Paying Attention To The Sky

Original Sin at the Museum of National Arts of Popular Traditions Paris, France

“No doctrine inside the precincts of the Christian Church is received with greater reserve and hesitation, even to the point of outright denial, than the doctrine of original sin. Of course in a secular culture like ours, any number of Christian doctrines will be disputed by outsiders, from the existence of God to the resurrection of Jesus. But even in those denominations that pride themselves on their adherence to the orthodox dogmas of the once-universal Church, the doctrine of original sin is met with either embarrassed silence, outright denial, or at a minimum a kind of halfhearted lip service that does not exactly deny the doctrine but has no idea how to place it inside the devout life. Even the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church, surprisingly enough, calls original sin a “sin” only in an analogous sense (#404), because unlike other (presumably real?) sins it is only contracted and not committed — a concession that would certainly have surprised Augustine, who had a vivid and almost physical/biological understanding of the First Sin.”

So begins Fr. Edward T. Oakes engaging essay on Original Sin. He continues:

“Clearly, Augustine’s authority notwithstanding, the doctrine is in crisis, a crisis different in kind from the challenge that secular modernity hurls at the totality of the Christian message. Secular culture undeniably plays a part here as well, with its doctrine of evolution or its belief in progress (now a rather tattered and shopworn belief, though one that still lurks in certain editorials and books). But much more severe is the outright discomfort believers feel in the doctrine because of what seems to them its internal inconsistency: how can guilt, an ethical and spiritual category, be inheritable, a category drawn from nature? As with the doctrine of predestination, to which it is often married, there seems to be a kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” aura to the theology of original sin: Free will may be free, declares Augustine without apparent embarrassment, only it is not free to do good. “How then do miserable men dare to be proud of free will before, or of their own strength after, they are liberated?” But no sooner does Augustine fear that the concept of original sin might threaten the idea of human responsibility than he quickly turns around and becomes free will’s best advocate, again without a trace of embarrassment: “Let no man dare to deny the freedom of the will as to excuse sin.” In other words, if you do a good deed, that is God’s doing; if you commit a wrong, it is your doing.”

Fr. Oakes mounts a defense of Original Sin based on Thomas Aquinas’ treatments of “disputed questions” that are found in the Summa Theologiae. He begins with an exposition of the position and then moves to a Videtur quod section of the argument where he refutes it. Thomas stated his opponents positions so fairly and convincingly that sometimes he seemed to present a better argument than they did. Only after stating the case would he move to the Sed contra (“on the contrary”) section of the argument

This is confusing for the modern reader, particularly those who have been raised on the duotone for and against cable news version of discussion. In fact the essay provoked numerous responses and some were generated from the lack of familiarity with the disputatio format that Fr. Oakes used.

The core of his argument is here: 

John Henry Newman, for one, always insisted that original sin is the only way believers can make sense of the world when they contrast that world to their faith in God. So powerful is his description of the meaning of this doctrine (it is probably the most famous passage in his Apologia pro vita sua) that it bears quoting in full:

If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflection of its Creator. . . . [To consider] the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turns out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, “having no hope and without God in the world”—all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution. What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence.

This remarkably modern passage does not, admittedly, present a full-throated defense of the doctrine of original sin, for it still allows a choice between atheism or a subscription to a belief in the Fall to account for the presence of evil in the world. But that is how the doctrine of original sin has in fact functioned in the history of the Church’s thought: it is a secondary implication arising from a prior belief in God’s goodness and omnipotence. Thus the waning of belief in God was bound to make the doctrine of original sin seem irrational. But that hardly makes it less indispensable, as Steven Duffy argued in an important 1988 article in Theological Studies:

In the twentieth century, when human beings have already killed well over one hundred million of their kind, disenchantment [with an optimistic view of human nature] has set in. Two world wars, the Gulags, the Holocaust, Korea, Vietnam, the nuclear and ecological threats form a somber litany that makes the optimism of the liberals ring hollow and naïve. Despite technological progress, evil, far from vanishing, has only become more powerful and more fiendish. . . . And artists like Conrad, Camus, Beckett, Golding, and Murdoch contend that because of our hearts of darkness there may be countless nice men and women but few if any genuinely good ones. In all these perspectives evil is held to be inherent, somehow structural, ingrained. And its terrible power defies explanation and solution. Paradoxically, the silver wings of science and technology, on which soared the hopes of the industrialized societies, carry the ultimate menace to the human prospect.

