Part 1: Christianity vs Naturalism
As an idea that lies at the very foundation of the Judeo-Christian narrative, original sin competes with other narratives, which for the sake of a short essay like this I’ll simplify into two categories: Eastern (as in Hindu & Buddhist) and Pagan (as in Greek, Germanic, and Celtic). All three basic narratives comprise many variations, and my purpose here is not to survey them all (or to try to show, for instance, how African and Amerindian shamanic religions fit in), but to look at each of these three as deriving from a basic gesture of the soul that distinguishes each from the other two. So before looking at the idea of original sin, let’s first take a quick look at its competitors—first, pagan naturalism; then the Eastern idea of maya and the chain of incarnations.
The modern period is steeped in nostalgia for pagan naturalism. And the Enlightenment made a very conscious shift away from a meaning framework rooted in the idea of original sin and salvation to one in which the pursuit of happiness through an embrace of rationality and material progress became the central concern. And this inclined the Enlightenment thinkers to lean more toward the Hellenic side of the Judeo-Hellenic marriage from which European civilization was born. The Jewish Christian side of that tension was rejected as unnatural, irrational, too weird.
So the Enlightenment celebrates the Greek and Roman worldview. It’s in the great paintings of the Baroque era through writings of Rousseau and later Nietzsche and Freud. The Enlightenment impulse was largely driven by a longing to escape the constraints and the accompanying guilt of the Jewish-Christian part of the Western heritage. In the pagan view, the Christian idea of original sin was associated with the fallen body and with sinful sexual passions. And moderns have felt a deep antipathy to the idea, which they see as the root of all repression. Pagan naturalism sought to celebrate the pre-Christian way of being human, and to return to a less alienated, more earthy, sensual, spontaneous, full-bodied way of being in the world.
For the pagan naturalist, the world is what it is—beautiful and cruel. We humans are animals who, for whatever reason, have developed brains that have allowed us to adapt to and to control our environment in ways that surpass any other of the planet’s species. It’s that simple, and we’re nothing more exalted than that. Any attempt to make more of who we are and why we’re here is fanciful at best and dangerous when it results in the naive idealism about which I wrote earlier this week. And any attempt to see ourselves as more leads to alienation, to false consciousness, to a refusal to accept our human condition for what it is. It takes courage to be human, and Christianity is the ideology of frightened slaves. That was Nietzsche’s take on Christianity, and he is in large part quite right. In my view, any attempt to present a postmodern Christian narrative has to go through Nietzsche. His is a flame that burns away everything that is not diamond hard. But I’ll come back to that later.
The second competing narrative lies in the related concepts of maya and the chain of incarnations found in both Hindu and Buddhist thinking. It is a given that we live in a world of illusion. It is a prison of ignorance from which we must be liberated, and even death offers no liberation because we reincarnate continuously until we finally break free. Liberation is achieved through one’s own effort with the aid of a teacher who has already found a way out, and the whole point is to get out, to get off the earth whose beauties are distractions and whose cruelties are incentives to leave once and for all and to merge with the godhead, the non-material, really real which contrasts with the shadow-world phantasmagoria we call our life on the earth.
There are similarities here to the idea of original sin and also to Plato’s Myth of the Cave. The idea of exile is strong in the Christian tradition, as in the Salve Regina—“…and after this our exile, show unto of the blessed fruit of your womb…” If we are exiles, we are so many E.T.s longing for home. And both the Eastern and the Western ideas are rooted in this profound longing not to be here on the earth because it is not our home. I embrace the idea of maya, of our fundamental delusionism as an element essential for understanding what original sin means for Christians, but I reject the idea that the point is to get off the planet. The Christian task as I understand it is not escape but subversion.
So there are important differences, and I’ll get into what they are in Part II. But here’s the main point I want to make today: Both pagan naturalism and Easternism are rooted in longings that go in two different directions. Both seek to overcome the fundamental alienation that is at the heart of the human condition. Paganism seeks to overcome it by looking toward the earth and the natural world, and Easternism seeks to do it by looking past the natural world to the really real which is non-material spirit.
