On Original Mortality

The following is my more considered reflection on some issues raised by my friend Bosco at his Liturgy blog.

One of the things that divides Eastern from Western Christian theology concerns how they regard the concept of Original Sin. The Western concept, largely developed by Saint Augustine of Hippo, is that the Fall led to a kind of contamination of human nature and humanity, robbing humans of the immortality they possessed by nature (as made in the image of God) and so rendering them subject to death, and stained with an inheritance of guilt that is passed along to each person born, a stain of guilt that has to be washed away in Baptism.

The Eastern church never adopted this view. It accepts that the Fall brought sin into the world, and that the effect of the sin is death; but it regards this as a consequence of the Fall without any inherited actual guilt. So the East doesn't think of it as transmission of something (like some kind of fluid passed along), but as an event with the logical after-effect of becoming subject to death

Both East and West (the West more explicitly) appear to accept that the original humans were immortal, and lost that quality with the Fall. It is doubtful whether this stands up to a close reading of the Scriptural text, nor is it necessary in order to preserve a doctrine of Original Sin, Western or Eastern, and the equally Pauline testimony that through that sin death entered the world, and that, in Adam, all die.

Looking at the mythological portrayal in the text of the creation accounts, Adam and Eve are denied access to the Tree of Life, and so lose immortality. Immortality, then, is not portrayed as something they had by nature, but because they had access to the Tree of Life. Every other human since, who never had access to the Tree, shares in the consequence of Adam's Fall. Nothing is portrayed as being "transmitted" because this is not about passing something along but about losing something.

In spite of the Scripture's mythological portrayal, the Western church (at a council in Carthage in 418 — with Augustine present, pressing his theology of original sin, a distinctly Western view later reaffirmed and codified by the Council of Trent) anathematized the notion I presented above, instead alleging an original inherent or natural human immortality that was lost due to the Fall, as the removal of, or alteration in, some aspect of human nature. I prefer the Scriptural view that the only entity immortal by nature is God, and that human immortality was (and will be again) a gift from God, a gift that could be lost, as indeed it was (in Adam) but which can also be restored (in Christ). This also makes good typological sense of immortality restored in Christ through the “tree of the cross.”

One way of looking at this involves thinking about the nature of God as the uniquely self-subsistent entity, the only One totally independent of all other entities. Immortality is an aspect of this independence, as the East sings in the Kontakion of the Departed, "only thou art immortal, the creator and maker of mankind." The Fall consisted in large part of Adam and Eve seeking that same independence — in their case, independence from God — in order, as the text says, to "become like God." The true human theosis cannot be achieved in such a bold, aggressive move, but rather involves — in the course of salvation history — the eventual jointure of our human nature with the divine. This union is a work already completed in Christ, who through the kenotic abandonment of what was his by right, became — in union with humanity and human nature — dependent and subject to death, "even death on the cross." And as Christ shares in our humanity in this way, we also come to participate in the divine life through our union with Christ.

The notion of original mortality is also coherent with the Genesis 1 commandment to the primeval couple, "be fruitful and multiply" — identical to the commandment given the non-human creatures, about whom no suggestion of immortality was ever made, nor does the Genesis 2-4 account offer any explanation for a "Fall" for the non-human world. The reason this commandment reflects mortality rests on the fact that progeny would not be needed if the couple were immortal; indeed, fertility and immortality combined would lead to eventual massive overpopulation of any finite space. Moreover, this is also coherent with the teaching of Jesus in Luke 20:35-36, where he explains that those who attain the resurrection to eternal life do not marry, exactly because they are immortal — no one will die, so no one will need to be replaced by a descendent.

All of this seems to mesh with a notion that the primal Fall lost something that the original humans had by grace, not by innate nature; and that the effect of that loss falls on their heirs and assigns not as a substantial inheritance — the presence of an inherited sinfulness distilled into their nature — but as the absence of something. If you think of it as a possession an ancestor had and then lost — say, a deed to a silver mine — it is easier to understand that the current poverty of their heirs is due not to something passed along, but precisely to something not passed along, as a consequence of that original loss. It is, effectively, about disinheritance.

