Blogging on Good Therapy

Written by Rainer Maria Kohler, JD

Growing up as a Catholic child and teenager in Germany some sixty years ago I learned about original sin.  I was told that I and every other human being inherited the mark of original sin from Adam and Eve because of their disobedience to God’s command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Actually, in German, original sin is called Erbsünde, which means “inherited sin”.  (An aside:  The word Erbsünde also contains the German word Erbse which means “pea”, and for many years of my childhood I visualized my original sin as a pea-sized growth on my soul.)  As a child I accepted what I was told, but as a teenager I could not comprehend why God would make me inherit a sin which I had not committed.  It seemed unfair:  Why should I be responsible for something over which I had had no control?

In my 20s and 30s, when I got married and had children, I began to question whether my original sin is a sin and how it could be original or inherited.  Over the years of trying to raise our children and living in a close relationship with my wife it dawned on me that I was engaging in the same hurtful behavior which I had observed in my parents, both as parents and as spouses, and which I had sworn I would never repeat.  How could this be happening?  Was this the long and large shadow of original sin?

It took me many more years and my intense immersion in the depth psychology of C. G. Jung before I began to understand that although this long shadow, which reaches down to me from my parents and from all of my ancestors, acts with the strength and mystery of magic power, it is in fact a natural and inevitable consequence of my human nature.  It is impossible for us to escape, more than just a little, the powerful patterns of perception, feeling and behavior which have evolved in humans during the millennia of the evolution of homo sapiens.  Although these human patterns appear to be similar to the animal instincts, they are not the same.  The instincts regulate the animals completely in all of their behavior, while our human patterns of perception, feeling and behavior leave us some room, albeit small, to make choices and decisions.  Even Adam and Eve already had a choice to eat or not to eat the fruit from the tree.  In the context of our discussion it does not matter whether these human patterns are “inherited” genetically or through unconscious imitation or both.  In either case they are transmitted so successfully and regularly that they seem to be ordained by divine decree.

The Catholic Church has it partially right, therefore, when it claims that there are inclinations and propensities in us, in each and every human being, which have been “inherited” from, or are “original to” our ancestors, all the way back to Adam and Eve who can be seen as the symbolic and original parents of homo sapiens.  But why should these inclinations and propensities be sinful?

Because these human inclinations and propensities, these patterns of perception, feeling and behavior, are different from the totally dominant instincts, there is some room for choice and decision making.  But as human beings we also share in the instinctual nature of animals which seeks to express itself according to its needs.  The drive of the instincts to assert themselves and the ability of humans to make different choices will inevitable lead to conflict within each individual soul and between individuals in society.  For example, my animal nature may desire my neighbor’s food, shelter, house and mate, but there are rules which prohibit the unfettered exercise of my instinctual wishes.  Or I may experience an inner conflict between the command to honor my parents and my need to become an independent and autonomous adult.  All of these conflicts are governed by rules.  Where do these rules come from?

The rules for the conduct of human behavior are as old as humanity itself.  Although animals also have rules for living in groups - we only need to think of the term “pecking order” which we have borrowed from the birds, or the “order” prevailing in ant heaps and bee hives - their rules are part of their instinctual makeup and are not subject to question by the animals and are not subject to change except insofar as the instinctual nature of a species may change gradually over millions of years in order to keep it adapted.  At the time of our ancestral and original parents, Adam and Eve, rules already existed for their relationship with each other and for their relationship to God.  We are told in Genesis, for example, that God commanded our ancestors to “be fruitful and multiply, and to fill the earth and subdue it”; and a little later God threatened them with death if they were to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

We can conclude, therefore, that the patterns of human behavior, and the rules governing them, evolved hand in hand from the origin of homo sapiens.  As anyone who has traveled to different countries or visited different communities within even one country can attest, there is a great deal of variety in the rules and laws governing human conduct.  And as any serious student of human history will confirm, there has been much change in the forms of human behavior over the millennia, and there has also been much change in the laws which apply to this behavior.  One thing only has remained the same, and that is the regularity and inevitability with which rules of some kind have appeared on the scene whenever and wherever there are human beings.

Some things change very slowly and other things change more rapidly.  The instinctual nature of humans has probably changed very little over millions of years.  The spiritual side of humans, however, has evolved relatively recently.  The unconscious part of our psyche, which is closer to our instincts, is much older than our consciousness which may have evolved over just thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousand years compared to the rest of our nature whose history reaches back into the millions of years.

Originally, laws were considered of sacred or divine origin.  It is only in the last few thousand years that a separate secular body of law has developed.  But whether law had its source with a divine lawgiver or emanated from a human source, in both cases it had to be perceived and articulated by human beings.  And human beings are subject to and influenced by the forces of their environment and by their internal psychic and spiritual realities.

How quickly things can change, even with regard to laws which were perceived as divinely given, can be shown by a couple of examples.  Some six thousand or more years ago Adam and Eve were commanded in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it”.  Humanity has multiplied so effectively that if the current trend of multiplication continues, the earth’s resources will be insufficient to sustain us.  At a time when the survival of children and their growth into adulthood was the exception rather than the rule, and at a time when natural resources were abundant in comparison to the demands made upon them by human beings, an injunction to multiply as much as possible not only made sense but was necessary for the survival of the human species.  But today, when the same multiplication can only lead to wholesale extinction, such a law must be revised.

AUTH © Philadelphia Inquirer. Reprinted with permission of UNIVERSAL SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.