It’s as if the human being is pulled simultaneously in two different directions, and peace can come only by choosing one or the other. These two fundamentally different gestures of the soul propose different solutions to the basic neither here nor there-ness which is at the heart of the human condition. I want eventually to make the case that true Christianity refuses both and proposes as an alternative to integrate both these gestures, to perform both at the same time, and that we were shown how to do it in the life story of the Christ two thousand years ago. The whole business is not about saving our sorry individual asses, but saving the whole thing, the earth and everything on it. More later.
Part 2: Is Sin a Thing?
Most educated people I know are uncomfortable with the idea of sin. They’re fairly sophisticated in their understanding of human psychology, and they recognize that people’s bad behavior is often rooted in childhood abuse or in chemical imbalances in the brain. Do these people who commit even the most heinous crimes choose to do evil, or are the programmed by forces outside their control? Is it that they have chosen to do evil, or that for them to have chosen differently would have been a remarkably heroic act?
How can these people be held accountable for their individual evil acts if they are part of a system that programs them for it? That’s hard to argue against, and I have no intention to do so. For me the idea of sin is not very robust if it is only a matter of individual responsibility. There is individual responsibility, of course, but I think we better understand what it is if we frame it in this context of collective complicity in the regime of fallenness into delusion.
I think that most people’s idea of sin is enmeshed with the social psychology of superego and taboo which have more to do with social order than with the deeper reality of good and evil. Sin is thus perceived as a social construction rather than a metaphysical condition, and if it’s a social construction, our ideas about it have more to do with arbitrary, culturally determined hangups than they have to do with the deeper reality of good and evil. In this view, if we are programmed for evil, it’s the result of bad social engineering and can be remedied by engineering something more functional. This view leads on the one hand to Mao’s cultural revolution or on the other to Skinner’s box.
And for many the word just has a lot of baggage from their childhoods that they would rather not carry around. So they have put it down and walked away from it, and I understand that. And yet the idea points to an existential truth that we cannot deny if we are honest. If evil is real, we’re all complicit. How do we talk about that in a way that makes sense? We have the choice either to come up with another word that describes this condition or to retrieve the older word and reframe it in a way that is relevant to our current circumstances. I’m taking the latter tack.
There may be lesser and greater degrees of complicity, but we are all complicit. At the deepest level it’s not about indvidual responsibility; it’s simply the condition of being born on the earth. If we are all in this together, it starts with a recognition that we are all born into the same conditions, into a world ruled by the Regime of Delusion. And it is from this regime of delusion and futility that all creation longs to be liberated.
And it begins with our waking up to to two facts: First that we are deluded, and secondly that we can be delivered from this condition. Both the western and eastern spiritual traditions look at our life in this world as a bad dream from which we must wake. The tradition of pagan naturalism would counter that if it’s a dream, it’s the only dream there is, and so we must therefore make the best of it. I see the spiritual traditions and the naturalistic tradition as not opposing one another, but supplementing one another, and I’ll explain how another day. Right now I want to talk about rehabilitating this old idea of original sin from the western spiritual tradition.
I’m for retrieving the idea of Original Sin as a way of describing our condition here as denizens of the earth because it helps us to frame what the task is. We have the choice to be either collaborationists with the bad dream regime or to wake up and join the resistance.
But if resistance calls for individual courage and determination, it is not a struggle that can succeed if undertaken alone. That’s what churches are for, and I would say that any given church body on the local level or denominational level has authority and credibility to the degree that it promotes resistance and liberation in the way I speak of it here. It fails to the degree that it functions as a collaborator. And let’s face it: none of the historical churches, especially my own, has a historically unambiguous record on that count.
But I like this metaphor of resistance vs. collaboration because of its this-world rather than other-worldly focus. It points us away from the idea that we are exiles longing for a home far away. It points us toward redefining our situation as citizens in our own land involved in a multi-generational struggle to reclaim what has been occupied by the enemy. The task is not to find a way to escape, but to stay and fight. The goal is not to get off the planet and into the Godhead, but to stay and engage the enemy like savvy guerillas. To be agents of liberation on behalf of him whose purpose is the liberation of the world.
I like the metaphor, but I also see its limitations. The abolitionist John Brown probably thought of himself as such a guerrilla, as do those nowadays in the Christian Aryan Nation. How often have people set out to subvert the regime of delusion only to become its unwitting agents?
