The Resurrection of the Fall

Again I am a fair bit behind the times in covering this article, but as I am still in Oxford and my topic is the Catholic Church, to engage any sort of timeliness and relevancy would be to defy my geography and subject. On the eminently useful Vatican blog Chiesa, Sandro Magister draws attention to the resurgence of focus on the part of Benedict XVI on the doctrine of Original Sin, one of the Catholic Church's less fashionable doctrines of date among a host of outmoded dogmas. Passé is, however, by no means a condemnation.

And so Benedict XVI brings the subject of Original Sin out from its embarrassed confinement, and proposes to defend its extended relevancy. In a December 3 catechesis entitled "Adam and Christ: from original sin to freedom," Benedict cleverly separates two areas of evidence for original sin - the empirical and mysterious. The empirical evidence for man's conflict, he says, is within man himself: it is the tendency to, to quote Paul, to "will what is right but...cannot do it. [To] not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want." (Romans 7:18-19). To argue this notion as "contemporary" would be foolish; this is not a first century or a twenty-first century malaise but rather a universal one - explanations of biology, Pandora's boxes, or fruits of knowledge are all etiologies of the same general condition. Indeed - to "miss the mark" - as the Hebrew word (het) for sin would have it, is perhaps the most fundamental action of the human condition.

But there are multiple explanations for this phenomenon, Benedict continues. There is existential dualism - the belief that good and evil are two equal, contrary principles - leading in turn to the monistic nature of man: a tangle of good and evil unified as "man" from the beginning. This model is the atheistic model, the cynical one, a rational neo-Montanism. And then there is the explanation of the Church - that man's pure, good nature was corrupted by sin, but that evil itself is perpetually subservient to God.

There is certainly historio-Biblical credence to this explanation in the Old Testament alongside the New - this is not to be taken for granted; so much of the Old Testament is divorced from context and through that its meaning. However we take the author of Genesis 1, in whatever context, he is divorcing the creation acts of The Lord from several cognate Ancient Near Eastern creation stories. There is no epic battle between forces of order and chaos, as takes place between Marduk and Tiamet in the Enuma Elish. There is no divine struggle. Rather, God can command and shape with a word the de-mythologized primordial chaos of Genesis 1; he names, and thus assumes power over, not only the light but also the darkness, the echo of that chaos - he is not the sometime victor of a struggle but the single source of divine strength (with the exception, it must be admitted, of his curious sometime heavenly court). 

But exegesis can only convince the believing; Benedict, perhaps wisely, ascribes the "mysterious" proof for Original Sin - that distinguishes its worldview from that of the dualists - to faith and faith alone. The sole practical explanation he gives is teleological: his view, in contrast to so much of what is wrongfully said about Original Sin, is at its core a positive assessment of the basic human nature, far more humanistic in its way that those who wish to insist against the proof of our natures that we are eternally the perfect and unblemished children of God, a hubristic falsehood. But I am wary of any explanation that rests in whatever part on "doesn't this sound nicer?" - whether it comes from the New Agers or from Benedict XVI's decrying of the cynicism inherent in believing evil to be on a cosmological par with good. 

Benedict's portrait of Original Sin - of pure humanity redeemed from its history and biology by purer Christ - is one to which I subscribe, and his use of "empirical" proof of the human condition brought his argument, at least, beyond those who criticize the "harshness" of the doctrine in insisting on the inherent flaws in the human soul. It is faith, Benedict, that takes us to the next step. But his arguments against dualism are here curiously incomplete from an intellectual standpoint, particularly coming from a man of such acknowledged intellectual ferocity that one imagines he would be capable of doing so if he so chose.

They succeed, however, emotionally: the Catholic Church's doctrine is positive and humanistic; the secular worldview cynical and full of despair. Perhaps Benedict's concern - an admirable one, to be sure - is to defend Original Sin's relevancy and plausibility in a modern world, not necessarily its existence. This is a public relations move for the doctrine, not an ontological defense. But first things first. Perhaps justification - if the pun can be pardoned - is exactly what Original Sin needs at this point in time.