Embodied Idolatry - An Excerpt

An excerpt from the conclusion of  Embodied Idolatry: A Critique of Christian Nationalism

Original Sin: Sebastian Moore

Original sin “is a distinctly Christian . . . one could argue . . . a distinctly Western Christian belief, based . . . largely on the writings and authority of Augustine.” A great deal of ink has been spilled over this doctrine, especially as to how it was originally formulated by Augustine, and later interpreted by theologians like Luther and Calvin, as well as hyper Augustinians in the mold of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French Jansenists. While I believe a number of formulations of this doctrine should be abandoned, I do not believe the doctrine as a whole should be tossed out. While Augustine may have misstepped in his understanding of certain aspects of original sin, I do believe his insight, that something is fundamentally distorted in human nature, holds merit.

There are two particular articulations of this doctrine I have found to be compelling, those of Sebastian Moore and Thomas Keating, both of whom were formed in the Benedictine spiritual tradition of lectio divina, meditatio, and contemplatio (sacred reading, meditation, and contemplation). Both men were also well read in theology and psychology. While both offer similar insights about original sin and the human condition, each has offered his own unique ways of approaching both the nature and consequences of original sin, as well as prescriptions for bringing about divine healing from its effects.

Humans have evolved as social creatures and are relational by nature. The relational quality of human nature means, for Moore, that we are drawn into personhood by the desire of an “other,” an “other” who, in recognizing our desirability, draws us toward the other, toward intimacy, with the hope of union. “Desirable, I desire another and hope to be desired by the other.” When experiencing the desire of the other, we experience a sense of arousal. This corresponds with the hedonic principle discussed in chapter two. The pleasure of desirability motivates our move toward relationship/intimacy, giving shape to both intrinsic and instrumental desires.

Underlying Moore’s analysis is his use of Freudian categories for the development of the individual, especially in the Oedipal stage. Unlike Freud, Moore does not limit the desire of the child for the mother to feelings of a sexual nature, which Moore felt was too constraining. Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, also saw this as problematic in Freud’s theory. In the early months of a child’s life, before there is an experience of a separate self, there is an unselfconscious experience of unity/oneness with creation. One of the great shocks in early life is the experience of separateness. Moore writes, 

[a]s that most alarming thing, ‘conscious separate existence’, really gets under way, the need for support becomes enormous. And not for a support of the crutches type that would mitigate the venturesomeness of individual reality, but for a total encouragement of it. The first powerful sense of self looks ecstatically to the mother for support in an incredible adventure.

Moore notes that the child’s complete reliance upon its mother as the means for a total sense of self is “a burden that no one can fully shoulder.” Because humans are finite, carrying their own individual sense of incompleteness, thus reliant upon an other/s for a fuller sense of self/being, the mother will not be able to act in a capacity that will offer a sense of fullness of being for her child. The attraction toward the mother is not exclusively, or even necessarily, sexual, though eros plays a role. The arousal in being desirable is erotic, a passionate desire not limited to crude sexual stimulation. Because the mother is the primary locus for the child’s hopes for desire satisfaction, that is, the mother’s recognition of the child’s desirability—thus initiating the pull toward psychological personhood—the introduction of the father, who also claims desirability from the mother, is perceived and experienced as a threat to the child.

As an opaque awareness of a loss of unity and oneness with all creation has occurred through an experience of a developing separate self, desiring the paradisiacal experience of the womb compels the child to seek a sense of unity/oneness by means of another’s desires. Experiencing disappointment in this quest, first with the intrusion of the father, Moore states that “[w]e might see in this moment, of ecstatic expectation directed to the mother and disappointed into the normal anxious existence of the human animal, the human moment, in which we can read all the tragedies and glories of humankind.”

Moore takes issue with the traditional articulations of the doctrine of original sin where once humanity sinned according to the Adam and Eve myth, God rejected them, dispelling them from paradise. This expulsion is interpreted as God no longer desiring the humans God has made; thus, they are constitutionally undesirable because of their sins. This congenital undesirability is transferred to each subsequent individual who inherits both the inclination to sin, as well as the punishment for the inheritance of this original sin. This punishment consists in the experience of undesirability and alienation from God. Analogically, we see in the experience of the child’s coming to a sense of a separate self a sense of expulsion from a paradise of unity/oneness, and now subject to work by the sweat of the brow to find this sense of wholeness of self. It is this early life experience—a sense of rejection by the mother whose attention is drawn to an “other”—that Moore sees as our experience of original sin. He writes,

[t]his first focus, in which self is all enmeshed with other, is influential over us without a rival. Why would anyone think of being him/herself other than the way they first came to consciousness? The world on which we first opened our eyes psychologically come to be the world. . . . The original habit (and yes, we can think of ‘original sin’ in this connection) of self-assessment-by-others undergoes a crucial complexification at the second-of-all-crisis, the Oedipal phase.