In Tolkien’s saga, Boromir is a valiant freedom fighter who in seeking to subvert the regime becomes the evil he seeks to defeat. He seeks to play the power game on power’s terms, and even if he wins he loses. We all would like to be dashing Boromirs, but the task of resistance is more Frodo-like–unpretentious, out of sight. The task is as much about what we refuse as what we choose.
The subversion of the regime must call upon resources from outside the system, or even in victory the new regime just winds up becoming like the old one. It’s just the old story of king of the hill, one buck endlessly displacing the one before him. Everyone of them believes he’s bringing something new, but it’s always the same old thing.
It’s not enough simply to be against the bad guys out there; we are continuously struggling with the the self-deluding part of ourselves which is always coming up with the most noble rationalizations for doing the wrong thing. And so if you don’t have a robust concept of sin as one of the basic organizing principles of the world we live in, chances are you’re not really grasping the gravity of the situation. Chances are good that you will either be unwitting collaborators, or like Boromir, defeated by the way the regime has established its delusional rule in each of our souls. You have to understand the nature of the enemy if you are to develop effective strategies to defeat it. And if you are to have any chance of success, you have to know what are the resources that will sustain you in the struggle.
If people still feel uncomfortable with the idea of Original Sin in the way I describe it here, it’s probably because they have a sensibility that is shaped by the pagan naturalism that is at the heart of the Enlightenment secular outlook, which in turn is at the heart of what it means to be a modern. The idea of Original Sin is for them an answer to a question they don’t have. It explains nothing. How could it if one believes that there is nothing that transcends the world as we experience it with our five senses. What we see is what we get. The idea of Original Sin and our need to be liberated from it is all make believe. It might be lonely and terrifying to think that we are these beings who have come into self-awareness in this cosmic void, but grow up, get over it.
But that Enlightenment secular outlook has been breaking down for some time now. It had to sooner or later because it is way too one sided in its emphasis on rationality and in the way it denies the validity of so much human experience as “irrational.” Reason in the end is simply a tool of the will; it gives its user the answers he wills. If one’s will is fundamentally materialist in its orientation, he will accept only materialist answers to life’s big questions. But materialism is fundamentally an irrational commitment or an unconscious prejudice.
I have the deepest respect for people who have made a commitment to materialism in full consciousness and live within such a mental framework with ruthless honesty. Nietzsche and Camus are both noble souls in this respect. There are others, but these two mean the most to me. Nietzsche is for me the great exemplar of this kind of ruthless honesty, and there is such depth and beauty in so much of what he has written. He was a great freedom fighter, but in the end he was a Boromir figure defeated by the regime of delusion against which he so valiantly struggled throughout most of his life. The nimble spirit that speaks from the pages of Camus, especially in his essays, likewise expresses a powerful spirit of resistance. I respect that spirit of resistance to conventional delusionism.
My attempt to retrieve and rehabilitate the idea of Original Sin is to give a name to that which they were resisting. You don’t have to be a believer to be a resistor, but I do think there are advantages. And I feel a deeper kinship with these unbelievers than I do the Dobsons, Fallwells, and Robertsons, whose brand of Christianity is collaborationist through and through. More in Part III.
Part 3: Ideas Matter
My goal in what I’ve written in the “Sinning Originally” pieces is not to argue for a position; it’s rather to describe the world as it appears from within the mental framework I have developed over the years. It contrasts dramatically with the mental framework of pagan naturalism, which has been the basic script governing the modern narrative. It’s closer to, but also pretty different from, the framework within which most conventional Christians operate.
I have said elsewhere that I’m a Catholic because I believe the whole thing–the fundamental doctrinal, sacramental, and liturgical package makes beautiful, profound sense to me. (The ecclesial power structure is pretty corrupting, but that’s to be expected because all power structures are corrupting.) And it’s important to say that it’s just not some rigid, doctrinally pure Catholicism that makes sense to me—much in Hinduism also makes sense to me, and I have also learned much from shamanic religions and from Kaballah, the Christian Hermetic tradition, and from the Orthodox Sophianic tradition. And it all connects, and provides for me a framework that is always in the background of everything I write here. For me the word catholic is just right–all embracing, broad, synthetic, more interested in connections than distinctions, but at the same time true to it’s own Christocentric logic.
