Sin is not in vogue. Myriads insist they have no sins. Even churches seem increasingly hesitant to use the word. I was recently at a Roman Catholic funeral wherein the priest expressed his hope that God would not consider the “mistakes” the departed had made in life. Where, I wondered, had gone the Dies irae with its plangent intonation of man’s culpability and its firm faith in the mercy and love of a God who himself died to bring back man into his arms, his heart, his life? Does sin have any meaning in this age? Does anyone know the meaning of sin?
As it is obvious the world is not flooded with angels and saints in glory, one must wonder where sin has gone. Has the persistent preaching of a God of hell-fire and damnation caused both God and sin to become unpalatable items? Has modern man been so pampered that failure and fault are intolerable to his glorified self-esteem? Has sin become something so prevailing that it fades in significance? Is sin, always the kin of death, something from which we prefer to hide? It is of note that we do hide from death.[i] We no longer mourn the dead. We prefer today to “celebrate life.” It is as if the dead were merely retiring from a job. Where is the pain of having torn from our life one bonded to us in love and affection? Where is the sorrow for one lost to our daily life? We are likewise wont to gloss over our deadly moral deficiencies that tear away the possibilities of life out of our personal, social, and environmental relationships. We treat these deficiencies and losses as mistakes of judgement. We casually dismiss them as subject to “the way things are.” As we fear to deal with death, we fear even more to deal with the death we implant into creation in the choices we daily make, or ignore to make. We are so afraid of life we cannot bring ourselves to face either its finality, which stands outside of our control, or its fragility, which is in our hands.
The reality of sin was once passed down by our elders. Indeed, one looked to the aged with respect for they were the bearers of history and tradition. Where are the aged today? If they are not shuttered away in “homes” under the assumption they will be there cared for, they, in growing number, are galloping about in search of a second youth, wandering the world, being nipped and tucked and botoxed in the hope of appearing to be the juvenile beings they want again to be. This is a sign of a society unmoored, a civilization in decline. This decline is coupled in the young. No longer do they want to be infolded into the ancient ways; they want for only a society that has for them the right “cultural fit,” something cocooned in their own budding and untested youthfulness.[ii] Where in all this is history and its lessons? History neglected, forgotten, misappropriated, is history lost. History now stands only to be pilloried for its faults, for its very temporality. It is execrated for being something lesser than the de rigueur present whose naïve estimation of itself is ever the same: Enlightened! That has always been the folly of the present when it is shorn of its history, its past.
Thus, once we were taught to take responsibility for our actions, that our actions had meaning and consequence, were capable of good and evil. Today, if something is morally questionable or patently wrong, it is soft-peddled and dismissed. The fault is not really mine because “it takes two to tango,” or “that’s just the way things are.” Personal responsibility is defenestrated. Individual responsibility is denied. If there is a “problem” it is not “mine,” and so it is up to some amorphous concoction of “society” or “government” to set things aright—and to do so without encumbrance of “my” freedom or finances. The infantile ego-centricity of the situation betrays the depth of the lie.
