Lenten Meditation: Original Sin III
admin | 30 March 2011This is the third of four Lenten meditations on original sin. The previous meditations are posted here and here.
“A house divided against itself falleth”
In the course of these little considerations of the big theme of “original sin”, I have tried to locate our reflections in the propers for the Sundays in Lent. The Third Sunday in Lent would seem to offer a particularly dismal view of our humanity that complements perfectly the negativity, as some would see it, of the doctrine of original sin. To the contrary, I would hope to argue, since the doctrine of original sin is really part and parcel of the good news of human redemption. Without the honest appreciation of the sin-wracked nature of our humanity, it is pretty hard to make sense of human experience and the grace of Christ crucified.
In other words, the honest recognition of how compromised we are by the habits of sin is really the entry point to the transformative power of God’s grace that leads us as Dante puts it, “from misery to felicity.” It does so by working on our hearts and minds. We are drawn into the drama of our redemption. The doctrine of original sin belongs to that drama.
We are, in the words of the gospel, radically divided within ourselves. The many divisions and tensions and contradictions within the institutions that drive our social and political lives are really a further extension of the idea and the doctrine of original sin.
The doctrine of original sin is the necessary counter to a variety of social and political viewpoints in our world and day. It is the counter to the ideology of progress, the idea that things are always going forward, that our humanity is constantly on the march towards the more and the better, the better, of course, always measured in terms of the more. It is the counter to the idea that the future is ever brighter and the past always a yawning abyss, the proverbial dark ages. The doctrine of original sin reminds us instead of the perennial darkness of the human heart, the much more persuasive concept of “the heart of darkness,” to borrow Joseph Conrad’s title.
Utopia versus dystopia. Ideal societies versus deformed and decayed societies, the societies of the chronically dysfunctional. The teaching about original sin attempts to deal thoughtfully and honestly about the human experience without our becoming either romantic idealists and revolutionaries or grumpy curmudgeons and reactionaries who think that everything has gone to hell in a hand-cart, if not yesterday, then the day before yesterday.
Original sin is the counter to such incomplete notions. It speaks directly to the divisions in our souls and in our culture. It is a recurring refrain and a necessary one. If I may trouble you for just a moment about the complexities of Enlightenment culture, indeed, its contradictions, we may see how an exuberant über confidence in the idea of human perfectibility conflicts with a morbid passivity and pessimism which perhaps, just perhaps, brings out the positive in what otherwise seems to be such a dismal view of humanity. The truth of the matter, I wish to suggest, is that the doctrine of original sin opens us out to the highest potentialities of our humanity. It is only our dogmatic recalcitrance and vain attachment to the projects of our wills that undermines it, on the one hand, and proves it, on the other hand.
Voltaire’s novel, Candide, written in 1759 is a work of satire. In a manner that is typical of 18th century satire, he deliberately exaggerates the situations of human misery in order to call our attention to the idea of doing something to make things better. As such, the exercise is positive and promising. It reflects the Enlightenment confidence in human reason. The title, Candide, is also the name of the main character, Candide. He is ridiculously naive and holds on to the teaching of his tutor, Pangloss. Pangloss is Voltaire’s parody of the great German polymath and philosopher, Leibniz. His name means, literally, all talk, and by implication, no action. Voltaire is satirizing a phrase from Leibniz’s Theodicy. The phrase is that “this is the best of all possible worlds.”
In the wake of the Lisbon Earthquake and Tsunnami in 1755 that literally and metaphorically shook the European world, Voltaire has recognised that, taken at face value, such a phrase is dangerous and hypocritical. Why? Because extreme optimism ignores the realities of human suffering. The educational journey is undertaken by way of the experiential or empirical – here Voltaire shows his preference for the English empiricism over and against French rationalism. Candide is forced to question his ideological commitment to this deliberately misrepresented and overly simplified form of the philosophy of optimism, in part through a “journey around the world in eighty pages” in which the experiences of suffering are endless, never-ending, greatly exaggerated and yet educational.
His education takes place, in part, through the companions of his journey. One of those companions represents the exact opposite position to the teaching of Pangloss about optimism. Martin is an extreme pessimist. While the actual philosophy of pessimism would not be articulated until Schopenauer in the 19th century, Voltaire anticipates that viewpoint. Martin, we might say, thinks that this is the worst of all actual worlds.
But Voltaire’s insight into optimism and pessimism, I think, is quite profound. Voltaire recognises that extreme optimism and extreme pessimism come to the same conclusion. Both result in doing nothing about the forms of human suffering and misery.
