Many Christians throughout history have insisted on seeing imputable guilt behind all the sins for which we are responsible. This seems wrong to me. You can be responsible for a situation, say the self-destructively rebellious state of a teenager, though you might well be free of guilt in a criminal or moral sense. Being responsible, you can incur criminal or moral guilt by not doing what you should to help that teenager, imposing controls or counseling him or getting him to a doctor or whatever. But responsibility doesn’t imply you, or some mythical ancestor, caused the situation.
Your responsibility can come from your state and your relationships to the states of other human beings (such as that rebellious teenager) or the property you hold as a steward in God’s world or political responsibilities entrusted to you as a steward. Culpability isn’t necessary for responsibility. Advocates of Original Sin were right that we’re responsible for our sinful states but they were wrong in speculating how we got into these states. They were wrong because of their felt need to find some sort of culpability as causing our responsibility. They took literalistically their own analogies drawn from human legal systems. They still could have seen they were wrong if they’d known more about the origin of the human race — it’s hard to imagine an apish creature from the Neolithic Era making a decision that would bind the entire human race for all time. And yet we are bound by our responsibility for who and what we are — our inborn traits as well as the vices and virtues we turn those traits into and most certainly our conscious sins of commission or omission. After all, it’s what and who we are and our only way of getting rid of that responsibility in this mortal life is to stop being us.
Maybe my psychological make-up is unusual, but I know that I’m me and I feel responsible for being me with all my weaknesses and faults, with my history of deliberate sins and accidental misdeeds. I feel the more responsible when I look forward to the possibility of becoming a Christ-like man, God willing, after my resurrection. I disagree with the supposedly more traditional thinkers who would say I’m culpable in a criminal sense for my misdirected or mistimed desires. I disagree far more strongly with the supposedly more modern thinkers who feel we’re only responsible for sins in the first-degree — those we commit with full intention and after months of planning.
The error of those supposedly more traditional thinkers did have a very serious result. The view of man that underlay their confusion of responsibility and guilt (in the sense used in a modern court of justice) fed into the modern idea that the fullness of ‘I’ is the conscious stream of mental and emotional activity that is most readily identified with ‘I’. That is perhaps the continuity between the supposedly traditional and supposedly modern thinkers: that view of man as being that conscious stream of mental and emotional activity evolved into the modern, liberal idea that man is an autonomous agent. If that stream of consciousness is the real ‘I’, then surely a man can change his other parts to the desires of that ‘I’ even to selecting to become a woman under the scalpel of a butcher.
In any case, a man can act more modestly than seeking a change in his sex. He can enter the marketplaces to select a seemingly more pious life-style in the same way he selects a toothpaste. In fact, our very ways of developing and marketing toothpastes and then selecting them when we shift roles from marketing-widget to consumer-widget will itself eliminate a vast array of life-styles which might well be more human and humane that those available to us in the marketplaces. Certainly, it will eliminate God-centered life-styles.
Along these lines, I agree with the farmer, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry that we’d solve our ecological problems if we found ourselves moral ways to make our livings. More generally, we’d solve a host of ecological and political and social problems — perhaps even some literary and intellectual problems — if we found moral ways to organize our lives and our communities. This isn’t to claim the possibilities of perfection on the part of old-fashioned families or traditional communities. We are what we are and will commit sins in those institutions just as we commit them in the marketplaces — though the number and severity of sins might well lessen without Hollywood to teach us ways of evil. Those old-fashioned families and traditional communities aren’t perfect but they are more human, in scale and in the forms of relationships between individuals.
I’ve been struggling with this topic for years, agreeing St. Augustine — and Jesus — in feeling myself responsible even for the desires pushed into my head by perverse rock-and-roll lyrics, by viewings of too many centerfolds when I was young, by watching perverse movies of the sort to which even young children are nowadays exposed. I confess my age when I admit that, as a young man, I went with a group to an X-rated cinema in a seedy part of Springfield, MA to see a movie (“Flesh Gordon”) far milder than some shown on TV nowadays.
Others may have incurred conscious guilt for providing this trash — in the sense of morality if not a court of justice — but my responsibility remains. And ‘me’ certainly is disordered in some important ways, because of my inborn traits and also because I reflect some of the disorder of a strange society — a physically prosperous and technically advanced society populated by the barbaric children Ortega described so well in “The Revolt of the Masses”, an often misunderstood and misread book — but that’s another topic.
Still I’ve found digression to be necessary in exploring paths that might lead to a better ‘me’ and might allow me to describe futures which might be more desirable than the ones to which we’re headed as we follow our exploiters deeper into the alleys of marketplace cities bereft of sacred spaces or even natural spaces. I digress away from the paths those exploiters would prefer me to travel. Sometimes I find a better path, or at least one more interesting. Digression is probably non-productive if someone doesn’t have the odd combination of ability to follow a complex line of thought and also to shift rapidly between lines of thought which is part and parcel of creative thought in philosophy or literature or — most likely — any field including physics. Digression is part of who I am and it leads to me failing to follow certain real-world responsibilities, especially in our bureaucratically stifled world but it also leads to the possibilities of new insights and prophetic warnings based on known truths.
As for the Biblical position on this issue? I seem to be only following Jesus in thinking myself to be responsible for the glandular flows and visual systems in my brain that lead me to look wrongly at a woman, not just responsible for going over and talking to her while plotting to seduce her. Those glandular flows are also me even if I don’t act out their urgings. Those flows must also be brought into my Christ-like state if I’m to be saved, if I’m to share the Life of God for time without end.