Philosophical Meditations

I.              Theoretical: The Question of Being

A.   Metaphysics and Ontology: A Scientific world-picture of Cosmic space-time embracing the principles of inertia and emergence

1.    The Principle of the Orientation Toward Complexity

2.     I have a specific interest in bringing together my interests in philosophy, theology, and the Bible, with an awareness of the significance of history in these disciplines. The tendency of many students of history is to adopt a stance toward the past as that of moral judgment, pointing to its moral blindness. However, the significance of human temporality includes that the present can travel a path that the future will need to amend. My interests led to constant writing, both concerning what was happening in my life, but also to help me understand and think through what I have read. Writing is an important aspect of how I learn. I author this essay in the hope that it will assist my personal journey toward wholeness and may be of assistance to the journey of the one reading this text. 

3.     Here is the plan. I will briefly give an account of the universe in which we live from the perspective of science, and how Christians today can consider the universe described by science as having its source and destiny in God. I will do so by testing the theory of evolution that includes the notion of atoms combining in ways that lead to evolutionary leaps into greater complexity of the arrangements of the atoms. If true, evolution progresses like that of the human body, in which, if one exercises regularly, one can plateau, and then make sudden leaps to a new plateau. If true, evolution progresses like the human mind, in which creative moments arise through heightened focus or perception we call intuition, which is also a leap. If true, evolution toward greater complexity is by random combinations of atoms that lead to new arrangements of finite objects that will initially have subtle influence upon the evolution of the universe. This subtle influence becomes noticeable for us with the emergence of life upon this planet. 

4.     However, the primary focus of this essay will be the development of a philosophical anthropology that will consider seriously the input of psychology as well as biblical and theological texts through a consideration of the hermeneutics of literary texts. One experiences temporality at a supratemporal level, that is, at the level of the dimension of time in its depth or inwardness. Persons are the basis for the human sciences, such as psychology, sociology, economics, politics. Persons develop art and religion, the two historically having a close connection. Persons are meaning-seeking beings designed to seek communion with what is larger than us. Such spiritual instincts need to be satisfied. If not, persons would have an absurd presence in the universe, since its spiritual instincts would be incongruous with union with an ontology of death/life-lessness and the passion for life on the other. Facing such absurdity calls for courageous and honorable action, or, alternatively, eat, drink, and be merry. My presumption is that a proper understanding of persons will require layers of understanding that include science but will also move beyond that discipline. While it is true that explanations should not be multiplied beyond what is necessary (Occam’s razor), sometimes multiple layers of explanation are necessary for full understanding.Behind this exploration is the question of whether nature is enough to explain this world, a form of naturalism and materialism, and whether there is a purpose or direction toward which the evolving universe is moving. 

I begin with cosmic space-time, the basis of which is our account of chronological time. We can begin with the givenness of the universe. 

This ontology involves the development of the complexity principle. This means the origin, sustaining, and end of this universe is the result of complex relationships. Contemporary physics locates and identifies particles in energy systems, which exist, if at all, only as integral wholes. The whole has priority over its parts. At the atomic and cellular level is an irreducible complexity, which means it cannot be produced by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is nonfunctional.[1] Even the origin of this universe arose out of the complexity of quantum fluctuations in the emptiness of the void, which then generated the explosive energy of the big bang. The void is a good term, for it is not explainable by our physics. Further, the singularity toward which the universe is destined is not explainable by our physics. The universe arose within the void; the universe expands within the void and is destined for the void. When the gases of the originating explosion cooled sufficiently, space-time as we measure it came into being. The complexity of space-time shows itself in the atoms developed complex relationships with each other. These complex relationships would eventually form finite inanimate objects, which also developed complex relationships that formed galaxies, which are organized into complex relationships, and galaxies themselves are complex relationships of solar systems and asteroids. These complex relationships will have significantly transforming events that will represent leaps in the organizational complexity of entities and the relationships between entities.

