Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Original Sin, Christian Redemption and God as Father
From Culture and Value (selections from Wittgenstein's notebooks):Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.
-1937
Within Christianity, it's as though God says to men: Don't act a tragedy, that's to say, don't enact heaven and hell on earth. Heaven and hell are my affair.
-1931
What would it feel like not to have heard of Christ?
Should we feel left alone in the dark?
Do we escape such a feeling simply in the way a child escapes it when he knows there is someone in the room with him?
-1931
The first and second quotations almost run contrary to one another. And yet they stand together quite nicely and are given real sense by the third. To encapsulate them into one, let us say that it is not man's place to recreate divine order, but that our experience of divinity and its absence are nonetheless real-life experiences, with the experience of divinity or divine protection coming to the Christian when he or she feels Christ's presence in life.
One of the oddities of contemporary Christianity is the profusion of pollyannish comforters of Job - people who tell you how blissful life is because of their great and loving God, then attribute to Him the most childish of sentiment in order to explain why others don't seem to know the blessings they're convinced they experience.
The singular greatest failure of Christianity across the ages is the failure to appreciate the problems inherent in the metaphor of God the Father. By misapprehension of what this means, we discover a world where we do not, it is true, create heaven and hell on earth, but where we pretend that God does. More upsetting, we beat our breasts and decry the fallen state of the world, using this belief to allow others to make a hell on earth while refraining from helping others along, save by preaching words.
Questions of heaven and hell are indeed God's dominion, not ours. But the drama of the soul is a thing of earth as well as the celestial spheres. To find in God - to find in Christ! - justification to dismiss another's sorrows, or worse, to dismiss a fellow human being altogether, is an abomination. Christ taught us to endure the suffering of this world as a better one awaits. But by his example, He taught us to alleviate suffering where and when we could.
Supposing that God is everywhere and in everything reminds that He is in us. As Christ declared, "I am in the Father and you are in me and I am in you." There is a bond among men that exists in that we are all infused with divine spirit. It is our ability or inability to harmonize with this component of our existence that determines the progress and process of the drama of the human soul.
Bible scholars read maps, handbooks and scripture and then set about looking for where Eden was. They are foolish. Where Adam and Eve were they may find, and that may be of historical interest. But if they wish to find Eden, they need only look left, or right, or front or back. For does one suppose that God made an entire earthly sphere, populated the whole thing over with plants and animals and then set aside one little square that would work right?
In the beginning, I suspect, the whole of the earth was Eden, for wherever man walked he found joy and bliss. And after the fall, he could not cross back into that joy. Eden did not exist where it was, as a place, but where man was, as a thing to be experienced.
We are told that we are infused with the breath of God, that this is the source of life. And we are told that tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge brought our joy to an end. And we are told that a loving God who created us set us this test, which He surely knew we would fail, then threw a hissy fit and took away paradise for our failure.
This doesn't sound like an all-loving, all-knowing, all-seeing God of infinite compassion and mercy. It sounds like us. We know parents hell-bent on absolute obedience from children from whom this is too much to expect. But shouldn't God know better?
When we use the phrase "God the Father," we make God into a human being. He is not. All human beings, certainly. And the rocks and trees and the babbling of the brooks and more. But a single human being He is not. God the Father, a perfect father, still made one mistake if He seriously thought we would pass His test. Having made us, He should have known better. Unless He is truly cruel, vindictive and vain, like the arbitrary gods of Calvin and Hobbes' comic strips. Let us try a different way of thinking that will explain "original sin" while allowing a better understanding of God the Father.
Robert Heinlein suggested that God divided Himself into many, that He might have friends. Scott Adams suggested that God might have blown Himself to bits to see if He could. Certain Eastern religions can at least partially buy the premise, as they see spiritual struggle as an effort for an infinite and divine consciousness to reunite with itself. Chopra tells us that God is the field of all possibilities, the sum total of all the energy in the universe as it conspires to shape and align itself. Remembering that we are gods, set to come before the mightiest of gods - God - judge of judges, creator among creators, we see the truth of Christ's declarations about doing the work of the father and about the good and harm we can do another.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word was with God. God created a world out of His spirit, a world which at least in our earthly sphere culminated in the creation of a creature in His own image, a create with will, with the power to create something out of nothing, with the capacity to shape the stuff of the universe by deliberate act. To be created in the image of God does not mean that God has nostrils because we have nostrils. It means that we have free will because God has will.
In the beginning, we inhabited an Edenic paradise, a place where we exercised our dominion with love and care, glorying in the wonder of it all. And then we tasted the tree of knowledge and knew original separation. I do not think that God would have set us a temptation simply to see if we'd make Him happy or break His heart. For one thing, He'd have known how that would turn out.
When God created us, there was one hitch that even God couldn't overcome. In free will comes the potential for willfullness. But for God to fully realize us in His image, He had no choice. I suspect that the warning about the tree of knowledge was like the warning about looking both ways before crossing the streets. It was meant to keep us whole and intact. The wrongness of breaking the rule comes not in the upsetting of a vindictive and arbitrary God, but in placing oneself in mortal jeopardy.