In the sundry sacred narratives that talk of a paradise or a golden age, moral differentiations are absent, and everything functions in peace and harmony. Then some fatal curiosity or venture causes the concord of nature to rupture. Reality spins out of control. A conflict in the heart of man has spilt out of him and differentiated him from the world about him. Man under-stands himself and nature differently. A primal fault-line in the psyche of man appears, and it creates waves of misadventure, enmity, destruction. There is more told here than the birth of a self-conscious ego. The narratives of our worldly beginnings manifest the primal thrust for unity, for self-integrity, for social, environmental, and spiritual integration. Without that proclamation of the ideal priority of unity there would be no significance to the disunity of life. While on one level the sacred narratives may well here reference the unity of embryonic life with the mother and the gradual unfolding into otherness with its differentiations and ensuing conflicts, a psychic manifest of a psycho-biological event does not negate the deeper truth being told. Indeed, it anchors it in empiric reality. There abides within every soul a power that seeks integrity and integration, and that power constantly abuts against the lethargy of life in its circuitous evolution. We have deeply set within a creative thrust to individuality within a thrust toward sociality and worldliness. Nature itself demands we each grow in the wisdom of self as coparcenary of the world. To the extent that integration of self and of self into world is not met, the originating fault-line within is exposed for its immaturity, its dissociation, its disharmonic of being. That fault-line Christianity names the original sin, speaks of as our broken nature. It is a psychic declivity to not ascend to a higher personal level of being, to hold onto an infantile-ego that wants the world to conform to “me.” That declivity to be infantile, to prefer the comfort of ego to the sacrifice demanded of authentically being-there for other and world, to be content with being a function of the anonymous mass, is the groundwork of all sin. If growth, if an anaclitic movement, is energy moving in a forward and positive path, then this declivity is a regression of energy, a shunning of the need to rise to responsibility and the demands of growth into self, into environment of other, and world. It is a psycho-biologic entropy. On the moral level to willfully bow to it, to regress to it, is to sin. On the theological level, the regression is an ignorance, an ignoring of the grace of the creative resident at the core of psyche. On the spiritual level, it is a defiance of Spirit, a loss of spirit, a lostness from spirit. All three levels can be summarized in one word: death, a death to the possibilities of integral and integrating life. Thus, since Eve and Adam we prefer to hide our sins, and disguise our shame of them.
We need to look back to the beginnings of post-classical psychology. Augustine sat at the end of the classical world which had viewed man as animated by three distinct principles: the sentient (plant like), the instinctual (animal like), and the rational (the uniquely human). It was an evolutionary stratification and was prioritized accordingly. Man had three souls. Man was authentically man when reason and will governed sentience and instinct. Augustine was, however, also informed by Hebrew scriptures. Therein God animated man with his own breath. Man had one animating principle, one soul. How then could this unit of being contain the seemingly autonomous and opposing forces of sentience, instinct, reason and will? The fracturing of the unity must be the result of the paradisiac fall. When man fell, his soul was broken. At times Augustine more harshly judged man’s soul, and claimed it to be utterly ruined. Whatsoever the case, to function properly the soul, the psyche, desperately needed a moral illumination and fortification from without. Augustine’s analysis has maintained considerable influence. Even a tincture of pessimism seems always to find fertile ground. We look for places and spaces to hang our woes and weariness that they become not so much “ours.” Calvin made Augustinian psychology bedrock for the reformed churches. We see also the cultural extent of its reach in certain schools of modern psychology (Freud), and philosophy (Sartre).
Augustine went beyond enunciating the brokenness of soul. The most potent of the instincts, the sexual, he judged to be the most disruptive of the unity of psyche. Not only was it disruptive, it was also disoriented. With a dash of the pen, sex became the number one problem in life. It was an animal instinct overriding reason and will and objectifying the other in its thrust for release. It propelled an insulation of ego against the other. The sexual instinct was taken as a quantifiable packet of energy whose thrust forward toward love had been blocked. It was now merely a declivity which descended into mere lust. Man had fallen from the angelic to the beastial. Because man is the apex of the worldly creation, the disorientation of the pro-creative thrust fractures creation itself. With that comes a deflection of moral energy. The need to be in every moment of life creative toward one another, toward the penultimate other, the world, and the ultimate other, God, is skewed. This is easy enough to espy in the amount of time and text spent on sexual “irregularities,” in the amount of sexual repression and suppression with which society is afflicted.
With so much focus and energy spent on sex as mere instinct there comes a demotion of all the other moral demands of our singular life in this singular world. Anti-social covetousness, envy, blinded prejudices, hate, all manner of callousness regarding the other (be that one other or the world), and with that greed, and the gluttonies of varied forms—all these take secondary place. In the course of daily life, even the objectification of other sexually is diminished because the sexual act is seen as instinct, as a quantity of energy, and not as a biological aspect of our nature capable within our nature of being transformed into a higher energy gradient, a psychic energy capable of lessening ego investment and investing energy in the embrace of the other as person. The instinctual understanding of sexuality imprisons sexuality in biology. If we confine the argument of man to biology, we defalcate psyche, soul and spirit. Instincts are evolutionary items, and they are capable of having their energy channeled to higher gradients. The instinct to pro-creation can lead us to more than biological reproduction. The instinct to satisfy hunger can lead us to more than biological satiation. Were it not so, we would not create art and hunger and thirst for justice. Were it not so the civilized would not have emerged from the brute.