Thus, reality consists of an ever-expanding system in which the patterns of existence and activity that exists between and among spatial-temporal finite material objects are more important than the parts.[2] This pervasive structure transforms the totality of beings into a cosmos. The cosmos has an intelligible structure, a logos, that satisfies the intuition that human beings have of a sense of the wholeness of life. Such intelligible structure shows itself in our quest for scientific knowledge of the universe. The existence of objects is the basis for the physical sciences. Physics and evolutionary biology suggest that this is the real universe in which human beings (and other minds we have not yet discovered) live, move, and have their being. The existence of living things is the basis for the explorations we find in biology and chemistry. 

The field of force provides a unitary and supreme concept that links together the special viewpoints of space-time. The field of force is unitary while allowing the multiplicity of finite-temporal objects. The body is a manifestation of the force field, while the force field is prior to the body. Body and mass are concentrations of force at moments and places. Action at a distance becomes possible. Field theory presumes priority of the whole over the parts.[3]

Finite things find their limit in their relation to other finite things. The plurality of finite things has its source in a big bang and the expansion of the universe. Such expansion requires space and temporality. It also carries with it the idea of openness to the future. Finite things develop their identity in relation to other finite things, out of which we observe the unity of the universe. The natural laws of science assume the contingency of natural events. The contingency of events expressed in the laws of quantum physics and thermodynamics are an exception to the laws of regularity. Yet, regularity is the basis for the emergence of enduring forms, which suggests evolution occurs by leaps toward greater complexity.[4]The processes of nature are open and communal systems that allows new forms and therefore a new totality to emerge. The persistence and perishing of forms contribute to a new totality.[5]

The system of the universe consists of a hierarchical subset of systems consisting of local arrangements of galaxies and within galaxies the arrangement of various star systems and planetary systems. This suggests the metaphysics of substance (Aristotle, Aquinas) used to explain enduring objects is replaced by the interrelationships of finite-temporal objects within the system. This suggests a metaphysics of becoming, in contrast to a metaphysics of being, and an event ontology. This suggests that what common sense thinks of as enduring objects and persons is an illusion in the sense that all objects and persons are the result of or the byproduct of interrelated transient events. If everything is becoming, then there is always a tension between identity and difference, between presence of being and the absence of being. The same stuff can have mental and physical properties that have an information-bearing pattern within the metaphysical system. The body is a set of dynamically interrelated and hierarchically ordered processes that are constantly undergoing minor changes in their internal relations to each other and in their collective relation to an ever-changing physical environment.[6]

The universe exists as an open, unbounded, finite system. The principle of inertia is the basis for the laws of nature. However, even the laws are subject to time and is a contingent element. The striving of bodies to remain in their condition occurs against the background of the contingent uniqueness of each natural event. Such contingency places the uniformity suggested by the principle of inertia into question. One way to imagine this length is a bookshelf is a set of 30 large volumes, each 450 pages long and every page representing a million years of cosmic time. The first twenty-two volumes are without life, but only at the end of volume 29 does life start its journey into complexity, thought will not arise until the last few pages of volume 30, and the last paragraph will involve modern humans.[7]

Science has mapped out the history of the universe using cosmological decades, each decade representing a 10-fold increase in years. It does so because the number of years is so large. The Primordial Era includes the big bang to the fifth cosmological decade, the first 100,000 years, from the big bang and the formation of light elements such as hydrogen, helium, and lithium to the birth of the first stars and galaxies. We are presently in the Stelliferous Era - the sixth (one million) to 14th cosmological decades (100 trillion). Most of the energy in the expanding universe comes from nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars, and the universe is replete with galaxies. I assume the earth formed in the 10^thcosmological decade. It is 4.5 billion years old. Somewhere between 1.75 (6.2) billion and 3.25 (7.7) billion years from now, Earth will travel out of the solar system's habitable zone and into the "hot zone." As this era ends, galaxies run out of hydrogen gas, star formation virtually ceases, and the longest-lived stars, red dwarfs, slowly fade. Science projects a steadily declining universe, consistent with the entropic force of decay defined the second law of thermodynamics. The universe will go through the dominance of black holes, and finally, in the 100^th cosmological decade, the black holes will give way to a universe of electrons, positrons, neutrinos, and photons of enormous wavelengths. Yet out of this moribund expanse of space-time, new universes can emerge. Truly, all things must pass, everything has its time, even the massive, beautiful, expanding, violent, and chaotic universe, of which we are a small part. As an open system, the relation of spatial-temporal objects and persons is one full of opposition and tension (and therefore dialectical) in a way that has both creative and destructive possibilities. 

