James Boyce - Born Bad: Original Sin and the Making of the Western World

But for this mystery [of original sin], the most incomprehensible of all, we remain incomprehensible to ourselves.

Blaise Pascal

What is wrong with me? This question has haunted the West for fifteen hundred years, but until recently it came with an answer which was called original sin. Western people believed they were born bad because they had inherited the sin of the first humans. Their understanding of themselves was shaped, as it has been in almost all cultures, by an overarching story of creation.

Adam and Eve is an ancient myth whose origins are lost in the campfires of prehistory, making the Western interpretation of the story a comparatively recent one. The West shared the same primal parents as now vanished tribes, Jews, Muslims and Eastern (Orthodox) Christians, but it stood alone in seeing the eating of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden as the original sin not only the first sin of human history, but also the one that subsequently became innate to the human condition. Only in this version of creation did a decision to disobey God in Paradise become a sin that was inherited by all.

The articulation of original sin and the making of the Western world were enmeshed. The doctrine, like the West itself, was a product of the tumultuous breakup of the Latin-speaking part of the Roman Empire. It underpinned the distinctive religion formulated by the Catholic Church as a Christian culture was built out of the imperial ruins. The creation story was the spiritual foundation on which the Western world was made, directing how people understood the divine, each other, the natural world and, above all, themselves.

Original sin is not part of the wider Judeo-Christian tradition. For Jews and Eastern Christians, the doctrines divorce of sin from morality was incomprehensible. It was not just the modern mind that found it difficult to imagine how Adams sin could become everyones, or to conceive of a God who would condemn otherwise innocent people to hell because of it. In no other religion were people understood to be born bad; in no other were they conceived with a permanently corrupted nature that faced the wrath and judgement of God. The deity of the West is unique in judging people before they commit a moral act. Those who first fought against the doctrine, in the fifth century, argued that a newborn baby could not be regarded as a sinner. They lost the debate.

An alternative tradition, inherited from Judaism and sustained by Eastern Christianity, recognised that all human beings sinned, but saw sin as freely chosen behaviour which did not corrupt the essential goodness of created nature. This perspective was never totally extinguished in the West, but the dominant view was that human beings were born sinners, subject to the just wrath of God not only because of what they did , but who they were .

But is the doctrine anything more than the idiosyncratic teaching of a bygone age? In 1934 Carl Jung observed: Christianity is our world Our whole science, everything that passes through our head, has inevitably gone through this history. Jung exaggerated in claiming that the age of rational enlightenment has eradicated nothing, but he was right to be frustrated at the assumption that the influence of Christian ideas concluded when people rejected the Christian religion. Today the influence of original sin is most obvious in the distinctive discontent of modern people the feelings of guilt and inadequacy associated not with doing wrong but with being wrong. This angst is as evident in the anxieties of contemporary consumers as it was among ancient believers.

Western people are increasingly ready to respect creation myths. It is now widely understood that the point of such allegories is not to document a literal, historical truth; rather, they represent internalised lore which helps people place themselves in the cosmos. They provide a framework that shapes consciousness itself. But this anthropological wisdom, so sound in its application to other cultures, is suspended when the thinker turns to home. Even those who courageously endeavour to understand themselves and mend their relationships with other people and the natural world often remain ignorant or scornful of the story that shaped them.

The purpose of this book is neither to defend nor condemn the Western creation story, but to show that its influence was not ended by science and secularism. I do not wish to join the ancient argument about the truth of original sin, but I hope to demonstrate that, for better or for worse, the doctrine has always been central to the Western experience of what it means to be human. Without some knowledge of this mystery, the danger is that we will be, as Pascal suggested, incomprehensible to ourselves.