Augustine’s psychology was not the only analysis. There was that of Pelagius. He had a more positive consideration of the human soul. It was not an utter ruin. It maintained a trace of the divine Logos that had made it. It could rise above the conflicts within by its natural or inborn powers, or, if you will, by the grace of its creation by the all-creative God. Unfortunately, Pelagius’ teachings roused the passions of Augustine, and he was not one to be defeated by any argument he found objectionable. Luther also, despite being well under the umbra of Augustinian thought, was more optimistic about man’s condition. While man is broken, man is still loved, and that love is in itself a saving grace. His position may shift in places, but the grace of God, the light of truth, dwells within. One needs only to turn within, and accept that apotropaic cross that crosses every soul, and acknowledge it as both condemnation and redemption, the crux of good and evil. While one is by the fall naturally a sinner, one is also eternally loved, and so valued, and in that capable of rising above nature, of being saved from the dictates of ego-desire. Therein life is freed to its fullness, its wholeness of meaning. Life becomes authentically in the world for the world. It becomes truly worldly. While the cross is the gibbet on which hangs every sin, it is also God’s fulcrum that lifts a man up into God.
Luther, like Augustine, was inform by scripture. It taught that while man is still a sinner he is loved by God. The love of God saves man from himself, holds him in life and well-being. In scriptural terms, salvation from sin is God’s gift. There is no ascent to God from man. There is no demand of good works to earn God’s favour. Salvation, the wholeness of life, is given, resident, abiding. It is “sole gratia [by grace alone].” God accepts, embraces, cherishes, loves man for what he is, not for what he, by grace, might become. But love is unitive. Love changes relationships. Love catches us up. Love transform those it joins. Thus, man comes to understand himself in a new light. A transformation begins. Man comes to trust that, despite all doubts and scruples, despite his unworthiness, he is indeed valued and loved. That trust, that faith, bonds man to God’s grace such that from the human side of love’s equation, love’s equalling, “by grace alone” becomes “sole fide [by faith alone].” Man is freed from doubt in himself, at-one with God, and in that man becomes free to be happy. It is the happy man who does good things. There is no mandate to do good works. They are simply the by-products of happiness. They are not meritorious acts, but the blessings a loved and happy soul transmits to the world so loved by God.
When Luther said man is “simul peccator et justus [simultaneously sinner and saint]” he gives voice to the optimism of gospel, and to the duality of man’s psyche. Salvation and sin are intimately related in man. The saint is not to be found without finding also the sinner. Before, however, we can see any individual sin, we need acknowledge that all have sinned, that we, the lot of us, are sinful, full of sin. It is the reality of life. We cannot escape it. We are called to individuality, and the formation of ego is a part of that process, and that process involves the need to differentiate and prioritize. It may always be a relative assessment of reality, but we divide the world into mine and yours, my needs and your needs, into good and bad, pleasurable and painful, into embraceable and rejectable, and we further prioritize those differentiations. We continuously make value judgements. The more we value “me” over others and the world, the more isolated the bits of the world become. The unity of the singularity of terrestrial life in which we are partakers suffers disunity, disharmony, disfunction. We are sinful, and every disharmony of relationship to one another, of society to society, of nation to nation, of man to the rest of nature cries out in agony for the loss of the integrity it deserves. Every iota of inequality, of environmental disregard and carelessness, of preference of self and self-interest over and above the needs of others is a sin, an aspect of our sinfulness as rational, moral beings gifted with free will. The process is at root connatural to man. Yet it lessens us, de-energizes us, demeans us, damns us. We can deny it, hide from it, repress it, suppress it. We can also acknowledge it, become aware of it, and so “own” it and channel its energy to a more selfless gradient. No one makes us do anything. No one forces us to invest all our energies into “me.” We cannot trot out our free will when it pleases us so to do, and deny it exists when it suits our interest, or better put, when we will so to do. We cannot have it both ways. We do wrong to ourselves, our souls and bodies, to those around us, to society, and to the earth each and every day, and we cannot shuck off all responsibility for that by claiming we are victims of life, of the actions of others, of nature. We are not merely creatures of sentience and instinct. We have intelligence, insight, foresight, will. Were it not so, societies would not exist. Laws would not exist; neither would out-laws. Were it not so religion, culture, and civilization would be never have appeared.