When we tasted the tree of knowledge, what we had done was to experience the earthy an earthly side of our nature. As Aphrodite's pomegranite seeds bound her to Hades, so the fruit of the tree of knowledge bound us to earth. We realized we were vessels of clay, when formerly we were so infused with spirit as to not notice. And so we grew ashamed in realizing that the divine spark within was housed by the stuff of corporality, the form of animals. And where we had felt as with a kindred spirit before, from this point on we knew ourselves other than as an extension of God.
The pains of childbirth are hard on woman, and the Catholic church among others likes to point to this as evidence of who bore the brunt of original sin. But the truth of the matter is that the true pain of original sin is the same pain that we gave God. The pain of separation.
When our earthly existence starts, it is with man and woman becoming one. Nine months later, the result is a creation physically separate from both. In time, the child grows, becomes mobile first, then hungry for independence. From that point on, we see a drama not unlike the drama of the soul, in which our dependencies, both physical and psychological, draw us back and heap upon the parents many cares. Reassured, the child finds security enough to again seek independence. For most people, the drama plays out for a lifetime, all the way down to visiting graves or remembering the birthdays of loved ones now gone, in a never-ending search for the security of the first moments in the presence of one's mother coupled with the independence to survive when that sense of security erodes. The drama is most painful and acute for those who achieve the fullest separation.
Our relationship to God proceeds in the same way, with us standing on our own two feet, going to work on our own, raising our kids on our own, and then getting tested. All of a sudden, there comes the involuntary, "Oh God," and we are again helpless and as reliant upon the spiritual aid of the One who created our souls as a two-years child is upon mother after scratching its knee.
Whence cometh peace? Peace and security come in spirituality where self-confidence and strength come in life - when we know we can do it on our own because, paradoxically, we aren't on our own. The child confident in his parents' love and his parents' ability to care for him, develops a self-assurance from their reassurance that guides him in life. By absorbing the best of what our parents offer - dependent upon the good they were able to offer - we cease to need our parents' active direction because it becomes inherent in our experience of the world.
If our childhoods are painful and filled with fear, though, we find ourselves taking one of two paths: separation for protection or security in insecurity. The question for those with good childhoods is how to access the reserves of strength therein provided. For those with troubled childhoods, things are trickier, for wholeness comes in being connected to something harmful.
Here is where the imperfection of the metaphor of God the Father comes into play. Just as coping with earthly life is aided by connecting with that within which best prepares us for the drama of human existence, so spirituality relies upon connecting with that within that is divine, the holy spark which brought our first breath.
God may be perfect, but we are not. Our parents were not, ever, perfect parents. And so we all have elements of our personalities, parts of who we are, with which we deliberately avoid contact. And that we access at our peril. In this state, it is hard to access the divine within, for so much else is corrupted by the cares of this existence.
There are people we meet who seem to live without care, though. How do they do it? Let's glance back at Wittgenstein:
... don't we have the feeling that someone who sees no problem in life is blind to something important, even to the most important thing of all? Don't I feel like saying that a man like that is just living aimlessly - blindly, like a mole, and that if only he could see, he would see the problem?What Wittgenstein is showing us is what happens when you are in alignment or harmony with life. There are those who suffer but maintain faith. That is fine. But there are others who suffer and remain joyful. This is the difference between piety - knowing that a greater good exists and ought be respected - and being in contact with the divine within.
Or shouldn't I say rather: a man who lives rightly won't experience the problem as sorrow, so for him it will not be a problem, but a joy; in other words for him it will be a bright halo round his life, not a dubious background.
-1937
Original sin, it seems to me, consists in our separation from God and adherence to our earthly natures. Finding peace in life, then, comes in surmounting the worst of the horrors unleashed by original sin, or original separation. It comes when we endure the darkness of life as the child endures the darkness of the room. The child can handle the darkness when his mother is there, the sound of her breath letting him know he is not alone. And we can learn to handle the darkness by realizing that Jesus is right there with us - right there inside us, in fact - if we only reach within to discover the immortal soul which is our true source and whose safety He has secured.
Take as a postscript to this discussion, the following that Wittgenstein wrote in 1939:
In a way, having oneself psychoanalysed is like eating from the tree of knowledge. The knowledge acquired sets us (new) ethical problems; but contributes nothing to their solution.This view of the tree of knowledge is apt, for before Christ, our own view of original sin could only be "We're sorry, but now what?" With Christ, we partially resolve this, for eternal separation from the Father is no longer necessary. But there is still the matter of how free our free will is if its only acceptable use is to align ourselves with the will of heaven, all other uses being possible but in vain except as gestures of defiance. The matter is more troublesome than the free will vs. predestination question, since it asks not merely whether but why God gave us free will. The question is one I will take up later. My thoughts are inadequate to the task and probably wrong, but it's worth exploring since, I suspect, the key to inner peace lies in figuring out whether there's actually an answer and what it might be.
posted by gbarto at 6:43 PM