this is an essay i wrote a while back on the theme of guilt and religion. it’s very simplistic and massively naive, and probably a sellout in the end, but i’d appreciate a comment if anyone can bear with it. many thanks. also much of the ideas sparked by or downright indebted to philip pullman and merold westphal.
Originally this essay intended to explore the significance of and implications for human guilt, by setting theistic understanding beside and against atheistic understanding. In a way this is still part of the project. But human guilt is also much more than this simple dichotomy infers, and considering different strands of religious thought has made it increasingly apparent, that to be content with setting perspectives in opposition to one another like this, is to miss something fundamental to the nature of guilt and how it relates to the religious experience.
A poignant example of this can be found in what many religions consider to be the first imposition of guilt on and the initial stirrings of culpability in the human consciousness. In talking of Adam and Eve, The Fall, and The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the ‘many religions,’ herein referred to become expressly Christian. In that sense the universality of the point to be made here regarding the dangers of dichotomized thought for religious truth is attenuated. But the hope is that the effects and inevitability of what many philosophers of religion call ‘cultural myopia’ might in some small way be mitigated by the strength of intention, which is to always be as all inclusive and all encompassing as possible. In any case ‘cultural myopia’ may not seem so adversarial a term, if we consider it in its sum total (as some theologians do), as a multifaceted expression of something essentially ineffable and transcendent, that makes an alternate spark of its divine truth intelligible in each differential manifestation and admission of it. So, relating this thinking back to the site of Original Sin, it is hoped that flagging the dangers of dichotomized thinking in a Christian context, may somehow communicate something of essential truth to all religious experience.
A popularized example of the perils of dichotomization that has especial pertinence for issues of guilt in religion comes in the form of ‘His Dark Materials,’ a series of books by Philip Pullman. In this trilogy Pullman works on the premise that Original Sin and The Fall are a good thing, because they bring the human condition out of ignorance into the light of knowledge, and if the price of this newfound awareness is a guilty conscience, a bloodied soul, and a descent into depravity and abasement, it is nonetheless one worth paying. Knowledge Pullman insists, brings its own salvation. In one regard Biblical Scripture bears him out, with its many references to knowledge as a means to redemption. But the tree of knowledge Pullman puts his faith in doesn’t furnish us the kind of knowledge Biblical God intends, as recourse to its full title will attest. ‘The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil’ gives the human being a very particular understanding of knowledge, a dichotomized one, that juxtaposes good with evil, thereby annihilating the very concept of unity and encompassment on which the Christian God is built. If this is supposed to be the path to revelation, then it seems deficient in the very important sense that it can’t transcend disparity, thereby failing to recapture or regenerate this notion of unity that is so intrinsic to knowledge as Biblically understood.
Pullman’s chief fault, (and that of others who choose to interpret The Fall in this vein), isn’t that he mistakes polarities for true knowledge, although this is the inevitable result. Rather his error originates in the fact that he confuses ignorance with innocence. It might arguably be said that all religions are an attempt to find a way back to the innocence that characterized Adam and Eve before they ate the fruit of the tree, and that the religious obsession with human guilt denotes a hypersensitivity to the fact that this innocence is the great casualty of The Fall. What Pullman doesn’t see is that ignorance and innocence aren’t interchangeable terms, but that (at least insofar as the Bible conceives of it), innocence is that purity of being that transcends disparity and disjointedness and allows us to think in holistic and unified terms, in a manner that is reminiscent of our Maker and brings us into communion with Him. In this sense, the method of coming to knowledge, to awareness via binary oppositions, which constitutes for Pullman the path of revelation, is seen to be little more than a perversion and distortion of the human capacity to truly know and to truly understand. Thus, in losing Paradise we lose not only that harmonious, idyllic state of being, but also our ability to think in a way that is so intrinsically superior to dichotomies, that it has no need to unbalance human understanding by setting it in opposition to itself in this way.