Religion, as the keeper and transmitter of values, as the cultic core of the culture, once was the epicenter for the dispensation of insight into psyche, soul. Churches used their symbols and rituals to ply the psyche into insight and action, to reinforce both the horror and destructiveness of sin and the absolute power of salvation [good-health] that was graciously set within. The prescient and astute Archbishop Cranmer had in his communion service three times wherein sin was confronted, and grace exposed. We knelt before the proclamation of the commandments, pleaded that they be inscribed in our hearts, and prayed “Lord, have mercy.” Only in that penitent stance could we clearly hear the word of God. With humble souls having heard the word of God we could, in the words of the creed, confess our trust in God, and admit to our manifold sins and wickedness which we from time to time had committed by thought, word, and deed—against the divine majesty, for in the word of God we had come to know this world belongs to God, not us. We knelt again to acknowledge our unworthiness before we embraced that same God in a holy union, a com-union, for only once God had offered himself for us and to us could we truly know our smallness, our creatureliness, our unworthiness before so great a gift, and so humbled of spirit, be thankful, be filled with thanks, be filled, literally, with eucharist [from the Greek for: to give thanks]. The entirety of the service was the making of a covenant–from the opening prayer in which we prayed to be able to perfectly love God and worthily magnify his holy name, to the inscribing of the terms, the commandments, to the offering of ourselves, souls and bodies, as a reasonable sacrifice made in com-union with the self-sacrifice of God for us, to the final magnification of the holy name in the concluding doxology: “Glory be to God on high.”
All this is ritual enactment and symbol representation of a psychic, a spiritual, truth we can grasp but vaguely. It is a truth we can “see but dimly.” It points toward the fact that sinfulness and grace abide within, and that grace will triumph only when sin is acknowledged, and handled. Only when sin is handled can that handsel that is the holy communion be handled. We cannot know the sacredness of the symbol–the Mystery–we ingest without first knowing the desecration of self, other and world that is sin. That is the affliction, the confliction, the cross we carry even into eternity. That is the pain of sin and the hope of salvation only God can once and for all time resolve at the end of time when he becomes our Centre, and wipes away every tear. In the sacred rituals we are met with the finitude of ego and the infinity of energy at the core of psyche, the Spirit. It is a truth of our existence secular society, buried in mass anonymity, tries to ignore because it presents a fundamental conflict between foundational forces. The daily resolution of that conflict is growth, and there is no growth without pain, without a cross on which must come a sacrifice for the sake of newness of life. In truth, in the truth of our being, this conflict cannot be ignored. If it is, it will find some way to erupt into our world such that out of an unworkable state of disconnection and tumult we will be ever more forced to deal with the truth of self and world. Thus, arises the world of the mad. The symbols and rituals that speak of God and grace, of sin, sinfulness and responsibility are replaced by hallucinations–demigods, half-truths, propaganda, and the fictions of the latest, self-appointed dicast. Behold the “Freedom!” of the herd.