If it is “the best of all possible worlds,” then, whatever has happened is taken at face value as good, indeed, the best. Lost your arm? Got cancer? Too bad, so sad? No. It must be good. There is a complete ignoring of the realities of the human experience of suffering. And, as Voltaire shows, human reason is also quite capable of coming up with ingenious but ridiculous explanations for natural and human events. On the other side, that of pessimism, of course, it is much the same. It is all bad and nothing can be done about it.
So what is Voltaire’s final opinion? He hated, and I mean, hated the Church, particularly the Catholic Church and especially the Jesuits, mostly because of their political power. He takes great delight in pointing out the follies and the hypocrisies of the Church. But not just Catholics, not just Christians, and not just religion in general. His satirical wit spares no one, especially those in any kind of authority whether religious, political, social, economic, or academic.
Voltaire was a deist. But, importantly, it seems to me, he held to the idea of original sin, recognising that, left to our own devices, we are pretty destructive and quite nasty. He recognised, too, that the attempts to do good, especially if it is assumed that we are naturally good, can often add to human misery. Against Rousseau’s idea of the “noble savage”, Voltaire saw the human propensity towards self-interest and understood its inherent destructiveness. A pessimist therefore? No.
Voltaire, like Jonathan Swift, uses satire to point out problems in human society that should not and cannot be ignored. The viewpoint is that in the face of such things one has the moral obligation to try to make things better, even in a limited way. There is the moral project of amendment to this kind of satire. There is a kind of confidence in a cautious and conservative approach to the amelioration of human suffering. But there is as well a strong critique of the over-confidence in human reason, a critique of the idea of progress and human perfectibility – all themes which deny the reality of original sin and its consequences. There is the implicit notion that the “brave new world” of human invention can often turn into a catastrophe.
Such themes as progressivism and human perfectibility would become the underlying assumptions in various utopian projects and, indeed, of the forms of social engineering.
Such critiques belong as well to the insight of the judicious Mr. Richard Hooker, one of the great Anglican theologians of the late 16th century in his work, The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity. “Laws politic, ordained for external order and regiment amongst men,” he says, “are never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to be inwardly obstinate, rebellious and averse from all obedience unto the sacred laws of his nature; in a word, unless presuming man to be in regard of his depraved mind, little better than a wild beast…” (Book I).
The awareness of the doctrine of original sin is critical for the articulation and framing of the laws which govern and direct human affairs. Ultimately, as Hooker shows, through the witness of Scripture we are given a fuller picture of the human condition. It is about our sinfulness, our inward obstinance to the truth and goodness of God. Such an awareness contributes to the framing of law. Such an awareness with Swift and Voltaire, writing more than a century and quarter later than Hooker, contributes to the moral task of trying to do something to ameliorate the forms of suffering and injustice.
Swift addressed the issue of child poverty in Ireland in his celebrated A Modest Proposal, a work of satire which bitingly criticises the English for eating up the Irish. His proposal is anything but modest. He proposes, though not literally, the idea of turning the children of Ireland into a market commodity – babies as a gourmet food source! The economic argument that he develops is a satire about the schemes which belong to the forms of economic reason, a reason which is devoid of a moral conscience. He, like Voltaire, understands the doctrine of original sin.
To Voltaire, we grant the last word, taking the last word of his novel Candide. “We must cultivate our garden,” meaning, I think, that in the awareness of the many forms of human misery and of the reality of our misery, the reality of original sin, there is the obligation to try to do what one can to make things better wherever one is. It is a kind of practicality but one which, in some sense, is grounded upon the grace of God’s goodness which is greater than our sin. It is not a recipe for despair nor is it license for social engineering. As Mark Steyn notes about Roger Scruton’s The Uses of Pessimism, “utopianism is not in the business of perfecting the world” but only of demolishing it: “The ideal is constructed in order to destroy the actual.” For Voltaire, of course, utopian idealism serves as a way of criticising the powers that be, a form of critical commentary on the follies and the foibles of the politics of his world and day.
In pointing out the hypocrisies of 18th century European culture, and it is suggested, of human culture in general, we see that state of inward contradiction in ourselves. We are a house divided within ourselves. And yet, to know that contributes to the moral programme of our lives. Our spiritual lives, which influence our social and political lives but without being reduced to them, are primarily about repentance and renewal, a repentance and renewal that belongs to the motions of God’s grace at work in us. The pageant of Lent unfolds the great drama of human redemption. We are convicted of our sinfulness and convinced of the love of God. In Christ Jesus and not in ourselves do we find that wholeness and integrity of our personalities and lives. Without him, we are but a house divided.
“A house divided against itself falleth”
Fr. David Curry
Original Sin III
Tuesday, March 29th, 2011