Recently I have been reading (amidst the other 13 books I am working through...oh how I much more I would enjoy life if I could actually read all the books on my list) The Great Divorce which gives a fascinating, though purposefully not doctrinal, portrayal of Purgatory. This lead me to a contemplation of sin and vulnerability. Before I get there, it is important to note that it is LENT. I love this season, 40 days for penance penance and more penance.
This isn't so unrelated to sin; essentially is prohibits us from forming relations with others (especially God) by forming a relationship with the utterly oppresive and self-centered Satan.
This season we are asked to increase (which implies that there is a regular practice and schedule of penance like no meat on fridays or opting out of desert on friday) our works of penance, fasting, frequent Confession, mortification, almsgiving .These increased practices force us to open ourselves up to the other and to God. From personal experience, I love fasting because it literally forces me to lean on God for support and strength; especially when the only thing I have to eat is His Most Blessed Body. Penance makes us vulnerable and how often do we need to be reminded of our own vulnerability and to make ourselves vulnerable to others. Giving money to the poor, confession, fasting...whatever penances you perform, they force you to love others and not yourself.
Here, then, is a recent paper I had to whip out (in a night...some things never change) for a class here on sin as self-centeredness
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“Nam mysterium jam operatur iniquitatis : tantum ut qui tenet nunc, teneat, donec de medio fiat. Et tunc revelabitur ille iniquus, quem Dominus Jesus interficiet spiritu oris sui, et destruet illustratione adventus sui eum: cujus est adventus secundum operationem Satanæ in omni virtute, et signis, et prodigiis mendacibus, et in omni seductione iniquitatis iis qui pereunt: eo quod caritatem veritatis non receperunt ut salvi fierent.” (2 Thes. 2:7-10)
In the first few chapters of Genesis, one encounters a rather dramatic narrative of God’s creation of the κόσμος (the created order), of man’s particular creation, and mankind’s subsequent fall from God’s grace through the eating of the forbidden fruit. As John Paul II quite eloquently notes in both Mulieris Dignitatem (§9) and his general audience on March 5, 1980, ‘Even though what is written in the Book of Genesis is expressed in the form of a symbolic narrative, as is the case in the description of the creation of man as male and female (cf. Gen 2:18-25), at the same time it reveals what should be called “the mystery of sin”, and even more fully, “the mystery of evil” which exists in the world created by God.” That is to say, we have the cosmic mystery of creation, the mysterium iniquitatis and even the resulting mysterium mortis. As St. Paul notes in his second letter to the Thessalonians, the mystery of sin is already at work. Yet, what exactly is sin? Quoting Saint Augustine's De civitate Dei (14, 28), the Catechism of the Catholic Church clearly states that sin is "love of oneself even to the contempt of God" (1850). Sin, then, is a radical self-centeredness; a state of existential solitude and isolation from God and neighbor. As Saint Augustine explains it, it is a disordering of the hierarchy so that man replaces God at the top of the hierarchy of beings. As a result, one is incapable of loving God or neighbor…or anyone that is not the self. That a radical self-centeredness and isolation is wrong simply requires a look to our human nature where we find that our εὐδαιμονία is rooted in our nature as social and political beings. We belong in a polis and we require communities to flourish.
Here Aristotle provides a great exposition of this truth. In the first book of his Politics, Aristotle argues that humans are, by nature, social and political agents. This quite easily echoes the first two chapters of Genesis. The Genesis account of creation eloquently displays our innate desire for communion with others. When God brought the animals before Adam, none provided that sense of completeness and wholeness. Thus, God created Eve of Adam’s own flesh and the two were united, quite intimately, in the covenant of matrimony. One of the many readings one can take on Dante’s depiction of the Inferno is the agony those in Hell experience due to the hyper-isolation and alienation experienced there (The Inferno, Canto iii, vv. 34-39). On a similar note, Primo Levi in Se questo è un uomo, describes the Lager as his own Inferno and the only thing that gets him through is his friendship with a Frenchman named Jean who he teaches Italian and Dante; the self-giving of himself to Jean made him feel most human in a place stripped of any sense of humanity. On a similar note, this openness to others can be seen in Shakespeare’s Tempest where Miranda truly sees (in contrast to the illusions of Prospero) for the first time upon encountering in Ferdinand another in whom she can place her heart in.
Aristotle continues by noting in a discussion of why the polis is naturally formed from man’s political nature, that the polis is self-sufficient and therefore most desirable. This notion of a desire and search for self-sufficiency is precisely what stands in contra to the Yahwistic account of man as one with an innate tendency to seek communion with others and it is in this contrast that sin makes its famous appearance in the Genesis drama. At the root here is vulnerability to others. The saintly and virtuous place their heart in the other; there is an absolute openness to the other even if he will be rejected. The prime example of this, of course, is Christ who opens himself (quite literally on the Cross with arms extended) to the world and sinners, knowing that he will be rejected. As Dante portrays it, those in Hell are there for their hearts lie completely in themselves; their live were lived according only to a principle of self-gratification. For example, in the classic movie The Song of Bernadette is a scene when they are interrogating St. Bernadette on the miracles to see if she is ‘insane.’ When they ask her ‘what is a sinner?’, she replies that a sinner ‘is one whole love evil.’ Not one who does evil; that is secondary. Rather, at the root of a sinner is one whose heart lies and rests in evil; that is to say, the self and not God as properly ordered.
This then, we see most eloquently portrayed in the drama of the first chapters of Genesis. Post-fall, what were once beautiful and good (καλοκαγαθός) unities and communions between Adam and Eve and between God and Adam/Eve have since been horribly disordered. In an attempt to be self-sufficient, Adam was forced to isolate himself from Eve and God. Self-focused, Adam and Eve worry about themselves for the first time, noticing their nakedness and literally hiding themselves from one another with clothing. Rather than gazing at the other, they are utterly preoccupied with themselves. Further, when God returns, Adam is found hiding behind the tree, literally setting a boundary between himself and God. As Benedict XVI wonderfully states, “The human being lives in the suspicion that God’s love creates a dependence and that he must rid himself of this dependency if he is to be fully himself. Man does not want to receive his existence and the fullness of his life from God. He himself wants to obtain from the tree of knowledge the power to shape the world, to make himself a god, raising himself to God’s level, and to overcome death and darkness with his own efforts. He does not want to rely on love that to him seems untrustworthy; he relies solely on his own knowledge since it confers power upon him. Rather than on love, he sets his sights on power, with which he desires to take his own life autonomously in hand. And in doing so, he trusts in deceit rather than in truth and thereby sinks with his life into emptiness, into death. Love is not dependence but a gift that makes us live. The freedom of a human being is the freedom of a limited being, and therefore is itself limited. We can possess it only as a shared freedom, in the communion of freedom: only if we live in the right way, with one another and for one another, can freedom develop.” (Benedict XVI, Homily Delivered to the Papal Household on the 40th Anniversary of the Closure of the Second Vatican Council, 8 December 2005.)
This, then, is precisely the nature of sin; a radical self-centeredness in which man becomes a navel-gazer. Rather than live in the community we were destined to be (and innately desire), we isolate and alienate ourselves from others in this radical pursuit of self-sufficiency.
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