Also in Genesis Adam and Eve are commanded to subdue the earth.  Again, at a time when human beings were much at the mercy of their environment and were few in number compared to the vastness of the earth, it made sense to encourage them to explore and harness the forces of the globe.  Unfortunately, this advice, aided by the explosion of human science and technology in the last few hundred years, has led to an exploitation of the earth’s resources to such an extent that some today even question whether we have not already reached the point of no return in our journey to self-destruction.  Since, therefore, the command to “subdue the earth” has, if anything, been fulfilled and exceeded, that law also needs to be reevaluated.

One might reasonably argue, therefore, that activities which once were divinely encouraged and sanctioned are now becoming immoral and sinful.  What is sinful at any given time can, therefore, not always be immutably stated at the beginning for all times.  What is immutable, on the other hand, at least under the perspective of our memory of the past and our anticipation of the future, is the need for laws to govern the conflicts within and between ourselves and to guide the choices which we have to make.  Equally immutable, therefore, is the making of laws, although their content will change over the generations.

Who are the lawgivers and makers of rules?  Human beings have experienced and continue to experience many makers of laws: God and God’s representatives on earth, parents, teachers, chieftains, legislative bodies and any grouping of people which seeks to set forth its value system as a binding canon of behavior.  A departure from the established rules of behavior is branded as sinful, immoral or illegal depending on whether the source of the rules is religious or secular.  The Catholic Church claims for itself, as God’s representative on earth, the right to state infallibly certain rules for human behavior.  But the doctrine of infallibility implies an absence of change.  Once pronounced, an infallibly proclaimed doctrine or rule is to be valid forever.  The justification for the doctrine of infallibility is God’s eternal truth.  But for us eternal is not the same as immutable.  We experience the revelation of God or our psychic center as an ongoing and changing drama, beginning at the dawn of human understanding and continuing every generation thereafter.  What is “immutable” in this drama is the ongoing revelation, and what is changeable in this drama is our understanding of that revelation.  Law making is likewise an eternal and “immutable” reality, but the actual content of the law changes and needs to change with our changing understanding of the unfolding revelation.  The Catholic Church is wrong, therefore, when it asserts the immutability of a revealed content.

But how did the Catholic Church get itself into the box of arrogating to itself the impossible task of proclaiming immutable (infallible) laws?  It may have to do with its view of original sin.  As we saw, the only thing which is original about original sin is the reality of an inherited conflict in our human nature, between our animal nature and our spiritual aspirations, and between different emotional and spiritual strivings.  The judgment whether a particular behavior is sinful can not be made once and for all and it cannot be unchanging forever.  It must depend on our understanding of good and evil, right and wrong, meaningful and meaningless within a time span that encompasses perhaps many generations but not eternity.
If, however, we view human nature as inherently sinful from and for all times, then it is not too great a leap to see a need for judgments and rules which are binding from and for all times.  If we consider human nature damaged for all times by original sin, it is necessary to have clear and permanent rules to help humans to deal with their sinful nature.  It seems to me that this view is one sided, and it is as one sided as the opposite view represented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who maintained that human nature is inherently good: “Everything is good as it came from the hands of the creator.”  Probably, both extremes are wrong.  Human nature is neither all bad nor all good.  Experience shows us that human beings are subject to the forces of both good and evil.  We only need to look at history and the current condition of humanity to see that people are both good and bad, and do both right and wrong.  But if we adhere to the extreme view that human nature is inherently and eternally sinful, then it is not a big step to claim the need for eternally unchanging laws to judge and contain such sinfulness.  And in this way original sin seems to lead inevitably to a claim of infallibility.

Summary:

The Catholic doctrine of original sin says that every human being inherits the mark of original sin from Adam and Eve. This raises the questions whether humans do inherit any sin from their parents and ancestors all the way back to the original parents Adam and Eve, and what the nature of that sin might be. With a Jungian perspective it is not difficult to accept the view that humans do inherit attitudes and powerful patterns of perception, feeling and behavior from their ancestors, whether genetically or through unconscious imitation or both. The Catholic Church is partially correct, therefore, in asserting inherited human attitudes and patterns. Human behavior, which grows out of these inherited attitudes and patterns, may violate divine laws as promulgated by the Catholic Church.  But since the formulation of divine laws depends on our human understanding, which changes over time in the course of our evolution, divine laws can not be considered immutable. Even if we accept as immutable that revelation is always ongoing, the claim of the Catholic Church that the content of such revelation in the form of laws and commands can be immutably and infallibly stated, does not agree with the Jungian perspective of an ever ongoing and changing human understanding.

Conclusion:

The realization that original sin is neither original nor a sin in the sense ascribed to it by the Catholic Church could free us from our feelings of guilt and shame due to our old understanding that we are somehow blemished from conception or birth. Rather, we share in the evolutionary human fate of taking on the attitudes and patterns of perception, feeling and behavior which our ancestors have developed before us. These are neither good nor bad; they just are. It is our responsibility, however, to try to learn to understand our “inherited” attitudes and patterns and to modify them, to the extent possible, when we deem this appropriate and desirable.

Likewise, the realization that the claim of the Catholic Church to be infallible in the promulgation of so called eternal truths and divine laws is no more than that: a claim, could free us from our feelings of guilt and shame due to our old understanding that we must submit to that claim without any questioning. Rather, since there is no immutability and since everything is subject to change it is our opportunity and responsibility to evaluate at all times the status quo and attempt to determine where and when change would be appropriate and desirable in order to further our healthy and whole life.

©Copyright 2007 Rainer Maria Kohler, JD  All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. The article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 9:36 pm and is filed under Psychotherapy and Spirituality, Psychotherapy: Approaches, Models, & Methods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.