Nor is the doctrine, in its essence, tied to a “literal” interpretation of the narrative of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2-3, despite what so many people think. In fact, the ubiquitous evil of the world, when honestly considered, is not a reality that an honest person should see first and primarily as an abstract issue of speculative theodicy (“How can there be evil out there when God is good?”); rather it is one that should first arise from within the human heart itself (“Why do I do the evil I abhor?”).

What is more, the consequences of abandoning the doctrine are nothing short of disastrous. Indeed, perhaps the best way of defending the doctrine is to follow the career of modernity and see the consequences of not holding to the doctrine. I am reminded in this context of a shrewd observation by Anatole France to the effect that never have so many been murdered in the name of a doctrine as in the name of the principle that human beings are naturally good. When one glances over the catalogue of evils that have so pockmarked this century, it is extraordinary how many have come from doctrines founded on the notion of the perfectibility of man. As Niebuhr puts it so well:

The utopian illusions and sentimental aberrations of modern liberal culture are really all derived from the basic error of negating the fact of original sin. This error . . . continually betrays modern men to equate the goodness of men with the virtue of their various schemes for social justice and international peace. When these schemes fail of realization or are realized only after tragic conflicts, modern men either turn from utopianism to disillusionment and despair, or they seek to place the onus of their failure upon some particular social group, . . . [which is why] both modern liberalism and modern Marxism are always facing the alternatives of moral futility or moral fanaticism. Liberalism in its pure form [that is, pacifism] usually succumbs to the peril of futility. It will not act against evil until it is able to find a vantage point of guiltlessness from which to operate. This means that it cannot act at all. Sometimes it imagines that this inaction is the guiltlessness for which it has been seeking. A minority of liberals and most of the Marxists solve the problem by assuming that they have found a position of guiltlessness in action. Thereby they are betrayed into the error of fanaticism.

This too, like Cardinal Newman’s defense of the doctrine, is not a positive “proof” in the technical sense but merely points to the consequences of abandoning the doctrine. But such a modest opening gambit at least blocks the way to an outright denial of the doctrine. For it is, after all, mostly because of Augustine’s own formulations of a perfect Paradise spoiled by a nearly unmotivated sin that make Christians feel stranded in their sense of the doctrine, especially in the light of evolution. On its own terms, the doctrine stands as a cipher pointing to what everyone senses in his or her own heart: that sin after Adam always takes the form of acquiescence and not of origination. We are born, that is, into a world where rebellion against God has already taken place, and the drift of it sweeps us along.

Nor, properly understood, is Augustine’s rosy scenario of Paradise (which John Milton used so effectively in Paradise Lost) all that absurd: the Catechism speaks of the “figurative language” of Genesis 3 (#390), and the same must therefore apply, a fortiori, to Augustine’s portrait of Adam and Eve before the Fall. The reason we are drawn, despite the theory of evolution, to Augustine’s and Milton’s portrait of Paradise before the Fall is the memory of that original justice we once had with God but lost through sin, as Pascal explains so well:

The greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is called nature we call wretchedness in man; by which we recognize that, his nature now being like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his. For who is unhappy at not being a king except a deposed king? Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no one ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes; but anyone would be inconsolable at having none.

In other words, when Augustine and Milton paint their version of “paradise lost” with the genius of their theological imagination, they are putting into figurative language this elementary insight of Pascal’s, one that every human being can recognize. The Genesis story of the Fall even retains its validity when we admit into our purview the folkloric motif of the serpent. As Paul Ricoeur notes in his book The Symbolism of Evil, which along with Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man is perhaps the best book on this topic written in the twentieth century, the figure of the serpent symbolizes a seldom-stressed aspect of the doctrine of the Fall: that rebellion against God also pre-existed the human species: “It is noteworthy that the Adamic myth does not succeed,” says Ricoeur, “in concentrating and absorbing the origin of evil in the figure of a primordial man alone; it speaks also of the adversary, the Serpent, later [understood as] the devil.” In a way, the term “original sin,” at least when taken, as it usually is, to refer to what happened to humanity in Adam and Eve, is a misnomer, for it is crucial to the narrative that they were tempted, and indeed by an outside force or reality. Niebuhr also emphasizes this point:

