Part I: Sinning Originally

I revised my post about "Naive Idealism" this morning. I wanted to be clearer about the meaning of the lifeline metaphor I used toward the end of it. And in order to  understand what I'm getting at, you have to understand the concept of original sin, which is an idea most moderns have a hard time dealing with. I think it needs to be retrieved in a way that makes sense for the development of a postmodern or post-secular Christian narrative.

As with any idea that has real profundity, it is cheapened by overuse and by advocates of the idea who reduce it to terms they feel comfortable with. And as with any idea, its value lies with the uses to which it is put. Is it an idea that helps you to understand the world, or is it an idea that creates more problems than it solves?

As an idea that lies at the very foundation of the Judeo-Christian narrative, it 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 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.   From the celebration of the Greek and Roman worldview that you see in so much of the great paintings of the baroque era through Rousseau and Nietzsche and Freud, there was a longing to escape the body-hating constraints and the accompanying guilts of Christian civilization.  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’s 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 thereness 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.

Here are the links for Part II,  Part III,  Part IV, and Part V.