Over the course of many years, I have met many people who have encountered the theology put forward by Matthew Fox. Often, he was the very reason why I was meeting such people, so it is not a surprise that the great majority of them were aware of Matt’s criticism of the doctrine of original sin.
Originally put forward by Saint Augustine in the late IV century, and later confirmed by several ecclesiastical synods in the West, this extremely influential doctrine issued from a combination of Augustine’s skewed reading of Genesis 2-3, his own troubled mind and personal history, as well as his honest desire to solve the problem represented by people’s (apparently natural) inclination towards evil acts.
Back to the people I spoke to, virtually all of them expressed their sense of release and joy in discovering that they were not carrying a blemish from birth, that their souls were not tarnished or stained for reasons independent of their actions.
Given that in Augustinian theology that stain is bleached away by baptism, it remains very difficult for people raised within the shadow of such a theology — which means most Christians in the West, both Catholic and Protestants — to believe that the act of baptism by itself can perform the miracle of wholeness. Especially if they don’t experience anything in connection to such a presumed miracle. Not to speak of theologians who have claimed that traces of original sin remain — in other words, one cannot really aspire to wholeness in this world but only in the next.
The genius of Fox’s critique to original sin resides — in my mind — in zeroing on the psychological double-bind in which people are pigeonholed: I am essentially faulty, but I must become perfect. This is, of course, the perfect recipe for acute neurosis, and in fact the religious history of the West is filled with people suffering from it. I have observed in some cases, with professional theologians, that it is impossible to debate the merits of Fox’s theology on this central point, because my dialogue partner is entrenched psychologically into such a double-bind.
I am essentially faulty, but I must become perfect. Both parts of this phrase are psychologically unhealthy: the notion that something essential within me is not right and cannot be truly be made right, and the notion that I must strive to be morally perfect, obeying all the dictates of ethical/religious laws down to their details. Not only, however, is each of these two sentences problematic, their combination represents the bomb that Matthew Fox has tried to defuse.
My way of presenting this central point shows why I am interested in the relationship between psychological health and spiritual health. I don’t claim them to be the same, but I believe that they are deeply connected. From my experience with people, I derive the conviction that until the double-bind is resolved psychologically, a truly spiritual path cannot be entertained. There can be a strong desire, an intense longing, at time even a ravenous one, to be on a spiritual path, but the block represented by such a double-bind is too strong to allow even the first step.
The human spiritual path, in fact, is symbolized by the search for wholeness, for the integration of all parts of oneself. Wholeness must be perceived as a worthy finish line, and an attainable one as well. And one must be able to experience the changes which constellate and constitute the path. Then, and only then, one can accept imperfections and lack of completness, if that must be.
Banner image: “The Earthly Paradise with the Fall of Adam and Eve.” Painting by Peter Paul Rubens / Jan Brueghel the Elder. Wikimedia Commons.
Queries for Contemplation
What is your personal history with the doctrine of original sin and how have you overcome its shadow side?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality.
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul & Society, pp. 301-304.
A Spirituality Named Compassion: Uniting Mystical Awareness with Social Justice.
Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action by Matthew Fox, Skylar Wilson, Jen Listug.
Hildegard of Bingen, A Saint for Our Times: Unleashing Her Power in the 21st Century
Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic–and Beyond
Meditations with Julian of Norwich
Occupy Spirituality: A Radical Vision For a New Generation by Adam Bucko and Matthew Fox.
10 thoughts on “Wholeness (part one)”
The story of Adam and Eve is a lesson for us and not a condemnation. A recent writing describing the lesson:
“Do We Repeat the ‘Original’ Biblical Mistake?”
There is a ‘Wisdom well’ and it is layered in and around and immersed within our Christ consciousness. What is true, what is fair, what is right? What is the mind and sacred heart of Jesus? Are we open to everything then? Are we willing to see beyond and before our perceived beginning and beyond our physical and perceived death? If we like Jesus are beyond death, does our bias about anything and everything get cast away? Does our love begin to bloom and our eyes not open? Is paradise not within us in the here and now and now and now and never not now? Can joy not bloom in suffering? Can we not be peaceful in a land of suffering and strife?
Are we Kingdom people as Jesus asks us to be, and living in an illusionary world but ‘not of the world’ at the same time? Is it best then to be of mind and heart ‘knowing’ just a few things and drink heartedly from the experiential ‘Wisdom well’. Or do we repeat the ‘original’ biblical mistake and continue to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil where everything is divided, confused, chaotic and unity lost? – BB 11 20 25.
From a psychological perspective, the very notion of being essentially faulty is the basis of shame. In this sense, buying into original sin is to live from a place of shame, which often leads to an unhealthy sense of perfectionism, but never to wholeness.
So how do you believe Teilhard de Chardin addressed this ‘original sin’ concern differently from a process perspective? How might the Celtic Christians have conceived this differently… I believe there is no other way than original blessing, dear author! We simply haven’t evolved into all we’re gifted with and bad theology holds us back!
In his 1922 essay titled Note on some possible historical representations of original sin (https://archive.org/details/christianityevol0000teil/page/45), Teilhard wrote 2 sections titled respectively: 1. No acceptable place for Adam and 2. Still less place, in our historical picture, for the earthly paradise.