In the sense that the concept of God as undifferentiated wholeness and indivisibility is the focus of much religious thought, then this particularly Christian, guilt oriented example of dichotomy as that which splinters and divides in the absence of a unifying, gathering, elemental presence to override such fissure (such as innocence provides in Christian thought), is seen to have applicability to ideas of religion in a broader sense.
But dichotomization needn’t always run so contrarily to the themes inherent in a particular form of religious thought, and perhaps this is best seen in isolating the symbol of the body incarnate, which paradoxically unites unifies different forms of religious expression while dividing itself. Although types of religious expression can and do differ widely across time, place and between people, yet the human condition is a state of being that is common to us all. In this regard it is interesting to see how different modes of thinking contextualize the body in terms of human guilt and culpability. The distinction between body and soul or body and mind has at least a verisimilitude of authenticity. It seems that just as there is a positive correlation between age and increased knowledge, so too is there is a positive association between age and bodily decrepitude. It is because of this kind of reasoning which sees body and soul as straining against one another, that some forms of religious expression, notably those exilic in nature, choose to view the body as the ‘prison’ or tomb of the soul, that incapacitates our ability to come into the light of true knowledge so long as we remain chained to it. Embodiment subjectivizes the human essence, placing it in absolute opposition to God, who is pure, undifferentiated, indivisible wholeness. In this regard bodily form is seen not just as the punishment for our transgressions, or the barrier to our liberty, but also as the ever-present, inescapable reminder that we are guilty, we are impure and we are out of sync with our essential and natural state of being. Corporeality is our punishment, but it is also the mark of our guilt and our shame, being not just the reason we say mea but also the reason we say culpa. For this form of religious expression, the discomfort and guilt we feel in this world is, so long as we remain participatory in it, absolute and unrelenting. The exile’s sense of abandonment is twofold. Particularity has taken essentiality away from us, and the additional placing of the exile in a ‘world’ that not only affirms personhood, but also enforces and refines it, compounds the feeling of estrangement and alienation. Thus, the path to redemption and salvation is rendered doubly hard. We must escape ‘worldliness’ as such, and also we must disavow what we are, - we must disavow ourselves. And herein rests another problem.
Westphal in his book, God, Guilt and Death calls it ‘ambivalence in the face of the sacred.’ God has placed us in this condition of individuated selfhood that must negotiate an existence altogether antithetical to its true, essential nature. Even if we fail to appreciate this on the level of ordinary consciousness, he insures that we feel it keenly at the subliminal level, by rendering the body and soul so utterly incompatible with each other. But more than this he immerses us so deeply within this ‘veil of tears,’ that to conceive of truth and actuality outside of our bodily boundary limitations becomes an absolute impossibility for us. In this respect we might allude to the religious iconography of the Christian tradition, which as Mandeville notes, assumes it has captured the character and form of the immortal, spiritualized essence, by affixing wings to the backs of men and women and pronouncing them angels.
But the fact of being rendered impotent to alternate possibilities of what essentiality may be; makes the quest for truth and salvation daunting in even yet another important way. Although the feeling of alienation in this world is intense, yet so utterly embedded in it are we; and, in our fallen state so thoroughly constitutive of worldly mechanics are we, that the thought of a return to true essentiality heightens our discomfiture still more. So in the face of questions of perplexity and ultimacy it becomes for us as Hamlet so eloquently puts it a case of, “bear[ing] those ills we have” rather than “flee[ing] to others we know not of.” Thus our sense of guilt is exacerbated in three ways. Firstly, selfhood is a stain of sin in itself. Secondly, we become hyper-aware of our inadequacies and estrangement from God in the fruitless attempts to conceive of ultimacy in terms other than human individuation and subjectivity. Lastly and perhaps most disconcertingly, because it betrays just how deeply invested we are in this the superficial realm, we, in the vein of Peter and the cockcrow deny God. We choose worldliness and dislocation over truth. We are as Westphal would have it are at the height of our ambivalence, oscillating between truth and untruth, courage and cowardice, and choosing in the end the recreant’s portion. And so human guilt now becomes in the face of religious fundamentals, not just a matter of incompetence, culpability and atonement, but something much, much deeper and pivotal - it becomes an issue of basic human unworthiness and undeservedness with regard to questions of redemption and salvation.