Ideas matter; they either imprison or liberate. One’s ethics follow from one’s metaphysics. One’s behavior in the world follows from one’s beliefs about the fundamental principles that govern the way the world works.
But any belief system is just a complex delusional mental superstructure if it doesn’t make a practical difference in the way we live, and ultimately the difference test is ‘by their fruits you will know them.’ Most people’s behavior in the world is determined by unconscious instinctual impulses. They may have a very noble ideational superstructure that makes them feel good, but their behavior in the world is just as unconscious and instinctual as the next guy’s. For most people what they think is spiritual is just socialization to be well-behaved. Their lives are still mostly instinct driven, and their religious ideas are sterile. They effect no transformations in the soul.
For me the fruits test has more to do with how ideas affect the disposition of the soul to be open, supple, and fertile. Christianity is not about being well behaved. It’s about being subversively productive, bearing fruit. This is a theme that comes up repeatedly in the gospels. The bottom line is not whether you minded your Ps and Qs, but whether you made a difference, whether you brought something new into the world, no matter how humble or innocuous. In other words, has one been an infusion point in the world for the liberating grace that seeks always to penetrate the regime of delusion and to subvert it.
The only measure for the success or failure of a human life that matters is the degree to which one was an effective infusion point. It matters hardly at all what one’s conscious beliefs are if he has lived a fundamentally sterile or unfruitful life. It doesn’t matter whether someone is Muslim, Christian, or atheist. What matters most is the disposition of the soul toward the ubiquitous, superabundant presence of grace, whether recognized as such or not. Are you open or are you closed? If you’re open and you act, you’re an infusion point, and the world is changed.
The great saints in all cultures are the ones through whom this grace pours into the world in torrents. But for the rest of us it’s enough that we be cracks in the wall through which it trickles. I’m not talking about anything humanly spectacular here. The simplest acts of kindness, of loyalty, of speaking the truth can be infusion points of grace into the world, and they may bear fruit in ways that we never know. It’s only important that we are open and that we act. “Think not of the harvest, says St. James in his epistle, “but only of proper sowing.”
The mental framework is not the most important thing; the disposition of the soul is. While the obsession with doctrinal purity is to me absurd and often a sign of mental illness, nevertheless the mental framework within which one lives, depending on its suppleness or rigidity, affects the disposition of the soul. What you believe and think makes a difference. What you believe can open up possibilities, and it can close them off. It can lead to cynicism or naïve idealism, to slavishness or proud resistance. The soul suffers significant consequences if the mind is seduced by cultish ideologies of the left or right. It is precisely from these mind prisons that so many people need to be liberated, and religious fanatics are among those in direst need.
The Pharisees in the gospel stories are the paradigm for this kind of enslavement to religious ideology. The obsession with correct behavior and correct belief becomes a wall that closes one off from grace. I’ve called it elsewhere whited-sepulcher syndrome. By their stench you will know them.
Which leads me back to what I want say about Original Sin. I think it makes a difference if you live within a mental framework in which this concept plays a role. I want to explain how it has come to make a difference to me. But this is long enough for today. More another day. For Part IV, click here.
Part 4: House–Purgatorial Man
If you’ve been following the logic of the three preceding pieces on Original Sin, it should be clear that there is no necessary moral difference between being naughty or nice. Being nice means for the most part being well socialized, which has the moral equivalence of being potty trained. Being nice is what we are trained to do in order to get along with others, and I’m all for potty training and getting along. But there’s nothing metaphysically good about being nice; it’s just convenient.
I’ve become a fan of the Fox Tuesday evening TV show “House”. The main character, Gregory House, is a legendary medical diagnostician, and he is not at all “nice,” and he is not at all interested in “getting along.” At first glance he seems to be just another arrogant doc. But after watching the show for awhile it becomes clear that he is a Diogenes figure, a ruthlessly honest man searching for other honest men and women, and not usually not finding anyone who qualifies. He sees through every subterfuge, every charade, every supposedly noble justification that masks ignoble motives. His basic assumption about human beings is that they are full of shit, and he’s right. For me that’s another way of saying that we’re all under the influence of original sin.
