Reflections after reading “Sin” by Wendell Berry, in The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, p. 133-173.  

 

   As used in the most profound (if not completely error-free) theology – that following St. Thomas Aquinas – the essence of sin can be formulated thus: that which damages or cuts the bonds between the person (the mortal creature) the essential connections, meaning the connection between body and soul, between the human person and other human persons, between the individual and the family, between individuals as well as their families and the community (and its common good or flourishing), between the creature, his community and the Creation (especially the nature of his place on earth, including the other creatures native to that place) and finally between the creature and the Creator, the origin of all that exists, the pure act of Being – pure Reason, Love, and Goodness being attributes of pure Being. In a sense, everything we do, think, and feel strengthens or weakens these defining connections or relations.  

 

Evangelical protestants tend to think of sin in simpler terms: disobeying God’s commands or laws. Here they are, in brief:

 

     I.        Worship one God (the originator of the laws).

    II.        Don’t worship idols – anything finite construct taken as Absolute – as a substitute (e.g. money, nation, race, Church, ideology, etc.).

  III.        Don’t misuse God’s name (e.g. speak it with ostentatious piety).

  IV.        Don’t work on the Sabbath day.

   V.        Honor your parents (not just obey, but listen to, take seriously, be guided by).

  VI.        Don’t kill other people.

VII.        Don’t commit adultery.

VIII.        Don’t steal.

 IX.        Don’t lie.

   X.        Don’t covet.

 

These laws or commands are absolutely binding, to be followed unconditionally, and that is that. In the Catholic tradition, the Ten Commandments are also practical, “a good set of instructions for people who wish to inhabit a land, to keep it, and to live in it as neighbors to one another. The ten, taken together, with the purpose of making something, namely, a community, loving and lasting.” The first four may not seem to have any application to a secular society. Still, when you consider the economic and cultural consequences of a life form that considers nothing sacred, that “treats everything in the natural world, including its ability to reproduce and renew its life, as finite and therefore exhaustible ‘resources,’” then one can rightly wonder whether a sense that the world is sacred is not a necessary condition for a flourishing community. No one of the secular mind would call this reduction of Creation sin, much less desecration or blasphemy. I think this inability to see what is happening to the world as desecration – making something sacred into something profane – just illustrates how meaning-blind the secular mind is. A kind of black hole has taken the place of reason – reason in the more profound sense of being receptive to reality, of seeing things as they are.

. . .

   Mr. Berry discusses the Ten Commandments from the perspective of a man who has lived in an agricultural community most of his life. Wonderful writing. I especially like what he writes about the 6^th commandment:

 

The sixth commandment is “Thou shalt not kill” in the King James Version. The word “kill” in other translations and in commentaries is rendered as “murder.” The comment in the New Oxford Annotated Bible gives what I suppose is the obvious reason: “This commandment forbids murder, not the forms of killing authorized for Israel, such as war and capital punishment.” Construed in this way, the sixth commandment forbids murder as a private enterprise, and makes it a monopoly of government, whether of ancient Israel or any other nation that may subscribe to the commandments. It clearly would not do to allow a religious scruple to stand in the way of war and capital punishment, which after all are necessities of life. 

  

Of course, as Mr. Berry reminds his readers, Jesus made his own commentary on the sixth commandment:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.

 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;

 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

 

Mr. Berry comments: “That no doubt is the most unknown widely published statement and the best-kept state secret in the history of the world.” The Israelite state – then and now – construe “kill” and “murder”; and like Joshua and his invaders believe that have God’s permission to do whatever they want to do, to the Canaanites or the Palestinians. (Hamas and their supporters, obviously, share that view and would love to do a Joshua-type slaughter on the whole people of Israel. “An eye-for-an-eye makes the whole world blind” as Gandhi said in support of Jesus.) As Mr. Berry again comments: “This granted…a powerful permission to humanity to follow its lowest instincts, and the ‘Christian nations’ since Constantine have followed Joshua rather than Jesus – Joshua and Jesus being opposite Biblical persons with oddly (in Hebrew) the same name.”

