On the Imputation of Adam's First Sin · §277 · Josué de la Place (Placeus)

Chapter 6: Adam as head of a body that did not yet exist

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Do you want all men to be considered as one republic, one body, whose head is Adam, and the remaining men each members? Then Adam was a head without a body, as we today are members without a head. This kind of reasoning, if it had come into L. Crassus's mind in that dissertation which he held with Q. Mucius Scaevola in Cicero, On the Orator, book 1, he could not by a plausible argument have turned aside Scaevola's saying that calls Socrates the fountain and head of the philosophers, whose long series flourished in Greece after Socrates was removed from human affairs—namely, because Socrates before those philosophers were born would have been a fountain without streams and a head without members; and those philosophers after Socrates would have been streams without a fountain and members without a head.

Latin

Visne omnes homines considerari ut unam rempublicam, unum corpus, cujus caput sit Adamus, reliqui autem homines singuli membra? Fuit igitur Adamus caput sine corpore, ut nos hodie membra sine capite. GAR. Hoc rationis genus, si L. Crasso venisset in mentem ea dissertatione quam habuit cum Q. Mutio Scaevola apud Tullium lib. 1. de Oratore, non poterat ille plausibili argumento dictum Scaevolae traducere, Socratem vocantis fontem & caput Philosophorum, qui longa serie post exemptum humanis Socratem in Graecia floruerunt: nimirum, quia & Socrates ante natos illos Philosophos fons fuisset sine rivulis, & caput sine membris; & illi post Socratem Philosophi, rivi fuissent absque fonte, & membra sine capite.

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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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Translated from Latin (Saumur 1661) (Latin)
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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