What is Original Sin?

As I noted in my book, “To See a World in a Grain of Sand”, the term ‘original sin’ points to a fundamental truth about the human condition, but it seems to miss the target a bit. Our knowledge of human nature and of the physical world has expanded greatly in recent years and has shifted the corresponding understandings.

Maybe human beings have always had trouble distinguishing between revelation, empirical knowledge, and human speculation. Or maybe we have far greater probelems because of our deep illiteracy as a culture. In either case, ‘original sin’, mostly a doctrine about the condition of a creature — man, has become a matter of revelation in the views of many who consider themselves to be defenders of traditional Christian thought. This is strange. While revelation is necessary to tell us our exact relationship to God, we come to understand our own natures by observing those natures and gaining some substantial knowledge of how those natures came to be.

And yet, as I noted, the term ‘original sin’ speaks of a profound truth about the basic condition of man. It speaks of a deep sort of disorder that leads us often to act against our own best instincts and sometimes leads us to act in self-destructive ways or in evil ways towards even those we love. But the fully elaborated concept of `original sin’ as we have inherited it adds a variety of claims that are only one possible interpretation of the creation stories in the book of Genesis and those claims are in serious conflict with much of our empirical knowledge about man and about this universe.

That fully elaborated concept of ‘original sin’, found in the last chapters of “The City of God” by St. Augustine of Hippo, was developed using concepts borrowed from ancient myths — I might even say ‘pagan’ myths — of man’s fall from a god-like state. The Golden Age decayed to a Bronze Age and then further to an Iron Age. There was an esthetic decay modeled in these myths along with a practical advancement, though that was probably accidental because few ancient thinkers even perceived that double-edged sword called ‘progress’. None that I know of had any deep understanding that they were moving through a time that did much but cycle around. The Golden Age would return and the process of decay would start again from that same height.

Christian thinkers borrowed those myths but eliminated the cyclical nature. Even so brilliant a thinker as Nietzsche was not able to much damage the secularized revelation from Christ’s story that the history of this world is linear. There was a one-time creation event, which we cannot see, and there will be a one-time end-of-times, which we cannot anticipate.

This proved a dangerous insight when combined with 2 other ideas:

  1. The idea that God acts as if He is a human lawyer; and
  2. The idea that the linear flow of history began at some high point, a Golden or Edenic Age, where human beings were in a prior state of grace, of perfection of a creaturely sort.

So far as the first idea goes: God is primarily a Creator. He is no more a Lawyer than He is a Designer. He is also a story-teller before He is either Lawyer or Designer.

So far as the second idea goes: our ancestors were knuckle-dragging apes and we haven’t advanced so far as some people think. But we are certainly not in a steady state of decay, however much we often decay for centuries at a time.

I emphasize that the concept of `original sin’ is not found in revelation directly. It is a human speculation which comes from reading the Bible in light of both the true insight that man is in a radical state of disorder and two other beliefs related to the two wrong ideas above:

  1. Man could not be in such a state of disorder, often including various sorts of pains and sufferings, unless it is punishment for something he did wrong. This comes from viewing God as a Transcendental Lawyer operating according to a human scale of justice. We cannot understand, limit, or expand God’s justice. A human system of justice is a weak metaphor for God’s justice in the same way that human systems of thought or action are no more than weak metaphors for God’s acts of creation.
  2. Man was created as man and is inerently a creature capable of hearing and accepting God’s offer of companionship.

In fact, the developmental aspects of the worldview I developed in “To See a World in a Grain of Sand” take care of both problems. The first problem is eliminated by the simple realization that God is a Creator of being and a shaper of particular universes. In future books and blog-entries, I will discuss the difference between God as Creator and God as Designer or Judge. For now, I’ll just note that there is a difference and we do not need to assume that God would, or could, give us our just deserts in this world — whatever that might mean. We would probably be better to wonder if God is telling this particular story with all its misery and pain and unfairness just because it is His chosen way of producing the saints He wishes as His companions.

The second problem is eliminated by simply realizing our ancestors, being also the ancestors of chimpanzees, were not inherently rational nor inherently God-centered in a conscious manner. Not only are we dependent upon God reaching out to us, we are dependent upon the Almighty Lord teaching us that He is there and is reaching out to us.

My way of understanding our human selves, more importantly — of understanding our relationship to God, is very complex and is not a task to be completed in one life. Yet, I can see hints of what is involved and those hints once again come through modern empirical knowledge. By way of our disciplined exploration of this phase of Creation we call the universe, we are learning to think the thoughts God feels appropriate to us. We may well conjecture these are thoughts we will be thinking when we are companions of God in another, more peaceful phase of Creation. In any case, it is quantum mechanics that is teaching us to view relationships as being primary, though that is probably a lesson we should have learned from the Gospel of St. John as well as his letters.

Once we see our very beings as the result of God chosing to have a relationship of love with us before we even existed, once we see the universe and all other phases of Creation as existing just because they are objects of God’s love, we can give up our attempts to make our own what is an ongoing gift. We do not even possess our own existence let alone any attributes that make us suited for life as God’s companions. We can realize that our beings and our various attributes, good and bad, are a result of God’s chosen relationships with us. And that forces us to realize that we, as individuals and as a species, are living out a story which pleases God. Our way to God, even that lesser way to a state of virtuous paganism, leads through various environments in which order uses building blocks drawn from the stuff of disorder.

Whatever might be possible to God, He has certainly not chosen to Create a universe in which men are, or ever could have been, living in a state of grace. This is not to deny that we all receive God’s gifts, His grace. This is to say that neither we nor our apish ancestors could have been the sorts of creatures capable of responding in full faith and confidence to God’s offers of companionship. God might have created such beings but they wouldn’t have been us.

The traditional doctrine of ‘original sin’ points to a great truth but it is not a very good explanation of the human condition. It is far better to retreat to St. Augustine’s earlier insight. We do not sin, we are sin. We are not autonomous agents with free-wills who can chose to be sinful creatures or to be angelic creatures who reject sin once and for all. We are sin to thedepths of our beings.

Only God can change this condition. We are living in a story God is telling, not one which we — or any conceiveable demons — can change in any fundamental way. Even the greatest possible use of our limited freedom can accomplish little unless God chooses to leverage it as He did, over a period of centuries, the noble but humble efforts of St. Benedict and his companions. All they wanted to do was to live a Christian life in small communities and God used them not only to develop and spread the Gospel but also to salvage much of Roman technology and then to start developing it in innovative ways. Even when our actions have great effects in this world, we can’t predict what those effects will be. God’s ways are not our ways and yet it is our task to try to make them our ways.

It is this mismatch between what God calls us to be and what we can be by our inherent powers that can be misunderstood as ‘original sin’. It is a sinful state since our Creator has called us to a better state and we are responsible for that sinful state. But we are not responsible by the criteria of human systems of justice because we did not will to be what we are and could not have been different and still have been us. We are responsible and yet we have no good way to say why.

We would be better off if we looked at our real situation and developed stories to explain it rather than trying to defend a view of human nature which can be readily seen to be both right and wrong. We have a duty to move towards a new view which will retain what is right about the concept of ‘original sin’ while correcting what is known to be wrong. True, that view will eventually be seen to be also partly wrong but we have to recognize our creaturel limitations and work within them.