This experience of rejection and sense of undesirability, or limitation of desirability, infects later beliefs about divine attitudes toward us. The craving for desirability, both by other humans and God, informs one’s strategies and struggles to gain a deeper experience of desirability. Moore writes, “[t]he whole of history could be seen as the complex struggle between the original habit binding people into its limited ways, whence come conflicts of every kind, and the gentle pressure of the spirit in people seeking to break out and free them.” The original habit/sin consists in a misdirected search for fullness by means of finite objects. The mimetic nature of human consciousness compels us to imitate models we hope can bring us the fullness we crave.

Girard’s understanding of original sin correlates with Moore’s, in that Girard sees it as the negative use of mimesis. He states that, “[t]he original sin is the bad use of mimesis, and the mimetic mechanism is the actual consequence of this use at the collective level. . . . The mimetic mechanism produces a complex form of transcendence.” In archaic cultures this use of mimesis led to the development of rituals of sacrifice, placing blame for social instability, grounded in mimetic rivalry, on some innocent victim, the scapegoat. In order to obfuscate what is in reality a murder, the ancients divinized the victim in order to present the sacrifice as a sacred act, thus acquitting the murderers from charges of actual homicide. But with the revelation of Christ the myths legitimizing murder of innocent victims are revealed as lies, in turn revealing both the innocence of the victim, and the criminality of the culprits. Girard sees these archaic practices of sacrifice, using Durkheim’s terminology, as “social transcendence.” Girard defines this as

the idolatrous transcendence from the point of view of the Judeo-Christian perspective. It is an illusory and idolatrous form of the sacred that, nonetheless, can protect the archaic community from greater and more disruptive forms of violence. It is what Paul says also regarding powers and principalities, meaning the secular powers of this world.

Because Christ’s revelation exposes the scapegoat mechanism for what it is, humanity can no longer legitimately claim innocence for acts of murder, expulsion, marginalization, and dehumanization. Yet, Christians in every era have fallen back into acts of sacred violence, justifying these acts as biblical, and thus divine. This, in Girard’s words, is satanic. Satan, the great accuser is not actually a person, but an aspect of human practice that accuses those who are innocent for the ills and instability of social life. The valorization of nationalism, which is grounded in oppositions, distinction, and claims of difference that subject some to subaltern status, is essentially satanic. Ironically, all of this goes back to the simple reality that we have come to conscious self-awareness with a lost sense of our original desirability and that we therefore create victims.

It is our quest for fullness, an experience of total desirability, and the actual experienced lack of this desirability that distorts our recognition that only in the truly divine—as opposed to the violent sacred—is found this fullness. Thus, in our habitual search for fullness, we turn our wrath on those we believe impede our quest. From this arise thoughts and acts of vengeance. As I discuss below, in my examination of Thomas Keating’s work, what and who inform our sense of transcendence is learned early and uncritically and can lead to a great deal of conflict and struggle.

    Building on Moore’s psychological approach to the doctrine of original sin, Neil Ormerod breaks down the tradition of this doctrine in the following formulation:

 1.  Adam sinned (however we may understand this). From the beginning of human history sin has been part of our condition.

2.     Because of Adam’s sin, we all suffer (however this suffering may be conceived). Sin has its consequences, not just for the one who sins but for all those around.

Because of this, Ormerod concludes:

3. We are all the victims of Adam’s sin.

This is a shift in focus regarding culpability. Ormerod writes, in this schema

[t]he doctrine of original sin says that, prior to sinning, we are first and foremost sinned against. To be sinned against is to be a victim of another’s sin. To be sinned against, especially in early childhood, is to enter into a condition of human brokenness, an interior shattering or distortion of consciousness that muddies our search for direction in the movement of life. To be sinned against in this way, to be thus broken, is the prior state that inclines us all to personal sins of our own.

Being drawn into life and personhood through the desiring of an “other,” who in recognizing our desirability makes us feel desirable, we subsequently feel a sense of victimhood when we perceive that our need to feel desirable is denied. The most tragic experience for individuals, especially those exposed to misguided articulations of the doctrine of original sin, either explicitly or implicitly, is that one not only feels undesirable to other humans, but more profoundly, on an existential level, is taught to believe that God rejects one’s self due to sin, making one metaphysically undesirable. This is a terrible and tragic lie in Christian theological history. Having lost the original experience of unity and oneness, due to coming to a sense of a separate self, we strive somehow to recapture this initial unity and oneness, this initial experience of pleasure/feeling good. Moore summarizes this quest:

All our desiring is an attempt of an original feeling-good, an original hedonic sense of myself, to extend itself, to realize itself over the wider field of interaction with others. All desiring is the attempt to realize the dream of myself, of a self-in-bliss which was my original condition in the physical, then the psychic, womb. All desiring is the attempt to be happy, the attempt of an original happiness to extend into the particulars of life.