The importance of biblical satanology lies in the two facts that: (1) the devil is not thought of as having been created evil. Rather his evil arises from his effort to transgress the bounds set for his life, an effort which places him in rebellion against God. (2) The devil fell before man fell, which is to say that man’s rebellion against God is not an act of sheer perversity, nor does it follow inevitably from the situation in which he stands.

The term “original” sin still retains its validity, though, even when applied to Adam and Eve, for the narrative definitely holds that, in St. Paul’s terms, sin entered the world through the sin of our first parents and henceforth takes on the specifically human form of “giving in,” of yielding to a force already heavily at work in the world of creation. This is why for the saints an asceticism of agere contra, literally “striving against,” was so crucial. For without a conscious effort to “stem the tide” of sin, acquiescence will sweep us along in its path.

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There is no doubt that original sin is a hard doctrine. For if we are infected with an original corruption to the very core of our natures, then there is a great deal of evil that cannot be uprooted—not an easy doctrine to accept in our activist times. Without the aid of God, unearned and unmerited, so this doctrine says, our misery is incurable.

No wonder, too, that Christians are more and more opting for a theology of universal reconciliation, hoping for an empty hell, a theological opinion most vigorously defended recently by the late Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. And while he is certainly right that there are certain biblical warrants for this hope, I also feel that the attraction that many Christians increasingly feel to that doctrine can be worrisome. In this accommodating climate perhaps the Church would do well to heed the admonition of Kolakowski:

It is hardly surprising that the optimistic philosophy of universal reconciliation should tempt contemporary Christianity so strongly. After the many failures it suffered through its inability to cope with a secular civilization and its mistrust of intellectual and social changes beyond its control, after its spurious success in overcoming the Modernist crisis at the beginning of this century, a Great Fear seems to have pervaded the Christian world—the fear of being trapped in an alien enclave within a basically un-Christian society. This Great Fear of being out-distanced and isolated now impels Christian thinking towards the idea that the most important task of Christianity is not only to be “within the world,” not only to participate in the efforts of secular culture, not only to modify the language of its teachings so that they are intelligible to all men, but to sanctify in advance almost any movement that arises spontaneously from natural human impulses. Universal suspicion seems to have been supplanted by universal approval; the dread of a forced retreat to the Christian culture of the Syllabus of Errors . . . appears to be stronger than that of losing one’s identity.

It is my deep conviction that any mitigation of the doctrine of original sin will prove disastrous for the health of the Church in the future, and for just the reasons that Kolakowski adduces. If the experience of human history from Rousseau to Stalin means anything, it must be that we are stuck, like it or not, with the doctrine—nay, the reality—of original sin. But as St. Paul knew, this need not be a morbid doctrine. For our diagnosis has come with a cure. Even Augustine’s formulation is perfectly understandable to people today, for he, perhaps even more than St. Paul, got to the heart of the issue when he noted that although (by virtue of our nature as human beings) we are free to do what we like, we are not free (by virtue of original sin) to like what we ought to like. And this insight is the beginning of the journey toward that holiness which God has destined for His Church. For as the Rev. N. P. Williams so wonderfully notes, “The ordinary man may feel ashamed of doing wrong: but the saint, endowed with a superior refinement of moral sensibility, and keener powers of introspection, is ashamed of being the kind of man who is liable to do wrong.”

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My only argument here, against the whole plausible array of arguments against the doctrine, is that, despite its obvious paradoxicality, it proves to be more illuminating of the human condition than its competitors. As Pascal—who can set forth in two lines what it takes other theologians two books to show—says with his usual precision: “Doubtless there is nothing more shocking to our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has rendered guilty those who, being so removed from its source, seem incapable of participating in it. Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine, and yet without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves.”

You will find the complete article here.