The question arises whether this worldview presents an ontology of death, where lifelessness is real and life an aberration. The other possibility is an ontology of anticipation, evident in emergent phenomena that are discontinuous with the past. Such mergence is the appearance of intricately organized living systems, displaying properties that had not been operative earlier, implying that the universe is not finished and that it takes time for its potentialities to become actual. Emergence leaves the possibility open for unpredictable modes of being in the cosmic future. Emergence resists entropy even as it feeds upon it. Emergence shows that nature is anticipatory of its potential and not just cumulative of its simpler past. It suggests that the genetic explanations on which science focuses are not complete until teleological movement is considered if we are to be in touch with the real. Anticipation, the realm of potentiality, bears the universe along as a source and reservoir of all possibilities. The power and lure of potential is the source of anticipation. Human intelligence is a reality intrinsic to nature, which avoids the problems presented by the dualism that is behind much of naturalism. This suggests that the striving for meaning and purpose is a quality of the life-process. Purpose is a process of bringing to actuality of lasting and intrinsic value is coextensive with the long story of intensifying subjectivity. The striving and feeling of living organisms, passing along information in its genetic structure, is in sharp contrast with lifeless matter. Thus, we turn to a wondrous development. Out of the complex relationship of atoms, which formed inanimate objects, came a further complexity, so far noticed only on this planet, of the emergence of living things, biological entities. The universe gives rise to beings like us. William James observed that we are children of the universe (A Pluralistic Universe), which suggests that this world is our home. It has given rise to beings like us through its internal regularities, but this requires a degree of irregularity. Mutations are random, DNA being vulnerable to change and duplication, while the fate of mutations is  subject to the discriminating and purposeful acts of selection.[8] Its holistic features are irreducible, which suggests that within the regularity of the universe is an emergence of influences higher up the hierarchy of complexity, influence that reverberates from lower to higher and higher to lower. An emergent theory moves against the idea that random natural selection is sufficient to explain the complexity we experience on this planet and in the universe, while the notion of process of emergence allows for contingent newness, which belongs in the concept of emergent evolution. Novelty in the universe emerges out of this drive toward increasing the complexity of relationships. The process of emergence describes the productivity of life that continuously produces something new. Self-organization is characteristic of life on all levels of its evolution, accounting for the spontaneity in all forms of life. Self-organization is the principle of freedom and of superabundance in the creative advance of the evolutionary process, of which human self-consciousness is its highest manifestation, allowing humans to integrate experience in the on-going formation of self, a self that arises from the initial stages of development and moves through successive stages.[9]

To exist is to be a finite temporal object within a system of finite-temporal objects, in which the process of the system determines success, regardless of what happens to individual entities. Each finite-temporal object is a momentary self-constitution in such a way that it looks like an enduring entity while the system of relations that constitute it remains hidden. Cooperation between the constituent actual entities of any given system, and cooperation between systems in the gradual emergence of an even more comprehensive higher-order system in the hierarchy of systems, is the way nature works. Organisms with parts or members that cooperate with each other will survive to pass on their genetic inheritance to offspring. This suggests a metaphysics of integrated systems of dynamically interrelated subjects of experience. Lower-order systems have their ontological value, but they exist to support the existence and well-being of the higher-order processes. 

With Whitehead, I think the evidence is on the side of saying that the trend in evolution is for organisms to live (survive), to live well, and to live better. If all that mattered were survival (Darwin), why have “life” at all? Do you not think that life is quite fragile? Survival would be far easier as a single cell. Beyond that, survival would be far easier as hardened atoms, that we call rocks or stones. In fact, I think one can make a compelling case that human beings are quite fragile. If survivability is all that matters, growing complexity toward living, intelligent beings would be impossible. 