None of this is to fall into the Pelagian view that Augustine was combatting at Carthage, and in which I think he went too far in his effort to find a mechanism for the workings of original sin as a substantial inheritance. I think ordinary life, and again the Scriptural text, reveal that human beings tend to sin by nature. The myth tells us that the primal couple commit the original sin while they are in Paradise. The sin is in their heart before it is in their hands. If they were naturally incapable of sin, they could not have done so; so there must have been in them a natural drive to the self (a theme beloved of Augustine, and surprising that he missed in his effort to pin all this down) is there from the beginning. It was the assertion of the human self, in its drive to become self-sufficient and independent of all else ("like God"), that it lost the likeness it already had, and the fellowship with God that allowed it access to immortal life in God's presence.

— Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Thought for December 11

Socialism, when it doesn't work, is hardly worse than capitalism when it does.

What do I mean by that? Simply that the ideal of socialism (as a system which asks "from each according to ability," and hopes to provide "to each according to need") is a rather noble goal, one which like many a noble goal runs aground on human greed and selfishness, in particular in the tendency of supposedly equitable societies to produce oligarchy rather than equity. This is a flaw and a failure in the socialist programme, but it may be unavoidable.

However, the ideal of capitalism is to some extent the same programme adopted and engaged, driven by those very forces of greed, selfishness, and oligarchy, neatly wrapped up in the "profit motive" that drives the whole system. As with the excuse for faulty software: "It's not a bug, it's a feature," the "bug" that wrecks many socialist endeavors is the main feature of capitalism: profit. Which is why few truly "free markets" are allowed to operate with total freedom, as it doesn't take an economist to see the abuses that result when profit runs roughshod over safety both personal and societal. Some regulation is needed as a curb on profit for profit alone.

It is in large part because I am a realist rather than an idealist that I acknowledge the faults of both (and all other) economic enterprises. They all run into human nature, amplifying at times the worst in us all. But the hope of social economic justice speaks to me as a Christian, and even if it is a fond hope, it is one I will seek to realize in this imperfect and imperfectable world.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Icon of Humanity

She knelt beside the neatly planted rows
of cummin, dill, and mint. The clear March sky
was bright; a flock of birds flew high.
She pinched a leaf;
                    then, suddenly, she froze —
a voice had spoken. There was no one there.
It spoke a second time; she looked around.
“How can this be?” she asked the vacant air.
Once more it spoke, yet there was not a sound.
She paused again; her answer in her mind.

In thirty years and three, her words would find
an echo: “Not my will, but thine be done,”
said in another garden by her son,
while three friends slept.
                           So here none heard her words —
except an angel, a high flight of birds,
and three neat rows of cummin, mint, and dill:
“Be it to me according to thy will.”

April 7, 1989
Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

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This poem first appeared in print on the cover of The Living Church in 1993, and on this blog in 2006. The image is a watercolor and pencil sketch after Rafaello, executed in Lent this year, which I've called "Blue Madonna."

Papal Fallibility

Pope Benedict XVI has chosen to make use of his Christmas message to do a bit of theology concerning human nature. In doing so he reveals a fundamental failure to grasp the meaning of the Incarnation.

...People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being.... They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.... The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he himself is concerned...

This rather misses the mark, as the whole point of the Incarnation taking place in the manner it did — via the work of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, without any participation of a human male — was to reveal the secondary quality of maleness and femaleness: Jesus derived his entire human nature from the Virgin Mary (or so says the Definition of Chalcedon). Although Jesus is male, his humanity derives entirely from a female. So the "human nature" is in itself genderless, although each particular human being has, by virtue of genetics and epigenetic factors, a sexual or gender reality expressed anatomically, psychologically,  emotionally, and socially. But as with all qualities of a person, sex is not essential to the nature: it is a characteristic particular to the individual, like height, or eye or hair color, or any of the other variable factors that individual human beings have. We even have a very clear sense of the genetic factors that produce this particular characteristic quality of the person. The quality does not make them human; their humanity gives expression to the quality.

The Pope takes what can only be described as a hard-line determinist position, pure sexism in its most precise form: anatomy fixes identity. In addition to the discontinuity of this position with the doctrine of the Incarnation, this also tends, like its cousin racism (also based on "given" characteristics), to dehumanize the human person, and reduce the concept of the person to the level of the animal nature; it puts all the weight of identity on the very aspect which the doctrine of the Incarnation shows us should not be given any weight at all, for as St. Paul so famously observed, "in Christ there is no more male and female."