In psychological terms there are many ways in which the guilt complex works to appease itself in the face of its disavowal of God. For example, it is widely theorized that the prayers of St. Augustine, and in a more generic sense the mode of prayer itself, which frequently personifies and particularizes God as ‘He’ or ‘Thou/You,’ is a conscious attempt to make apparent and evident that which is immanent but veiled. Augustine it is widely supposed is directly addressing the Christian Platonist Anselm’s question of how the believing soul gets around its problem of ontological inadequacy, of needing in its human form to perceive God once it has found Him, of needing to complete the circle from experience to concept back to experience. This may be very true, but prayer insofar as it attaches personhood to God, while simultaneously insisting that God is irreducible to subjective understanding, is also attempting something more than this. Making God identifiable with the selfhood in which we negotiate our own earthly existence; gives us some sort of parity with him, however illusory and superficial it may be. This verisimilitude of parity serves to lessen our own sense of unworthiness and ineptitude in His presence, and appeases the strong guilt we feel at being unable to renounce the condition of personhood that we know innately to be contrary to our true essentiality. It could be said that the function of prayer insofar as it pertains to human guilt, isn’t just one of securing salvation through penitential rites, but at the more profound level, is about trying to attain to essentiality, without having to relinquish that condition of human existence which normally has essentiality as its antithesis. It could be said that reducing God to personable terms, is an attempt to rise the self out of abasement and guilt, and elevate it to a level, where it can enter into a dialogue with the Almighty, with this notion of dialogue, symbolizing the successful leap across the previously inaccessible transcendental plane which separates earthly, primitive embodiment from Godly, worldless essentiality.
As an elaboration on this idea of personification of the Divine as opposed to deification of the self; - it is of great significance that Westphal in his book ‘God, Guilt & Death,’ chooses to express the relation between God and the Christian believer in terms of a covenant. As the name implies, Westphal understands by covenantal religion, a relationship between God and Creation which mirrors that of the husband and wife bond. Insofar as this pertains to human guilt, it nullifies that sense of dislocation as punishment which permeates exilic thought. It also sets itself up as an association that runs much deeper than those sometimes found in mimetic religion, where the express purpose is of elevating the self and saving the soul. But in the creation of the covenant, the transcendental gap between us and God, between heaven and earth is bridged - and the feelings of intimacy and connectedness the covenantal symbol inspires, makes God immanent in us, and in this immanency also explicit. But while this reading of the relationship between God and humanity eradicates the guilt complex insofar as it is understood in terms of alienation and estrangement, yet the stain of guilt is not removed from the equation, it is simply relocated.
By definition a covenant is an avowal of absolute fidelity on the part of its participants. The casting of humanity in the role of the wife, while God assumes the character of the husband (which Biblical understanding will use interchangeably with paternalism), makes a very definite statement of intent, that concentrates and then crystallizes the whole of humanity in the person of Biblical Eve, (she who first tastes the forbidden fruit, and is thus the first casualty of prelapsarian existence). God meanwhile remains that male ideal, the epitome of perfection that Adam never was. Alternatively, indentifying God with the character of man could also be seen, as a further avowal that feelings of guilt regarding our embodied state are needless and unwarranted. Engendering God with male attributes, serves (aside from everything else) as the most cogent and imposing affirmation, that physicality and embodiment aren’t necessarily bad. Personifying God in female form would have rendered less remarkable the impression of bodily integrity therein espoused, simply because the dimensions of space the female self typically occupies are relatively small. However, engendering God in a male sense communicates a reverence for the body with a spatial forcibility that is more difficult to ignore. In these two conflicting possibilities for the symbolism implied in the covenantal promise, again is seen something of the ambivalence in the face of the Sacred, that is so integral Otto’s understanding of guilt in religion. The constitution of the covenantal