 

. . .

 

Jesus’ understanding of the Ten Commandments he reduced to two:

 

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

 

The focus here is on the parallel between loving your “neighbor” and loving God. This parallel or like is the meaning of the Ten Commandments. Who is my neighbor? Jesus redefines who qualifies as his neighbor with the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29–37). Jesus makes it clear in this parable that our neighbor is anyone around us, regardless of their ethnic, religious, or socio-economic status. What if your neighbor is your enemy? Well, I already gave Jesus’s reply to that. As Mr. Berry puts it: “He didn’t say to love your neighbor unless he is your enemy.”

  What does love mean here? Surely not the sentimental sentiment to which it has been reduced in the secular culture I inhabit. I think C. S. Lewis expresses it perfectly: “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

  The apparent belief of many people that they are “Christians,” i.e. followers of Christ, while at the same time wallowing in the idolatry of populist nationalism and sharing in the MAGA dehumanization of “the least among our brethren” (those forced from their homes by dire poverty and violence) and their “enemies” (the libs) is truly a ground for profound sadness at the current state of humanity.

 

. . .

 

Mr. Berry shows how impoverished communication becomes when it is detached from community (from neighbors) and happens in a public of strangers alienated from each other. He identifies four “sins” that the public focuses on: from the right, abortion and any “governmental interference with the accumulation of wealth.” On the liberal side, the prime sins are sexual aggression against women and racial prejudice. All of these are serious matters, all alienate the soul from essential bonds (though I would say the failure of the government to stop the billionaire-corporate class from preying like a parasite on the body politic is the sin.) But the point is: why only these four?

  The fat, relentless ego is here at work. As Berry says of abortion (which I have written on before in this journal):

Abortion may be the ideal sin for public censure because it so neatly divides the innocent from the guilty: some women have absolutely committed abortion, whereas other women absolutely have not. Also abortion is committed only by women (and some male doctors, who anyhow are not Christian conservatives), leaving the men uninvolved and therefore innocent. We might be justified in supposing that all aborted babies are the products of immaculate conception. The whole drama of abortion, including the public exposure and opprobrium, ought to be construed as a sexual aggression against women. . . .”

 

Abortion as a public sin is used to divide. To set up a group of righteous and unrighteous, pure and polluted. Same for public sins featured on the left. Sexual offenses against women are all committed by men. It “places all women above suspicion and renders all men suspect.” Easy goodness and virtue. Sin is thus used sentimentally, to prop up the own ego by idealizing its innocence at the expense of othering some other group, turning them into orcs. This is pure narcissism. The two hostile camps need the orc-vision of each other to prop up their own self-righteousness.

  Narcissism runs so deep in our culture precisely because we have been driven out of our communities – those boring, provincial communities with all their prejudices that kept all of us potential Horatio Algers and Elon Musks from leaving home and “making it big” – chasing the god-damned “American dream.” [I am not breaking the third commandment but using language very literally here, for I think that was what Christ meant when he said, “You can’t serve God and Mammon” and “It is easier to thread a needle with a camel than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of Heaven,” even if by serving Mammon we are trying to “take care of our family.” No purely economic motive, in other words, justifies breaking faith with neighborliness. “But then we would all have to live like the Amish!” Well, not in every detail. But living and working in their community economy, which includes fellowship with the land and animals they live in the presence of,  they seem to me to be as close to the Kingdom of God as we Americans are to Hell. Individual Amish may chafe under the “restraints” imposed on them by a moral economy. Still, it is also imaginable to imagine some of them as having a rare kind of human happiness and fulfillment that can come only from living in peace with the Law and the virtues – a happiness we lonely individualists can only dream of. We could learn a lot from them.]