Thus, something more than Darwinian evolution is at work, and science needs to explore what that “something more” might be. One way to think of it is that evolution is not only about following the law-like behavior of the past. Rather, evolution is about “attractors” of what an organism might become. Francis S. Collins^[10] notes that Darwin had no way of knowing the actual mechanism of natural selection. His work on the human genome project has shown that the mechanism is naturally occurring mutations within the DNA. In other words, from the perspective of human beings, you are a product of your parents – almost. Every generation will have one mutation for every one hundred million base pairs of DNA. With two parents, this means we have three billion base pairs of DNA and therefore about sixty mutations. In this case, a mutation is a base DNA pair not occurring in either parent. Most of these mutations are not ones noticeable. Some are destructive, of course. However, some are successful. When magnified over millions of years, we can see that naturally occurring mutation is the vehicle of the theory of natural selection. In this form of evolution, the attractors allow for novelty to arise that are “higher” than previous forms of life. The process of evolution cannot rely totally upon what the past has produced. It must also rely upon what organisms are attracted to become in the future.

Beings like us arise out of relation, with a perspective, and in a context, as do all other finite things. However, for us, values arise because we have a sense of what it means to be here, to have an angle from which to view and experience the world, and therefore a place from which to assess value. Given the rarity of life, we have every reason to value its emergence, value the context of the non-human world out of which humanity has arisen, and value its diversity and creativity. We can value its splendor, for its vastness, complexity, power, and beauty is the root of our aesthetic appreciation of nature. At the same time, there are reasons for us to withdraw from nature in horror. Death is one such reason. Life is sacrificed so that other lives may exist as well. For life to flourish, other life must be forfeited or given up. The fact that we can assess value suggests that suffering and evil will always be an issue for beings like us.[11]

Science is puzzled by the role of human beings in the unfolding history of the universe and in the unfolding history of life on this planet. We are creatures who have the capacity to observe the evolutionary process. Human beings are the goal of evolution, in the sense that the capacity for reflection upon oneself and the world is as complex an organism as one can get. Such a view places an important scientific basis for affirming a significant role for humanity in the exercise of their minds. It will be important for thought to have thought as its object, as Hegel would put it. Human beings will need to gain increasing knowledge of their thought processes, not just the physical nature of their brains, to accept and fulfill responsibly the unique role they have in nature. Human beings have an important and dignified role to play in the evolution of the universe. In their rationality and freedom, the emergence of human beings is the crowning achievement of evolution. Therefore, the development of mind is not an aberration, but is the fruit of millions of years of evolution. Mind has emerged from a natural process we know as evolution, to be sure, but it has emerged from previous “experiments” with “mind.” Other parts of nature also express qualities of mind, even if we have not fully identified them. Human beings, due to the development of mind, have the responsibility (an ethical obligation) of maturing the capacity for rationality the process of evolution of providing them. Within the law-like and intelligible functioning of the universe is randomness and chance. Human beings, due to their minds, have the capacity for a high degree of independence in their decision-making process. They have the responsibility, which is the basis for ethical life, of developing their rationality and freedom in a way that promotes the flourishing of human life.[12]

In these statements, I am quite close to several philosophers. Plato placed the true, good, and beautiful at the height of his notion of eternal forms. Aristotle placed happiness or human flourishing as the “goal” of human activity. Hegel presented the notion of “Absolute Idea” at the conclusion of his Science of Logic as the development of reason, freedom, and the good, which had been the process of development throughout the “becoming” of nature. In the introduction to his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel also says that the minds that we so naturally use are foreshadowed in other developments in nature, while at the same time we experience our alienation from the rest of nature precisely because of our minds. We “wonder,” as Aristotle put it, and therefore begin philosophical and rational thought. Human beings are the “end” of the evolutionary process. If we wanted to say it more generically, rational creatures are the “end” of a process that involves intense struggle and violence.

To overcome the separation in thought that human beings feel from the rest of nature will require thought that leads to grasping at a deeper level the nobility of the human project. When we grasp that the “end” of our rationality is freedom, then we can begin healing the breach between us and nature. We will see that other parts of nature have their freedom we need to respect and nurture. “Mind” is already the essence of nature. The study of nature liberates it in the sense that we start seeing in nature the emergence of “mind.” Each organism has “something” that desires the fullness the organism can achieve so that it can live better and live well, not just to survive. Earlier forms of life created the conditions for humanity to emerge and gives an essential feature of the universe as it is. Intelligent life has the possibility of gaining dominion over the random, chaotic, mostly lifeless, history of the universe.

