Reading Alan Jacobs' Original Sin got me to thinking about addiction. When I look at social media addiction, other addictions and the kind of burning desire for our past (Pillar of Salt Effect), all of the lost opportunities and all the intoxicating nostalgia, I see we are drowning in our imagination, our sense of entitlement, our narcissism’s sense of inflated self-importance. We have fallen off the Moral Ark, and we are subject to the merciless impulses of our innate depravity, our original sin.
I’m thinking about original sin after reading Alan Jacobs’ book of the same title. What do I see with original sin?
- Addiction
- Dehumanization
- Zombie-Brain
- Escape from responsibilities
- Grotesque, abased self
- Selfishness
- Defiance
- Anger
- Defensiveness
- Wall of cynicism
- Hard-heartedness
- Excuse making
- Compulsion
- Alter ego that takes over our self
As I read Alan Jacobs’ book Original Sin: A Cultural History, I could see that Augustine and Paul, especially in his letter to the Romans, made the notion of original sin crystal clear: A Mr. Hyde who takes over Dr. Jekyll and sabotages our highest aspirations. This force is insidious and often works against our self-awareness and metacognition. This is why Paul laments his Shadow sinful self takes over his autopilot when he is unaware. Paul’s words spoke to Augustine, whose conversion and focus on original sin made Augustine a huge influence on Christianity and our understanding of original sin.
But I keep coming back to the unbaptized babies who Augustine believed spent eternity in hell. For all of Augustine’s piety, I can’t help but feel he ascribes depraved characteristics to his God and paints his God as having original sin. Surely, a God doesn’t damn infants to eternal damnation, but Augustine argued this point vehemently throughout his life.
Augustine’s baby doctrine diminishes his credibility or at least should be addressed further in Jacobs’ study.
I am shaken by the psychological truth of original sin as described by Paul in Romans and as elaborated on in many ways by Augustine. I can attest that my own psychological makeup embodies much of what Paul describes.
Are there secular ways of addressing this self-destructive, self-abasing impulse? How would Elizabeth Anderson, the philosopher who wrote a scathing Christian critique in her essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”, address original sin? She claims we evolve morally through common notions of evolution, community building, and shared values, but does that claim get to the core of the matter?
What about secular humanist Martin Hagglund? He has written the polemic This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom in which he argues that a belief in the afterlife is an impediment to the human mission: to create a liberal democracy. Making better people is a communal, political operation. There is no deep dive into human psychology of the kind we see in Paul and Augustine.
The only secular humanist who addresses the human tendency for self-destruction in deep psychological terms that might compete with Paul’s notion of original sin is Erich Fromm, author of Escape from Freedom, To Have Or to Be, and the Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. For Fromm, fear of individuation, failure to love, failure to connect with a purpose outside of ourselves, failure to be free, and getting trapped in materialism, irrelevance, powerlessness, sado-masochistic symbiotic relationships is all somewhat analogous to original sin.
Reading Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hagglund, and Erich Fromm, I can see that we all abhor a vacuum, to use Viktor Frankl’s language. We must have a purpose, our religion if you will. We must also have a model that tells a story of human self-destruction and human flourishing.
I am fascinated by the conflict between the Pauline and Augustinian story and the somewhat different story as told by the aforementioned secular philosophers.
Deep in my mind and heart, I see more in common with “falling off the Moral Ark and drowning in sin” and Paul’s notion of compulsive sin, but I also see that faith is often not only a failed guarantee at conquering sin, but can accelerate ugly moral development. When I look at Augustine’s baby damnation doctrine, Aquinas’ Pleasure in Watching Unsaved Suffer doctrine, Paul’s boasting (even as he warns against boasting), the evils of Calvinism, the self-destructive God described in Alfred North Whitehead’s Religion in the Making, and people of faith supporting a criminal sociopath who tears down our free democracy, I wonder what the real diagnosis and cure of original sin is. For me, since I’ve been fearful of damnation since the age of 17, this is not a casual inquiry. I explore these questions feeling that there are high stakes.