Categorical difficulties
Which brings me to Genesis. One of the ongoing problems with the traditional Christian view of sex and sexuality lies in the reading of Genesis 1:27 ("male and female he created them") as referring to categories of people; that is, reading the words male and female as adjectives. However, in Hebrew, they are nouns — and would likely be better translated as "a male and a female, he created them." Although the Greek translation (LXX) elides them into adjective form, the Aramaic retains the noun form, and in one of the Aramaic versions adds specific details about the couple.

It appears from the contemporary evidence that Jesus and other Jews of the Second Temple era read and understood the text in this way, as referring to a couple. The Damascus Document of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Geniza A Col. 4:19-21), for example, uses the verse from Genesis in support of its argument in favor of monogamy. The same is true of a section of a Zadokite Document (7:1-7) that is usually classed with the Old Testament pseudepigrapha or apocrypha. (It seems to me to be from the same source as the Qumran text.)

And Jesus himself, when he cites this text in his critique of divorce and remarriage (Matt 19:4-6) is also clearly referencing not some alleged complementarity that makes male and female fit together, but rather the simpler and more obvious notion that a couple join together to form a unity: he even quotes (paraphrasing the Hebrew, as do the LXX and Targumim, by adding "two") another portion of Genesis (2:24). He then nails the matter home by his own gloss, "So they are no longer two, but one flesh."

So this isn't about categories, but about the mystery of how two become one — which is, of course exactly how St. Paul deals with it in Ephesians, which is also about how two become one — the two of Jew and Gentile (2:15) in one body as well as the two of husband and wife in one flesh.

So could we please have no more of this nonsense about categorical qualities being determinative about who and what people are, at their most basic level as human beings? People are fully dimensioned with many qualities and characteristics, and indeed free — with the freedom given by their Creator — to become all that God intends for them. The Scripture may begin with Genesis, but it ends with the Revelation of the new humanity, which transcends the merely earthly categories and qualities that each of us possess. It is not our substance or our genes that matter: but our actions of love and service to one another.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

ps: Let's try a mental exercise. Surely a part of the imperative of bodily identity as male and female should be "ordered" towards what male and female exist for: sexual reproduction. So any person who fails to live out this aspect of his or her natural identity is in some way "constructing" an identity at odds with their biological destiny. So the "celibate lifestyle" is contrary to human nature.

UPDATE: You can read the full text of the address courtesy of Whispers in the Loggia. As I suspected, Benedict reads Gen 1:27 as referring to categories, not people. He's done it before, and will do it again...

Thought for 08.21.12

God has written something of the Truth on every human heart, but none can read the text upon their own. So God has given us each other, so that we may read the truth upon each others’ hearts, and come to know God's Truth beyond ourselves.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
a word that came to me in a dream last night

Role Model

Mary, with your human nature
God himself was pleased to dwell.
Every priest should imitate your
Hosting thus Emmanuel.

Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG

Doing What Comes (Un)Naturally

A Sermon for Proper 10a

SJF • Proper 10a 2011 • Tobias Stanislas Haller BSG
The mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law—indeed it cannot, and those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

Some of the philosophers of the romantic era and in the 17th to 19th century came up with the idea that people living in simplicity in the time before civilization were somehow more innocent, more “natural” and hence unspoiled. The notion is sometimes referred to as that of the “noble savage.” The concept became attached to Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but it isn’t exactly his idea. Still, he shared the tendency somehow to idealize human beings in their uncivilized condition. He saw civilization itself as a kind of introduction of morality and consequent decline.

The idea as Rousseau espoused it is that people in their primitive state were morally neutral, and that it was only with later civilization that evil entered the world as society began to corrupt the natural innocence of primitive existence. As Rousseau put it, the problems began “when the first man staked out a bit of land and said, ‘This is mine,’ and convinced others foolishly to agree.”

The Christian tradition is said by some to see things rather differently, but a closer reading may reveal that it is not quite so different. People sometimes look to the story of Adam and Eve and think of the innocent perfection of life that they enjoyed in paradise. But surely the point of the story is precisely that they were not innocent. They sinned — disobeying what at that point was just about the only thing God had commanded them — while they were in paradise. They may have been created innocent, but they were also created capable of committing sin, and it took them almost no time to do so.

