Sin and "Missing the Mark"

At the beginning of a book titled The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur asks, "How shall we make the transition from the possibility of evil in man to its reality, from fallibility to fault?" A related question would be, "What distinguishes a mistake from a sin?" In our modern minds, the distinction is relatively clear. Ricoeur attributes this modern distinction in part to the emphasis we place on human autonomy and the will: a mistake in this case is simply the unwitting manifestation of a flaw, whereas sin is a willful embrace of wrongdoing.

I am not persuaded that these categories are so water-tight (neither is Ricoeur). I offer three demonstrations. First of all, the treatment of pedophiles in the decades leading up to the 2002 Long Lent assumed, with the regnant psychological understanding of the day, that the fault of the pedophiles was mitigated by psychological flaw, and that, such flaw being 'mended', would render the pedophile no longer controlled by this temptation, free to act morally again (this did not work). Had this behavior consistently been treated as a moral failing, as Canon Law seems to assume that it is (and from the point of view of the victim is surely is!), even where the perpetrator acted in the grips of an overwhelming compulsion, fewer relapses would have been permitted, in my opinion. In any case, the line between fault and compulsion to wrong/sinful behavior is not so clear. Knowingly dabbling with sinful behavior can bring about the situation of addiction and compulsion, in which our actions are no longer freely chosen. Is behavior after the development of addiction therefore no longer sinful? In other words, is the person who tempts fate by drinking too much too frequently a sinner while the hardened alcoholic not? If it feels wrong to call an addict a 'sinner', I suggest that this is evidence of our modern mindset, that divides a person between materialistic components and existential components. Incidentally, this is not the position taken by Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization that requires both an admission of helplessness and amendment of harm done to others.

Second example: Is it not the case that claiming to have made a mistake seems to absolve us from blame? But what if we make the same mistake five times in a row and by doing so, we harm others? "Oh, I forgot to stop at that sign; I didn't mean to hit you with my car!" At what point are we derelict for being distracted, not paying attention to others? We can demand that others forgive us (everyone makes mistakes! give me a break!) without having to repent.

Third example: we are often made uneasy by Biblical stories in which persons are apparently punished for having made (innocent?) mistakes. Nadab and Abihu are obliterated for ignorantly offering incense (Lv 10) inappropriately, and Uzzah is struck down when he touches the Ark of the Covenant, ostensibly to prevent it from falling (2 Sam 6: 6-7). The punishments of Moses and of Saul have provoked probing questions about God's justice. Job presents an even tougher case.

The Old Testament does not distinguish much between ritual impurity deriving from circumstances beyond our control and impurity that is clearly moral, in our sense of the term. A leper is no better off than a murderer with regard to the temple cult.

The Christian tradition interprets this state of affairs as evidence that the world is in the grip of an anti-creation force of evil, and we suffer from this state whether we will it or not. We humans are not able to extricate ourselves by effort, either by moral effort (the Pelagian option) nor by scientifically identifying flaws and solving them (the Enlightenment program). Rather, we are in need of grace, of a Savior, to set things right.

That there is a 'right' way of things being is a crucial point for a future post, on why Thomas Kuhn and others are correctly criticized by A. MacIntyre when they assert that conversions or paradigm shifts occur as ruptures in a person's life rather than in some way as a fulfillment (a topic that I am still working on!). I have adumbrated this by drawing attention to the presumed rupture between 'mistake' and 'sin'. So hopefully I will build on today's post as we explore this question.

P.S. I also plan to answer several questions posed by attentive readers in these main posts, since I'm not sure how many of you read the comments sections. Let me know if this approach is too confusing, or if it matters at all! Thank you and God's blessings to you!

Fun at the airport

My experience at Midway Saturday morning reminded me of a conversation I had recently during a walk I took around the Bridgeport neighborhood (in habit). A group of young people were hanging around in front of a building as I passed, and one of them hollered out, "Whoa, man! What's that [thing] you're wearing?!" I stopped and replied in a friendly manner, "It is called a religious habit. This is a tunic and this is what is called a scapular."

"So are you one of those guys who blows people up?"

Now recall that Bridgeport is traditionally and still nominally overwhelmingly Catholic. I do get the regular, "Hey, Father!" on my perambulations. But this was the most astounding question I have gotten yet. My response: "No. I serve the Prince of Peace. I am a Christian!"

I normally travel in clericals for the sake of simplicity at security, but since I am travelling with Mother Mary Clare who has no choice but to wear her habit, I opted for Benedictine solidarity and wore mine. This was the cause of consternation for the fellow who had to frisk me at security. "This is a baggy outfit!" My inconvenience was shared, of course, by Mother Mary Clare. Two baggy outfits! Worn by the worst sort, religious zealots! Who obviously blow people up!

That a teenager in Chicago could assume that anyone in traditional religious garb is to be linked with fanatical violence shows just how well the Enlightenment (or as Fr. Roach, SJ, used to say, the Endarkenment) has succeeded in controlloing public discourse. All religion is automatically superstitious unreason, linked to oppression and the restriction of freedom. No religious display can be tolerated in public. Only people in immodest and revealing (secular) clothing can pass easily through airport check-points; persons who insist on the mysterious power of the body and its proper veiling are suspect.

You can find, in a matter of seconds, stories on the internet about journalists in everyday clothes sneaking all kinds of dangerous objects onto airplanes right now. The alleged 9/11 highjackers 'disguised' themselves as regular Americans, forsaking baggy outfits (a la Bin Laden) and turbans. But religious display gets singled out for special opprobrium. People who believe in God are assumed to be more dangerous than those who do not. Have we forgotten the Soviet threat so thoroughly?

The More Things Change

I found this quote from Rousseau (along with Nietzsche, my favorite intellectual to admire and blame for modernity) in Peter Gay's history of the Enlightenment:

"All the subtleties of metaphysics will not make me doubt for a moment the immortality of the soul or a beneficent Providence. I feel it, I believe it, I want it, I hope for it, and I shall defend it to my last breath."

If you could translate this from the proto-Romantic idiom into today's 'spiritual, not religious' idiom, this echoes the sentiments of many of our contemporaries. The immortality of the soul and other propositions are proven not by appeal to reason or fact, but to the strength with which one holds the conviction. "I feel it!" This could have been the name of a pop song (and probably has been) over the past thirty years. But what of fabled Enlightenment Reason?

What piques my interest in this sort of non-argument is two-fold: 1) While Rousseau was often less that up-front about his actual thoughts, in my opinion, he stands out as an Enlightenment figure to me precisely for his willingness to admit that humankind possesses an affective, yea, religious side. Reason only gets us so far, and he is one of the few Aufklarung philosophes to write as if this were true. 2) When I was in high school, I thought this way. I even wrote a song once in which I claimed to have the power to be whatever I wanted after death simply by believing it and wanting it (this based on a warped interpretation of Fr. Tito Sammut, O. Carm's teaching on the Last Judgment, which was orthodox, so far as I recall it). Perhaps inevitably, this kind of metaphysical optimism withered when exposed to the Enlightenment atmosphere of the U of Chicago. Then, someone convinced me, by appeal to reason and human nature, that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. Ah! The immortality of the soul is not a mere postulate, but something that can be asserted by eyewitness testimony! This both appealed to my reason and my religious side, and I was on my way back into the Church.

But this seems to be a rare sort of story today.