I GOT this information from a columnist of the UK magazine The Tablet of October 14, 2017.
The Book of Genesis reveals a fundamental truth about the human condition: the knowledge of good and evil ushers in a world of blame, shame, alienation and suffering. That is why Dietrich Bonhoeffer described such knowledge as “deepest divide in human life”.
For Bonhoeffer, this divisive way of knowing - this group, this individual (usually including ourselves) is good; that group, that person (somebody else), is bad – obscures the ambiguity of the human condition after the Fall, and allows us to deny our radical dependence on God. It tempts us into the hubristic position of playing God in our judgments and decisions, always seeking to justify ourselves over and against others.
Genesis 1-3 is a story about the nature of desire, and it finds many echoes in Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex. It serves as a cautionary reminder that desire and prohibition feed on one another, and that there is something fundamentally disordered about the nature of human desire. We tell ourselves that our desires are for that which is good and for that which brings happiness and satisfaction, but under cover of those justifications we fall prey to a host of addictive and obsessive behaviors – what Christians call “concupiscence”, or lust.
Thomas Aquinas invites us to understand the nature of desire and its effects upon us. Aquinas had an essentially positive understanding of the relationship between God and desire, and between happiness and goodness. God intents us to be as happy as it is possible for us to be within the conditions and circumstances of our lives. Before and beyond the distorting effects of sin, we are good creatures in a very good creation. By accepting that the ultimate focus of our desire is God who is beyond all knowing and possessing, we can begin to understand and harmonize our other desires so that we are able to enjoy the goodness of God’s creation and to love our neighbor as we should.
The doctrine of Original Sin democratizes evil. It tells us what we call “evil” is the disorientation of desire that lurks in every human heart, making each of us susceptible to temptations that draw us toward violent behavior. It warns us never to assume that we are immune from a tendency to violence, and always to be on guard against those promptings of envy, violence, lust and anger that lurk within us. So often, when we discover the stories of people who have been labeled as “evil”, we find that they were born into spirals of violence or abuse. The wounds of the human condition visit themselves anew upon every generation, and nine of us is entirely immune from or innocent of their effects.
In seeking to understand why our democratic institutions are disintegrating, each of us needs to accept some responsibility for the crises in which in which we find ourselves.
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