The bright intellectual and faithful Jesuit priest that he was felt compelled to devote the rest of that essay to “New possible ways of conceiving original sin” [p. 47]. After a somewhat convoluted series of hypotheses supported by geometrical drawings, Teilhard concludes, “we must so expand our ideas that we shall find it impossible to locate original sin at any one point in our whole environment, and will realize simply that it is everywhere, as closely woven into the being of the world as the god who creates us and the Incarnate Word who redeems us.” These lines were not meant to be published or, God forbid, read by his superiors, but they were: the reaction was swift and Teilhard was exiled to China; any overt negation of the original sin in 1922 would surely have been sanctioned by more than a trip abroad, i.e. excommunication. Understanding rather than harsh judgment seems therefore in order.
Early on in life, I considered the doctrine of original sin as the hallmark of unfairness: what kind of “loving” God would punish innocents for something their ancestors did? Later on, it became a bit more complex: on one hand I understood that literal reading of Genesis was a convenient way for the Church to control masses by instilling shame and, at the same time, selling tickets of redemption from shame, but on the other hand, I also discovered the wisdom of a symbolic reading of the biblical story of the tree of knowledge of good and evil: just like cars are convenient tools to travel from A to B and, misused, can be Weapons of Mass Destruction, the human mind is a convenient tool to navigate through life, but can also be a Weapon of Mass Destruction (and distraction). I see “original sin” as a misnomer for “original blessing of a path towards conscious contact with the divine.” Not a fault, an opportunity.
Like the two enclosed videos in today’s DM briefly explain, I also have Faith that we all have an Eternal Soul/Spark the Divine within us that we’re consciously becoming more aware of in our personal and communal spiritual journeys of growing and manifesting that unique Divine Love with one another, with Sacred Mother Earth, and with All spiritual beings/dimensions of our eternally evolving Co-Creation/Cosmos of LOVING DIVERSE ONENESS….
Raising myself in the Conservative Baptist church, I asked questions a lot in my attempts to digest church teachings. Once in my youth group, I asked our youth leader what would happen to indigenous people who never had a chance to hear about Jesus. He said, “Well, they just need to live up to the light that they do have.” Based on what I knew about how hard it was to get non-Christians “to accept Jesus as their personal savior,” I said, “Well then let’s not tell them!” Of course, my views now are different. Even as a teenager, I couldn’t see how original sin made sense; and now I believe in original blessing. It’s the only thing that makes sense if you believe in a loving God. This morning, just for fun, I googled original sin, and found many problems with the doctrine of original sin, but I love this one: “Science shows that the Biblical creation story is not literally true, and demonstrates that Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden are myths and not historical figures. This destroys the idea of original sin as being caused by the misbehaviour of the first man and woman.” Hard to refute that one. https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/beliefs/originalsin_1.shtml
In my little Congregational Church growing up, original sin was not part of the teaching that I absorbed. Following Jesus was the main idea, and the golden rule was a key to how we were to act. Later, hearing more about the concept of original sin, and knowing that it came from Augustine, who had some serious problems, I just rejected it. But reading Mathew’s book, Original Blessing, provided a wonderful alternative that I could embrace. Original sin has doomed many to a life filled with shame and anxiety, and it has been especially damaging to women as it supposedly stemmed from Eve.
Thank you GG, for bringing up this conundrum again.
And I believe you are right, in saying that many theologically trained people canNOT get over the double hurdle.
I was very lucky to have been brought to intellectual consciousness in the Vatican 2 years, and with Jesuits in love with Teilhard de Chardin’s philosophy, which fits well with Matt Fox’s understanding of Original Blessing, and also with the Jewish understanding of the human experience. It makes so much more sense, and goes along with helping us recognize the yearning to be “whole”– as in, a soul having a human experience, where the body is in the soul, not the other way around. I rejoice to have had such wonderful teachers as Matthew, lifting us out of Jansenism and crippling Augustinian fear of the body, and dualistic thinking. I think Thomas Merton was going to reify Matt’s theology of Original Blessing, but the CIA killed him. I think Cardinal Ratzinger before he was Pope, also was marred by this understanding of Original Sin, and couldn’t get past it. I was really worried when I heard Pope Leo is Augustinian. But I feel now that maybe his experience in South America helped him get over the dualism. So far, he has been a breath of fresh air. But it would be so nice if he would speak directly to this issue, and confirm that the Augustinian belief is an error, misleading us about true human nature, God and grace.
“At some point in our distant past we chose freewill, reinforcing this perception of our separation from God; and, as we continued to unfurl, we solidified our new identity with an arrogance and denial. We complicated ourselves in bizarre and perverse ways. Science became dominant as we began to seek dominance over each other, developing technologies that appeared to enhance ourselves over our neighbor. In the end we devised atom bombs which we unleashed, annihilating ourselves and, in the case of Maldek, our world.
“This was our past fraught with illusion, lies and deception all grounded in ignorance. In one sense it can appear as an entrancing game but, like an addict, we had created for ourselves a scenario from which it was difficult to find release; and yet all the while we were bound by the inescapable Law of God, called “Karma”, which encases everything.” Taken from “Maya Mire – A Spiritual Journey into Cosmic Truth and the Dawning of a New World”.
amazon.com/Maya-Mire-Spiritual-Journey-Dawning/dp/1803415525