Autor: Becker, Ernest

Buch: Escape from Evil

Titel: Escape from Evil

Stichwort: Sünde als Projekt causa sui; säkulare Welt -> Aufhebung der Sünde; Sühne durch Anhäufung von Dingen

Kurzinhalt: sin: separation from the powers and protection of the gods, a setting up of oneself as a causa sui; completely secular -> we no longer have any problem with sin

Textausschnitt: 88a No wonder the confusion of the ancient world was so great and tension and anxiety were so high: men had already amassed great burdens of guilt by amassing possessions, and there was no easy way to atone for this. Men were no longer safely tucked into the group, but they still had their human burdens. As Brown puts it, men were still in flight from themselves, from their own mortality. The burden of time, the tension between the visible and the invisible worlds, and the guilt of possessions must have been high on sensitive souls. This is how we understand the growth of the notion of "sin" historically. Theologically, sin means literally separation from the powers and protection of the gods, a setting up of oneself as a causa sui. Sin is the experience of uncertainty in one's relation to the divine ground of his being; he no longer is sure of possessing the right connection, the right means of expiation. He feels alone, exposed, weighed down by the burden of guilt accumulated in this world by the acts of his body and his material desires. His experience of the physicalness of life obsesses him. Modern missionaries found that the notion of sin was difficult to translate to primitives, who had no word for it; we understand now that they had little experience of isolation or separateness from the group or the ancestral pool of souls. The experience of sin still today, for simple believers, is merely one of "uncleanliness" and straightforward prohibition of specific acts. It is not the experience of one's whole life as a problem. (Fs) (notabene)

88b No wonder that early converts to Christianity could renounce everything in a decisive way that today seems strangely self-sacrificial to us. We are not in the same bind. We have completely eclipsed the tension of the invisible-visible dichotomy by simply denying the invisible world. We have put time on a wholly unilinear basis, and so money and cumulative interest have become our unequivocal god. Christianity proved to be an idealistic interlude that failed; and so we have reaffirmed the ancient pursuit of wealth with a vengeance and straightforward dedication of which archaic man was incapable. We have become completely secular. Accordingly, we no longer have any problem with sin, since there is nothing to be separated from: everything is here, in one's possessions, in his body. There is no experience of sin where the body is not felt to be a problem, where one imagines that he does indeed have full control over his own destiny on the physical level alone. Separation from the divine powers is not felt because these powers are denied by the primary power of the visible things. In other words, we have succeeded better than even the primitives in avoiding sin, by simply denying the existence of the invisible dimension to which it is related. In contrast with guilt, we don't even have to repress it, since it does not arise in our experience of the world. (Fs) (notabene)

89a Brown points out that the secularization of the economy means that we can no longer be redeemed by work, since the creation of a surplus is no longer addressed as a gift to the gods. Which means that the new god Money that we pursue so dedicatedly is not a god that gives expiation! It is perverse. We wonder how we could allow ourselves to do this to ourselves, but right away we know the answer: we didn't take command of history at some given point where civilization started. Not even the noble and thoughtful Athenians could manage that. Rather, history took command of us in our original drivenness toward heroism; and our urge to heroism has always taken the nearest means at hand. Brown says that the result of this secularization process is that we have an economy "driven by the pure sense of guilt, unmitigated by any sense of redemption." What has happened to guilt? It is "repressed by denial into the unconscious" - which can only mean that we are "more uncontrollably driven" by it. Another way of putting this is to say that man has changed from the giving animal, the one who passes things on, to the wholly taking and keeping one. By continually taking and piling and computing interest and leaving to one's heirs, man contrives the illusion that he is in complete control of his destiny. After all, accumulated things are a visible testimonial to power, to the fact that one is not limited or dependent. Man imagines that the causa sui project is firmly in his hands, that he is the heroic maker and doer who takes what he creates, what is rightfully his. And so we see how modern man, in his one-dimensional economics, is driven by the lie of his life, by his denial of limitation, of the true state of natural affairs. (Fs)

89b If we sum it all up historically, we seem to be able to say that man became a greater victim of his drivenness when heroism pushed expiation out of the picture; man was now giving expression to only one side of his nature. He still needs expiation for the peace of his life because he is stuck with his natural and universal experience of guilt. Brown says that the "man who takes is strong enough to shoulder his own guilt," that the process of expiation of modern man "has been reified and passes into piles of stone and gold." Granted that money represents the new causa sui project, that the infantile omnipotence is no longer in one's body but in things. But to repress guilt is not to "shoulder" it; it is not that guilt has vanished by being transmuted into things or expiated by things; rather, as Freud taught us, that which is denied must come out by some other means. History is the tragic record of heroism and expiation out of control and of man's efforts to earn expiation in new, frantically driven and contrived ways. The burden of guilt created by cumulative possessions, linear time, and secularization is assuredly greater than that experienced by primitive man; it has to come out some way. (Fs) (notabene)