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Theologians have wrestled with the question of human nature for thousands of years — whether people are good by nature or bad by nature, or started good and became bad, or whatever.

It seems to me that Saint Paul had it right, and made the most sense both out of that ancient story of the Garden and the Fall, and the practical reality of his own human experience. Human flesh — with its cravings, devices and desires — is weak. Human beings also have a natural tendency towards self-preservation, like most living things. And human beings develop very quickly the sense of property: at least when it comes to their own property. Much as Rousseau observed, children don’t take long to get to the point at which they have learned the first person possessive: Mine! It’s just that he saw this as part of a decline rather than natural, in contrast to another earlier philosopher, John Locke, who took the view that property was a natural right. Whether a right or a tendency, though, as a child, I had to be taught that not everything was mine — I had to learn how to share with other children.

For Saint Paul, this natural tendency is a part of the “mind set on the flesh.” It derives from our creaturely existence — our neediness. We need things; we need air to breathe, we need to eat. All of that is natural, natural to us. And that neediness has to be governed and ordered and civilized by some kind of regulation. Thus far Paul would be in agreement with Rousseau and the English philosopher Hobbes, with the exception that Rousseau was a bit more optimistic about the short-lived innocence of primitive humanity.

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But Saint Paul stands apart from all of these secular philosophers, in that, while they saw from rather different angles that law was society’s answer to the problem of human weakness, Paul saw that law was an insufficient solution to the problem. It is like a drug that comforts but does not heal. He saw law as an insufficient means of bringing peace to the warring hearts of fallible human beings. Even the law given by God could not bring compliance: in fact, God’s law only laid down the penalty: “Of the tree in the midst of the garden you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you shall die.” That was the law that God gave to Adam and Eve, and it was the law they broke, before the proverbial ink was dry.

So what is the answer? What does Saint Paul offer us as an answer? Paul looks to God again — for something different this time; not for the law, but something different — after all, God is the source of all good — the fountain of all goodness, as we sang in our hymns today: it is from him that everything comes, the source of all good — but Paul did not look to God for the same old kind of law that God had given in the past, the law that was weakened by the flesh and so could not bring true righteousness.

Instead God sent his Son, but not, as the evangelist John would say, to condemn the world. God sent his Son precisely to relieve the world of that endless cycle of law-giving and law-breaking that was getting us nowhere, as we spun our wheels in the dry soil or the mud of our own failings.

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For Paul had observed something in that old, old story: you may recognize it too — let me ask you, when was it that Adam and Eve sinned? While God was away from them, while they were on their own. (Of course God was not really “away” but that is how the story goes — and we had best pay attention to the details of that story.) And Eve was off on her own — away from Adam — when the Serpent whispered sweet nothings in her ear and tempted her to violate the only law on the books at that time. And her weak flesh — the desire to live forever and become like God (even though, as the text shows, she and Adam already were like God, being made in God’s image) — as I say, her weak flesh gave in, and then she persuaded Adam’s equally weak flesh to join her: all of this while God was “away.”

So the answer to all of this, Paul says, is to be always “with” God — such that God is never “away.” And this is made possible both through the fact that Jesus Christ came “in the flesh” — that is to say, in and through and by means of the very human flesh that was the problem in the first place. And further to know that God is always with us, always present to us through the Spirit. If the Spirit of Christ dwells in you, God is with you, and even though the flesh might still seek to drag you down to death because of sin, the Spirit — God’s presence — is life because of the righteousness of Christ.

This is the hopeful message that Saint Paul brings: Christ came in the flesh and remains with us in the Spirit, and his spirit is at work in us and there it can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine: even though we have no power in ourselves to become righteous, his spirit working in us is life because of his righteousness.

And it is a life that contains within it the promise of new life, the resurrection life. The Son of God, the Word of God, is at work within the soil of our human flesh. Remember how the story tells, what God made us from, at the beginning. Our soil, our flesh, comes from the earth. It is like the seed of the word received and nurtured, which grows in the soil to bear fruit for righteousness, “in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.” We are not good by nature, but by grace: our soil cannot bear fruit on its own, unless the seed of God be planted in it.

And so we do not trust in what is merely natural to make us good, but in the supernatural goodness of God to make us his. That is the message of salvation and grace through Jesus Christ our Lord.+

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