     Having chosen to leave or (in my case) driven out from my larger family and community networks (by the economy, not by my parent's choice), being deprived of the opportunity to be forced to practice the virtues necessary to live in genuine fellowship with neighbors – the classical virtues: self-restraint, courage, justice, and common-sense, practical wisdom; faith, hope, and love if I am a Christian – I have had only myself to think about. This got complicated when children came, and then a ‘binary’ (how I hate that word) forced itself on my consciousness, their needs vs. my needs. For I could only imagine my needs in individualist terms; how could it be otherwise? So you make “sacrifices” but then, you can’t ignore your needs (so the lore) for if you do, you won’t be able to function as a father. But my needs are defined individually, by me. Neglecting them to do my duty is a “sacrifice” only because of this. With my second family, being closer to death my own fat, relentless ego has loosened its grip enough to allow me some pleasure in fulfilling the needs of my children; to allow me to experience doing for them not as a sacrifice but as part of my own meaning. My ego has been breached and included two other budding souls in my own core meaning and value; spiritual energy has leaked out of my private epistemological bubble and echo chamber and energy from two little souls has entered me. That happiness blows anything else I have experienced away. You become more by becoming less.

     It is still partial and fragmentary. My fat, relentless ego is alive and well, if not quite the irresistible force it used to be. A mighty fortress is the ego, always working to keep love and fellowship out. I read in Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s collected works that he – perhaps interpreting a Hindu text – equated Satan with the ego, the principle of autonomy, the opposite of limits and thus of fellowship, of a common humanity. My ego defines what is real and good. I have my truth, you have yours. We are in competition. My purpose in life is “success”: proving myself more real and valuable on the market of self-worth than as many competitors as possible. What elevates my ego lowers yours and vice versa. My children are nothing but an extension of myself, requiring some sacrifices. I can establish a charity if I am a billionaire to show how generous I am, making me ever greater in the eyes of the world. Self-righteousness is cocaine for the ego. Anything that makes me more moral or virtuous than some group of others gets me off. The secret desire of Ego is to be worshipped, as an idol. To be able to worship myself.

    What is Hell? I know Jesus – if the sayings were really his, as they probably were – used some horrific images of Hell. But Hell is in the most literal sense the victory of the fat, relentless ego over love, and thus over family and community, over nature and God. The fortress has become so strong, reality so unreal, that the self loses even the awareness that the Good, true, and beautiful – reality itself – lies outside it. The exits have been walled up. The self has forgotten where they are. The fortress “Ego” has become a prison whose main function is not only to keep the Ego safely within, unchallenged, but to keep God out (cf. Dante’s depiction of the City of Dis in Hell). As long as we are alive there is hope. Most, perhaps no human being has the power to self-enclose completely. (Hitler? Stalin? Mao? Trump? All worshipped – not really loved in a human way – by the masses they enthralled.)

    My damned ego is plenty relentless enough to make it impossible without extreme narcissistic self-deception to imagine I am much better than most other people dealing with their fat, relentless egos. But it is worthwhile to keep trying to pierce it and let a little reality penetrate you.

   I think, having written this, I understand why Jesus taught loving enemies and refusing to cast the first stone. Constant forgiveness is needed or we are all lost.

 

. . .

 

    My little family is not a community – it is too small, and I am the only adult in it. But it is a primitive community. I can observe how the commandments and virtues work in it. “Don’t lie.” After a lifetime of struggling with truth, I see the point of it very concretely. Our relationships are fragile. The truth, even in trivial matters (e.g. whether Paul brushed his teeth), is the glue of trust, respect, love. We have resolved never to lie to one another. Years ago. There are many occasions when a harmless lie would allow us to avoid having to deal with something we don’t feel like dealing with or get something we wanted in the easiest way. Overcoming the temptation to lie is balanced by the wanting to enjoy trust, community. You know with every temptation: if I lie now, I will damage something fragile. Overcoming becomes a habit after time. Truth becomes more natural over time. You acquire the habit of bucking temptation, of telling the truth, even when it is difficult. Like learning to play the piano: you get better at it with practice, and you know if you don’t practice you won’t become a good piano player.

   Only after this experience, can you really understand what Aristotle, Aquinas, Berry, or MacIntyre have written about the virtues even as you can only understand what a master has written about playing chess by becoming competent in chess yourself. Practice before intellectual understanding. Intellectual understanding sheds light on practice but cannot substitute for it (I lesson I know much better than most!) Wendell Berry understands this better than most and can express the thoughts of Aristotle and Aquinas in a way that could speak to people today if they read – because he has lived in and reflected on a genuine community extended over time (and because of his unique gifts of mind and expression).

