunque sit, non digna esse reprehensione? Culpa quidem eius non est quod ita generatus est, sed quod ita comparatus est, quod nequam, quod impius, quod Dei adversarius est, haec est profecto magna culpa, non quidem, ut loquuntur, culpa actualis, sed tamen habitualis. Ab actuali inobedientia causa a qua est, extrinsece; ab habituali vero subjectum in quo est, intrinsece denominatur inobediens. Non est igitur parvulus reus ab actione proxime sed ab habitu: non quia malam aliquam actionem commiserit, sed quia ipse malus est, & ad male agendum comparatus.

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Josué de la Place (Placeus) on the imputation of Adam's first sin: chapters 1 to 12 and 14, and the later disputation up to its chapter on Romans 5:14, from the Latin. The rest is not yet translated.

Josué de la Place (c. 1596–1655), known in Latin as Placeus, was pastor at Nantes and from 1633 professor of theology at the Academy of Saumur, the school of Cameron and Amyraut.

On the Imputation of Adam's First Sin argues the distinctive Saumur thesis: Adam's sin reaches his posterity only mediately, through the inherited corruption — never by immediate reckoning of a sin they did not commit. Fellow Reformed theologians rejected the view, but the book remains its classic statement.

Part only: Chapters 1–12 and 14, and the disputation up to Romans 5:14

Datec. 1645–1655 AD (written after the 1645 Synod of Charenton, and read in draft by Drelincourt by 10 December 1653; printed posthumously at Saumur, 1661; Reformed / Amyraldian circle)

The English is made from the 1661 Saumur Latin of chapters 1 to 12 and 14 and part of the later disputation. No earlier English was copied.

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Also checked Text extract of Caput Primum (Latin)
Also checked machine-read text of the 1661 volume (Latin)

We have not yet re-checked this work against its source. We made this study translation with AI help. No scholar has yet certified it as faithful and complete. Open Latin on any section, or the Latin source link, to see the source text. It is not a critical edition.

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