bond as thus understood provides in the final analysis perhaps a better breeding ground for the guilt complex than is prima facie evident. Though God is made immanent, the sense of Eve’s (or our) ontological inadequacy in the face of that proximal relation is tautened. Crystallizing humanity in the character of Eve also supposes perhaps, that on the part of humanity, there is an unavoidable and inevitable tendency to fall back into sin and error. Therefore Covenantal religion entails the assumption that, even as we utter the covenantal promise, there is an impending sense that we are definitively incapable of remaining faithful to it. Leaving aside momentarily the implications of inevitable infidelity for the guilty conscience, and focusing instead on the effects of faithlessness per se on that same sensitized conscience; it becomes apparent that covenantal religion provides the believing soul with a theoretical and relational framework that is a source of both great comfort and great unease. The covenant shows not only that God is committed to us, but also that he is committed in a very immediate and intimate way. However, because of the immanence of God and the profound nature of his covenantal pledge, then any time we do betray our part of the promise, the sense of guilt and hence worthlessness (if we follow Otto’s reasoning) we experience, runs much deeper and is much more magnified than it would be if the relational bond between God and Creation was less familiar, less proximal. In this sense the Old Testament God that occasioned fear and awe, in a strange way insulated the believing soul against its guilty conscience. Human energy was entirely concentrated on the frightening anticipation of what the wrath of God might entail. But with the transition to New Testament God, whose relation to humanity is now expressed in covenantal terms, with love and forgiveness at its core, that insulation or protective blanket falls away, and the strength of the bond pulls us so tight to Him, and leaves us so completely bare in the eyes of Him, that all our imperfections are revealed, and all our indiscretions are rendered maximally worse, when set against this unimpeachable perfection and unwavering excellence. In this form of thinking salvation is made very accessible because of the willingness of God to forgive us our transgressions, but equally our sense of being worthy and deserving of salvation is diminished, because the proximity of God makes us hyper-aware of our imperfection. So salvation is a more or less forgone conclusion provided we meet some fairly unremarkable conditions. Yet, there is a price to be paid for assurances of salvation, and that price is the consistent presence of a heightened guilt throughout our earthly lives.
With regard to psychological tactics some religions find it much harder to use psychological manipulation as a balm for the soul, and must dig deeper to make it work. For example in certain forms of Gnostic religion, the idea of human depravity and culpability runs so deep, and the idea of subject-object worldliness is seen to be so antithetical to the concept of God, that this human world is understood to be the work of a being inferior to God, a demiurge or fallen angel that has trapped particles of the divine essence (people), and left them in limbo in this its hellish creation, we call earth. The incarnation of Jesus Christ is, in this form of religious expression, regarded as an attempt to liberate and deliver us from this hell, and recover us into the divine form. This type of religious consciousness sees the earth as utterly irredeemable and the prospects for the human condition as completely hopeless, so long as it remains trapped in the earthly sphere. But equally here, by attributing Creation to the work of a devilish demiurge, the character of human guilt is transformed. The Original Sin now becomes this world and issues of human guilt and punishment become irrelevant, even inapplicable. Salvation now has nothing to do with absolution and repentance, because there is nothing to repent, nothing to forgive. The exilic and prison metaphors, once more come to the fore here, but in a new departure, are accompanied by a sense that the human soul is completely powerless, helpless and incapable of contributing in its own salvation. We are not to blame, and yet we suffer just the same. While other religions seem to readily blame this state of earthly unreality on human disobedience and sin, this form of religious expression rids it of any lingering connotations of guilt by making our existential state of corporeality not so much an arbitrary misfortune that befalls some particles of the divine substance; as an affirmation of power and intent from a force, a demiurge that sets itself in opposition to that divine substance, in which we understand it as our natural condition, our ultimate destiny to inhere.
