[Ed. note: I'm reposting this 2005 piece as a follow up to "The Communion of Saints" post I put up over the weekend.[
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 framework I have developed over the years. It contrasts dramatically with the 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, whether consciously chosen or unconsciously assimilated, 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 fruitful 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. And ideas matter to the degree that they open one up or close one off to the possibility of this 'more' breaking in from outside the system. If you believe you live in a closed system, then you think and behave like a prisoner.
The great saints in all cultures are those through whom this grace, this 'more' from outside the system, 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.”
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.