. . .

 

Against this, there stands the difficult reality of being sinners one and all. What does that mean? Mr. Berry answers the question by looking at our public reduction of sin to a small number of “media-friendly” and “self-comforting” sins that “have the requisite exclusiveness, sufficiently flattering virtue or vanity, thus sufficiently inflaming passionate righteousness, of those who oppose them, thus magnifying the evil of those who commit them.”

    Our “public discourses” simplify sin to elevate ego and shield the self from the difficult truth that, as Jesus said, “none are good.” Compared to a geometrical circle, all the circles we draw with pencil and paper are imperfect: more more so, others less so. None of us are geometric circles. None of us are God. None of us are Ideal Being – and thus Goodness, Love, Beauty. The myth of Satan wanting to be God is the very practical myth of the Ego that knows in itself it is unlovable. So it must revolt against reality with the secret purpose to make itself “loveable” – which as Ego can only be in the form of Idolatry. It is a law of the spiritual universe what you only become loveable by loving. But loving means acknowledging that something outside the Ego is real and good. To be able to do that – to transcend the Ego – a person needs to feel loved from the time that they were born. Nurturing families and communities practice this self-overcoming. Deprived of that, the lonely, insecure Ego tries to achieve ‘love-ability’ on its own – and down it goes from there.

   Modern individualism, capitalism, autonomy is what the Ego makes when unfettered or unloved. It is free to see nature, work, people as commodities, as resources that it uses to elevate itself. The whole world is de-meaned, de-valued, de-sanctified. The Ego as God, for only God has the authority to do to workers what capitalists do in their sweatshops; only God has the authority to destroy millions of acres of ancient forest. God has this authority not only because he “created it” but because he loves it, keeps it in being, and thus would never destroy it. We would. The capitalist market is nothing but the fencing out of the commandments and virtues from economic activity; a freeing of greed, envy, vanity, and lust to do their thing without fear of community censure. Just look at what it has done to the world and human community if you don’t believe me.

    I feel fairly confident that I would not oppress workers or destroy forests for the sake of becoming a millionaire or a billionaire at this point in my life. Not absolutely certain, for that would be hubris. I feel fairly confident that I have no need to elevate my ego by making myself more righteous than others. This was not so easy in the past. I learned from C. S. Lewis not to dwell on those sins that no longer tempt me. It is better for the soul to focus on the ones that you.

  Mr. Berry’s point is that ‘the Devil is clever’ and sin is complex. Whatever cuts bonds of love and fellowship, whatever sows discord, whatever others other people, etc. – that is sin. Not just the handful of public sins people use to beat each other over the head and so feel self-righteous. And every movement away from Goodness, justice, love, fellowship, family, community – away from the commandments and virtues – poisons the world. Partly by withholding what good you might have given; partly by damaging it with actions. My moral failures have consequences far beyond my own life. Only ensnared by Ego do we imagine that we have nothing to do with the sins of the world. Ego always shields us from realities it doesn’t want to face. Mr. Berry writes:

 

We define ourselves as human only in the weakest sense of that term [“autonomous” individual persons] by our inclination to call wrongs wrong only when we can attach them to other people. The consequent little handful of public or media-friendly sins work as breeders of division and hate, self-righteousness and reprisal. This seems to force the replacement of our old need and respect and love for human goodness or “virtue” by obsession with mere reputation or “public image” or public relations or publicity, or by fear of being caught in violation of some ad hoc code of behavior, or of being publicly accused or suspected of such a violation. There is, needless to say, a critical difference between love of right-dealing between neighbors and fear of public embarrassment. It may prove simply and obstinately true that the sins, rightly named and defined, and the countervailing virtues give to human life a moral structure that is indispensable. It is indispensable because, complicated and conflicted creatures as we know ourselves to be, it defines us complexly enough.