Yet, it is also interesting that while the human self is found to be ‘not guilty’ in this sense, yet issues of guilt and culpability never disappear from human understanding completely; and that though they are no longer considered to dwell in the self, yet their loci still remain within the believing soul’s line of vision, and therefore very alive in its conscious awareness. This idea of being unable to release the guilty impulse from religious thinking entirely, invites perhaps the suggestion that, what appears prima facie to be an avowal of human guiltlessness and powerlessness, may in fact be a rather superior and complex psychological act of deflecting the truth of guilty conscience out of the self and into a being we have created specifically and unconsciously for this purpose. This kind of claim seems somewhat substantiated if it is considered that the believing soul never adequately locates or explains the demiurge within its theological framework. Humanity is understood as part of the divine substance that has lost its way, and God is conceived as that undifferentiated wholeness which encompasses us within its bodiless form, collapsing as it does so all pretensions of distinction, objectivity, particularity, personhood and otherness. Yet, if the concept of God as such (to borrow from Christian rhetoric), is contained within this expression of absolutely perfect and indivisible wholeness, then the independent existence of the demiurge, seems to suggest a deficiency in the character of God, that is inexplicable by recourse to the concept of God, and absolutely antithetical to what that concept means by God. There are three possibilities here. The first is to say that religious expression in general is notoriously paradoxical, and that where it is observed, it is often an observation of the essential ineffability of the Divine. In this regard the oxymoron expressed here is, as in many other forms of religious paradox, understood as a simple illustration of this essential ineffability. The second possibility is to re-evaluate the concept of God by conceding that the concept is not all inclusive, and that there is something ‘other’ to God, that while it may not be equal to God in terms of power, potential, and essential reality, is yet nonetheless independent of God. The third and final possibility is to acknowledge the demiurge as a product of human inventiveness, representative of a scarcely understood attempt to salve our collective conscience, and ease our discomfiture by projecting our guilt and unworthiness outside of us, to a place where we can’t deny its existence, but we can disavow its relation to us. The first possibility is appealing – so easy to arrive at, so difficult to disprove. The second is perhaps less resistant to interrogation. The re-evaluation of the God concept seems to require too radical a revision for too little reason. Excepting the problem of the demiurge, understanding God as omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent seems to compliment all the theological assumptions of this particular religion. On the other hand to attribute to the human condition the kind of incisiveness, which confirmation of the demiurge as something ‘other’ to God amounts to, is to ascribe to that human condition powers which a quick consultation of the theological brief affirms it is completely unfamiliar. Admittedly, this kind of reasoning entails understanding this belief system as Kant expresses it as ‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason Alone.’ But additionally, this is to take nothing away from the gravitas of its import, because as Kant expounds further, reason is the tool, the marker and the horizon of human understanding, and so to acknowledge something as bound by reason as such, is simply to acknowledge that this something has been touched and considered by human consciousness. Thus the doctrine of Gnosticism on balance seems less likely to bear out that the error lies in the fundamentals of the religion per-se than in the individual people subscribing to it. This in turn makes more viable the third contention of the demiurge as a product of the displacement activity undertaken by the believing soul, to rid itself of its guilt. It is perhaps the apparent strength of this likelihood that alone can attenuate the claims of ineffability. But even yet, postulating on the significance of the fact that the best human consciousness can ever achieve is a transmogrification of guilt, and not an all out annihilation of it, isn’t an adequate foil to the insistence of ineffability. It is more a persuasive alternative to it that strengthens its own viability in noting the seemingly ineradicable link between sin/guilt/blame and the experience of the believing soul; without necessarily diminishing the contention that something ‘other to’ or inaccessible to human understanding is at work in the paradox of an omnipotent God undermined by a devilish demiurge. Yet again the human relation to God undergoes a radical reconstitution, and yet again the notion of the person inhering in a world of guilt and shame survives this purgative analysis.