Is House a good man? No, but he is an honest man. Morally, he is neither here nor there. He has yet to be won over. He is not nice, but neither is he deluded, which puts him on the threshold of goodness. He is nauseated by any manifestations of cheap grace and sentimentality, but the 9/20 episode suggests that he is capable of recognizing and honoring goodness when it is the real thing.
The story involved a little girl with an inoperable tumor which was going to kill her within the year. She was the poster child for courage in the face of suffering and death, and House was having none of it. At one point he says to Wilson something along the lines of “Why is it that all these children are courageous? If they are all courageous, then none are courageous.” Courage, if it is real, has to be something that transcends the cliche about the plucky, terminally ill child celebrated by Oprah or Katie Couric.
He hypothesizes that the child really has no emotional grasp of the reality that she will die and that she will suffer terribly before she does. Or even if she does understand, that the illness has affected her brain in such a way that she does not have the normal fear response. So he takes it upon himself to make sure that she does understand, and that she doesn’t have to go through with it, and that it could end right now by refusing to go through a hellish procedure required to buy her a little time. Without going into the details, she proves him wrong, and in the end he reluctantly acknowledges that there is something going on with her he can’t quite fathom. He has brushed up against the true goodness that lies behind the cliche, and he is moved by it.
So the point is that it’s possible not to be full of shit, because this kid wasn’t. Sometimes what appears conventionally nice is in fact truly good.
In the Christian mystical tradition going back to Pseudo-Dionysus and Bonaventure, the path toward God comprises three stages: Purification, Illumination, Union. House represents the first stage—having the ruthless honesty to recognize that we’re mostly full of shit and that we need to be purged. House is a purgatorial figure in this sense—a monk wrestling in his cell with the devil. He is more progressed than the other docs around him because he sees more shrewdly and clearly than those around him. Illumination is the gradual process by which the substance of truth and goodness fills the space that was formerly occupied by all the shit. And union is what becomes possible when all the shit is purged and the shattered image cleaned and restored. Then we will have fully realized that which we were created to become, and then we shall see face to face. Most people are like me, mostly full of shit with occasional moments of illumination.
Martin Luther, who knew a thing or two about shit, insisted that we humans were simul iustus et peccator, at the same time saved and sinner. I think he got it half right. He was describing accurately our existential condition insofar as we have awakened to the fact of grace, and how it breaks into the shit-filled world that is our souls. And that therefore our condition as humans is both to be half full of shit and half full of grace, so to say.
But I don’t think there’s always an even balance between the two. In each of us there’s more of one or the other. I think there is a tipping point and the balance can shift, and that shift is effected at least in part by our effort. So sure, sola fide and sola gratia—it all starts there, but you got to do something with it. You’ve got to be fruitful.
Lutheran-style Protestantism easily leads to the kind of “I’m not ok; you’re not ok–but it’s ok” complacency that is so typical of mainsteam Christianity. And I think sola fide Protestantism emphasizes too much the idea that there has to be this conversion moment, this eureka, I’ve found Jesus moment. I think some people have such moments, but mostly it doesn’t work that way, and it doesn’t have to.
But even if it does, even if you have an experience that knocks you off your horse, what difference does it make if you don’t do anything with it? If it just results in your joining up with a bunch of Jesus freaks and spend the rest of your days congratulating one another on your great good luck, and nothing comes of it–you still remain mostly full of shit with no prospects for improvement. It seems to me that there’s an awful lot of what passes for evangelism is little more than recruitment into the Christian Complacency Club–my definition of hell. I’d rather hang with House.
Part 5: Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso.
Thanks to Dave Shack for sending the following quote by Frederick Buechner in response to my “House” post. I think it gets at Luther’s neither here nor there status of human beings very nicely:
I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense that I can believe matters much to Christ or anybody else. Any Christian who is not a hero, Léon Bloy wrote, is a pig, which is a harder way of saying the same thing. From time to time I find a kind of heroism momentarily possible—a seeing, doing, telling of Christly truth—but most of the time I am indistinguishable from the rest of the herd that jostles and snuffles at the great trough of life. Part-time novelist, Christian, pig.