Today, some say for the sake of time, some say for the elimination of unnecessary (!) repetition, Cranmer’s profound insight into both ritual and human sinfulness is diluted, and sadly, in some cases, washed away lest some congregants become “turned off” by all this talk of sin. How does a church preach salvation, celebrate salvation, without acknowledging the sin from which we are saved? Some may opine that it is best we do not dwell upon sin, and simply be happy and full of glee because like little children, mindless of life and responsibilities, we have a wise and loving parent-god who takes care of us and for us. We, being infantile, need know no internal conflict, restriction, discipline or pain. Such is not spirituality, not religion. It is moral and spiritual anesthetization. Better the universal church have a membership of one in touch with one’s sins and in faithful search of God’s light, than be filled to the rafters with a hoard of silly souls shouting “alleluia.”
A church that does not teach sin cannot preach salvation. Without sin, what need have we of a saviour, of some-one, of some power beyond the fracturing of psyche to resolve its convolutions? Who is Christ? Is he the source of new life, the source of Spirit, of integrity and integration? Does he become merely an example to be imitated? With all due respect to them that use “imitate” to rally the following of the Christ, there is a difference between the notions of imitation and incarnation. Imitation calls for a conformity with someone or something. It is passive in nature. Its aim is a copy. Incarnation is about giving birth to a unique soul, a spirit, an identity. It is active, and it, as is all new life, is a grace, a graciousness in action. We are not called to imitate Jesus, but “to be,” to uniquely live Christ-hood for our world.
Church does not exist to make one “feel good.” It is about enabling one to approach the essence of self, the core of self, the heart of reality. It is about enabling a confrontation with the connatural declivity toward entropy, and the psychic core’s thrust to integrity of self. The first is an evaporation of energy, the second is an expansion of, or more accurately, an expansiveness of energy. The first is a regression into sinfulness which by free will erupts as the individual, the individual’s sin. The second is the grace of the Creative, of God, within. Grace preached without addressing sin makes no sense. To celebrate grace without profoundly acknowledging its antithesis is not only illogical, it is a folly. Sin preached without the balance of grace is merely sadism paraded on a grand scale.
“If we say we have no sin, we lie.” The lie is to the self. The self, the core of the psyche, hates being told a lie. It, as noted above, objects to the conscious mind, and if it is ignored, it rebels and throws up all manner of unconscious material to force the issue to light. Examination of conscience and confession of sin having fallen into disrepute, psychiatrists and psychologists earn their livings dealing with these rebellions within souls, and the neuroses and psychoses they spawn. We need again discover that dire need to repent, to acknowledge our deeds that offend against others and this earth, and embrace with faith and hope, and yes, with love, the power of transformation that dwells graciously within. We need acknowledge again that such things as touching upon the very fundaments of our being, our life, our soul, have always been encoded in symbols and ritualized acts. We need find again that great symbol of cross on which we all hang on the mercy of God, and humbly submit before a Power greater than the ego-defined world, the world deludedly taken as being “mine.”
Ritual and symbol are of vital importance to the psychic life of the world, but without proper context they malfunction. They require uncovering in a restricted time and space, a sacred time and space. They must be presented as ritual and symbol, as items not of empiric fact, but as phenomenological facts about our psychic reality that create and continuously transform the empiric world. Churches that seek to be “church-lite,” to be chatty places to get together, to be “feel-good churches,” ignore the seriousness of life and of our responsibility to grow in wisdom and graciousness. They may well offer some degree of euphoria and the sense of belonging that can be found also in the pulsing of a pop-concert or the pump of cheering on a sports team, but such are merely emotional stimulations. They do not, cannot, inspire the excavation of the depth of psyche, nor rouse the scaling of the heights. Only in facing and resolving the conflicts within the soul does the authenticity of humanity emerge as individual, as person, as personable, as saved from biologic necessity and liberated to the core power of the psychic reality of life, to the grace of the creator, the creative God resident as core, as grace.[iii]
We are broken, but for our sake so too is our God, and he bears the marks of our broken nature into eternity where he intercedes for us before the Throne of Mercy. He, having made himself one with us will not abandon us. The option of abandonment exists, but only from our side. Such is the power of sin which we wield. Kyrie eleison.
[i] Cf.: on Death, its disposition in cult and culture, September 2013.