In light of the exilic relationship just documented between selfhood and guilt, it is interesting to see how Christianity by contrast uses the pervasive notion of guilt as a legend for deciphering questions of selfhood and embodiment. Unlike in the Gnostic expression, Christianity makes us participatory in our salvation. It affirms we are guilty, and that corporeal existence is a fallen way of being, but equally, it empowers us by acknowledging there is something more we can do than simply cry out desperately and helplessly ‘Save me.’ Admittedly the degree of empowerment we experience is contingent upon the strand of Christian thought we subscribe to, with things like common grace, irresistible grace, prevenient grace, justifying grace, and grace by salvation alone, all differentially mediating the human capacity to feel there is free-willed and teleological element at work in all human action. But the point is, that even if the extent of this free will reaches no higher than muttering prayers to win the Lord’s favour, yet the presence of an autonomous will is apparent in the fact that we can choose to pray or not to pray, choose to create the conditions most likely to occasion God’s favour or elect not to. In this regard Christianity ultimately manages to eschew that state of being that is completely and unequivocally dependent on the higher order being. In psychological terms this is tantamount to granting humanity a degree of similitude with the Almighty. Insofar as this is true the pain, punishment and reality of fallenness is partially overcome, and the guilt normally occasioned by feelings of unworthiness in the face of the sacred is lessened. Autonomy and free-will thus understood are interchangeable with respect. But numerous commentators have noted that it is not just the need to appease a guilt complex which mobilises the human impetus to seek a degree of parity and similitude with God, but rather that this sense of ontological unworthiness is accompanied by a tangential and yet inseparable human need to flatter its own vanity. Conversely, acknowledging that the need to feel autonomous is a twofold one, may also occasion the realisation that the process which assuages our sense of ontological inadequacy in one regard, is the self-same process that potentiates our guilty conscience in another. Nietzsche was perhaps one of the first people to realize this when he acknowledged that all things being equal the destiny man would write for himself is that of a Superman, in other words a god. Mandeville with his cherubs drawn in the likeness of the human condition, with the only addendum being a set of wings, was getting at the same notion of pride and vanity intrinsic in the human condition, even as he was using it to propound the theory of ontological inferiority, ontological inadequacy in the face of interrelation with the Divine. The implication thus is, that while God is our saviour, and for that we are grateful, yet the composition of our character is such that we also want to be God. Envy makes us ambivalent in the face of God, as leaves us oscillating between the attractiveness of salvation, and the attractiveness of being that deity who deigns to save. Westphal discusses the proposition that human love is the remedy or compromise for this yet again alternating state of being. Where we can’t be God we choose to love him instead. It is the only thing that relieves the pain. He also discusses the idea that the monotheism produces more sensations of ambivalence in this regard than polytheism, than belief in a plurality of gods, because where……
What this essay hasn’t said, and couldn’t ever have hoped to say, is what kind of guilt espoused by which kind of religion points most assuredly along the path of truth and revelation. This analysis can’t even know if such a path isn’t just an imaginary construct designed to assuage feelings of loss, pain, fear and uncertainty. Nor can it say if the true condition of human nature is individuated selfhood or, bodiless participation in an organic whole that has no need for, or concept of ‘subjects’ and ‘parts’ once wholeness is achieved. But what this exploration has done hopefully; is provided some sort of commentary on how different forms of religious expression incorporate the idea of human guilt into their respective theoretical frameworks. In acknowledging disparities between and within frameworks, this exploration has also with any luck extrapolated from the disjointedness, disunity and fissure placing each form of thinking in opposition to one another, still something of those common stands of thought threading delicately, sometimes almost imperceptibly between and within typologies. Thus, the hypothesis has been that insofar as each religion is concerned with the issue of human guilt, even if the character of that guilt undergoes a complete metamorphosis as we move from consideration of one form of religious expression to the other, yet the pervasiveness of guilt in all forms of religious conceptualization, renders a study of it, important and necessary. Much as the idea of guilt, what it means to feel guilty, and what atonement requires may be a bottomless pool of possibility, yet all religious expression finds commonality and unity in the fact that it chooses to treat of guilt at all. Studies of guilt and religion may never be able to be unequivocal about the truth or falsity of a transcendental plane, and perhaps especially not at the intellectual level. Yet this doesn’t have to be the point of studies of guilt in religion. The point could be that if we engage with questions of religion and guilt, wholly, honestly, ontologically, dialogically and relationally; - then though they may never point us heavenward with earth shattering conviction and finality, yet they might just lead us to an understanding of the important human truths, around us, beside us, between us, within us and enveloping us.