The rest of the time, in other words, we’re normal. And I guess the point that I’ve been trying to make is that it’s ok to be normal; it’s normal to be normal. But being normal is not normative; for the Christian impulse is about loving the normal and yet not accepting it as all there is, and from time to time acting in such a way as to subvert it.
Despite the pejorative connotations, I don’t think it’s such a bad thing to be a pig. It’s simply a metaphor for our normal, natural life in a fallen world. There is so much that is good about that. Going to ballgames and hoping your team wins. Raising your kids to do well in school and to get decent jobs. Normal is the ordinary joys and sorrows, the tedium and excitement of a life lived through its different rhythms. It means arguing about politics and mowing your lawn. It’s about falling in and out of love, and about our dreams for a better future. It’s our life as talking, self-aware animals, piggies if you will, living on the earth, and if we see our normal life in this way, it’s hard to take it too seriously, because really it shouldn’t be.
There is much in the normal that is truly good, but it’s not the only possibility. We may be litle piggies, but we are capable being more. We want to be more or to think of ourselves as more, but there is a right way and a wrong way of going about it. The normal route people take to being more has to do with ambition and pride, this always leads to problems. The non-normal route is to recognize oneself for the piggy one is and then work with something that we don’t think of as natural, but which is as much a part of our daily experience as the air we breathe.
You know the movie “A Day without a Mexican”? It tries to show how important to the life of L.A. is the mostly taken-for-granted presence of Mexicans. Well imagine the world without the taken-for-granted presence of grace. Maybe Quentin Tarrantino could be hired to do the movie about a world without grace–or maybe he already has. For surely he has a knack for showing us the lives of people who live in a world of banal vileness, banal and vile to the degree that they are closed off from the reality of grace.
I believe there is a principle of metaphysical evil that operates in the world, and its purpose is to close humans off from the possibility of grace. Hell is the soul’s state which has become completely impenetrable by grace. But I doubt anybody takes up permanent residence in downtown Infernoville. There are, though,plenty of people who live in its suburbs. And there are people who likewise live in the suburbs of Paradiso. But most of us live in the murky, in-between burb, which is downtown Purgatorio. It’s the place we call normal, neither filled with grace, nor completely cut off from it.
These are metaphorical places, but also metaphysical ones. It’s the condition of all of us who live in a fallen world. It is not a physical place, but the physical world is changed by being within the gravitatiional pull of those people who have Paradiso within them. Non-normal things can happen.
Natura est vulnerata, non delenda. Nature is wounded, not destroyed. I’m going from memory here, so I’m not sure, but think it’s Aquinas who said it. It makes a difference if you think of the world as we live in it as wounded, because it suggests that health and wholeness was something lost and also that it can be regained. It suggests that what we have come to take for granted as normal is not necessarily healthful. It makes a difference because it contrasts with the naturalistic understanding that accepts the normal, natural world as the only possibility. And it makes a difference in contrast with the view, Eastern or Western, that understands the world as a prison with no possibilities other than to be a prison, so therefore a place that must be escaped.
It makes a difference because it frames for us the nature of the “heroic” work that we are called to do–the work that truly makes us more than piggies eating at life’s trough. And it defines what heroic means in ways that circumvent all the recognition-driven motivations that are at the heart of the traditional meaning of heroism. Natural heroism is piggie heroism, insofar as it’s driven by adrenaline and testosterone. It is in my view morally neutral because it’s natural and instinct driven, even if prodigious in its accomplishment. It’s bucks bashing one another in a battle for dominance. It is a heroism that is neither here nor there. For the heroism about which Bloy and Buechner speak is not about the performance of tasks that require extraordinary gifts. They are motivated by grace.
Heroism in this sense is the cumulative record of a life lived, usually obscurely, in response to the presence of the possibility of true freedom or grace. It is about the development of the kind of character which, because it is capable of responding to grace in small ways over the the course of a lifetime, is then also capable, if the occasion arises, of responding in a big way. It is only because of a lifetime of small decisions, small gestures, and the habit of soul that is developed as a result, that if something big comes, and even if notoriety comes with it, there is enough ballast to keep him or her from being blown over.
I haven’t had much time lately, and I don’t feel that I’m saying this very well. I want to take this further. But there’s too much else going on for me to really dig into it just now. But I will get to it.
[Originally published in separate essays in Autumn 2005]