[ii] Whensoever rhetoric uses brevity for the sake of a focus, the broader perspective is omitted. To adjust here the lens, and to sooth lest feathers have been ruffled, I here add four caveats.
One, it is unfortunate that many need support as they age. Some people do indeed need to be cared for in an institutional setting, but not all. Once, when we lived in extended families, the elderly were cared for at home and by the family. Modern life has for the majority ended that living arrangement. Often today even when an elder member of the family is invited to come live with children, grandchildren, or a younger sibling, there seemingly arises more conflict than care because patterns of life, of personal space have had no time and space in which to develop. We have not, at least in North America, established systems of assistance that can keep those in need in their homes and communities. Big business has been swift to find here a market, and the needs of elderly and sick have been commercialized. Attempts to ameliorate the situation are met with corporate resistance, not unexpectedly. Businesses, whether it be in pharmaceuticals, tobacco, or medical care are not inclined to terminate their work or at least curtail its reach. They are profit driven and an ever-expanding market is their prime concern. Modern mobility, good intentions, and opportunism have created a social quagmire. The situation is unfortunate, and governments need to intervene with regulations, standards, and the fostering of alternate systems of support.
Two, on the whole, the younger generations in western culture have been shielded from both discipline and failure. They will eventually need to learn those things their parents, teachers and guardians, caught up in phantasies concerning personal freedom, have failed to provide.
Three, we age. We do not expect the bud to resemble the bloom. We do not expect the bloom to last forever. It fades and withers. So too do we. It is the process of nature. Certainly if some aspect of age causes disability one needs to access whatsoever amendment is available. If one is simply trying to return to the perceived glow of an earlier age, if the procedure is merely cosmetic, then one must question its reason and wisdom. Is it an escape from the present? Aspects of aging can arise suddenly, and that can well involve a shock to the body-image that requires a time for adjustment. Time is something many as they age feel they have in ever shorter supply, and so they seek to fill it up with all manner of undertakings. Such usually bespeak not a considered response, but a frenzied reaction. I have seen many who have obviously spent an astonishing amount of cash to be saved from time’s fleeting by being lifted, tucked and smoothed-out. In their presumed victory over time they strut in pavonine glory. Ironically, they look embalmed.
Four, as for the wanderlust, the restlessness, of my fellow seniors, I question again the reason. Certainly to many who have spent a life dedicated to the job and/or the rearing of children, a time to “get away for themselves” seems reasonable. Certainly there is here a time when there come forth changes in life, both internal and external. Masks and roles that have defined life shift or fall away. Forces of psyche that have been ignored come forward. As roles change, so too can personalities. It can be a renaissance evoking new vocations and advocations. It can also, quite understandably, bring disruptions in relationships. In all this psychological typology bears consideration. Nevertheless, I question if, in many cases, the wanderings and restlessness are not displaced because at this time in life a deeper movement is unfolding within the psyche. As we age the call of the psyche is to turn within, to discover the depths of the psyche, the soul. It is not a call to discover the cultures of the world, but the world of the cult, the wisdom set within each out of which the great world cults have made their appearances. As we reach those aptly dubbed golden years we are called upon to become transmitters of a wisdom within, not explorers of the world without. As with the aging body, the aging soul needs to be acknowledged and celebrated. We are called in a sense to an internalization of energy, a contraction of energy. It is not the sending of energy outward, but the funneling of energy inward toward the root from which we sprang, toward soul, toward spirit, toward life itself. It is not a matter, a materiality of “from dust to dust,” but a spirituality of “from life unto life.” The shifting and conflicting powers within the psyche have had their times to be confronted and embraced. As life ages, psyche summons us, in both body and soul, to ripen, to let go, and to fall back unto arms of the Ground of Being from which we sprang. Such effort is not to refresh it, but to embrace it with thanks and joy. The work is done. “It is consummated.” Such are the processes of life.
[iii] Cf.: on Repentance and Advent, January 2012; on Sin, March 2013; and Occidental Ideas, Part 8, Beginnings, February 2014.