2.    Toward Theology: Philosophy and Ontological Complexity

From a theological perspective, all any of this can suggest is a hint of the divine. The religious experience of God derives from another place than either scientific or philosophical spheres. We are Being-in-the-world, but are we also Being-before-God? I am just as concerned as any naturalist or materialist that religious persons would view this approach to evolution as proof for the existence of God. One can understand emergence of new forms through leaps in evolution as a scientific reality. Nor ought a religious person expect more than a hint as one looks at the universe as human beings experience it. God is not an object in the world, to be discovered like other objects. The demand for more evidence that God exists presumes that God is such an object within the world. It demands that God show up, as would a tree, and show itself. This is not possible, for if God is, God is that Infinite and Eternal that embraces this space and time. Behind such an approach to a scientific description of the universe and the rise of life on this planet is an openness to interpreting the principle of inertia as a sign of the faithfulness of God and emergence arising out of increasing complexity as open to a non-interventionist notion of the activity of God. It does not establish such a notion but becomes an opening for such a notion. Further, the quiet, unobtrusive way in which life arose through its information system, insinuating itself into the chemistry of life, is an analogy to the kind of influence divine action occurs. Divine influence is influential in the emergence of new forms through the power of attraction without needing to display itself as any finite-temporal object might do. 

Religious naturalism would accept the discussion thus far, but would stop short of the divine, importing a view of the sacredness of the natural world from religious experience. This universe is unique, has primacy, is pervasive, has a rightness, has a permanence, and is its totality is hidden from us. These qualities call for a religious response from us. This perspective at least acknowledges the importance of religious experience to understanding the human condition, while understanding what they experience is a connection to Nature. Nothing real transcends this universe, so any claims to have experienced such transcendence are nothing but projections of human hopes and values onto that transcendent reality. However, continuing the use of the word “God” is not helpful in this context. Even replacing God with the creativity metaphor as proposed by Gordon Kaufman seems unnecessary. The field of force found in field theory is sufficient to explain the transformation events that arise out of complex relationships between entities.

At the same time, some Christian theologians take science seriously as the source of our knowledge of the universe and seek to explore how and why God made the world as science describes it. Here are a few directions such a theology could take.

Theology can borrow the notion of field theory in a powerful way. The New Testament contains an example in the notion of Jesus Christ being Logos in the Gospel of John. Psalm 104: 30, “When you send forth your spirit, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground.” The Creed of Nicaea refers to the Holy Spirit as the Lord and Giver of life. Physics refers to the energy at the subatomic level that undergirds and forms the conditions for life. This analogy can provide a way for Christians to affirm the Spirit, which precedes human interests, as the source of life. 

Evolution can deepen the Christian understanding of the patience of God in bringing forth life and eventually human life. Evolution can provide a way for Christians to appreciate the way God brings new forms of live into being (contrary to Barth). Human life, bearing as it does the image of God, places humanity in the position of authority over the rest of creation. It must exercise that authority in way consistent with the stewardship of what God has granted to humanity. The debate within science regarding some kind of teleology is an important one for theology. Organisms are not just gradually evolving. “Leaps” seem to occur. Further, a direction or hierarchy is the result of this process. It may well be that the world science describes involves some form of direction and complexity. 

Science continues to challenge theology. The immensity of the universe that science describes makes it appear that humanity may be nothing more than a random blip in an insignificant part of the universe. The immensity of suffering and violence that evolution describes can make it difficult for Christians affirm that God created a world like this. However, science has only deepened our understanding of how extensive such suffering and violence are. I am not suggesting any proof for the existence of God through science. I am suggesting that Christians must not back away from affirming that God has created the world that science describes.

The tension between theology and science does not need to continue. Scientific reasoning is like other forms of reasoning in its need for the scientist to use some faith and imagination to solve its puzzles, while theological reasoning about God is hypothetical in their character and open to testing. This approach presumes a form of critical realism in both disciplines.[13] The test of theological assertions is whether they aid us in understanding the whole of finite reality, a wholeness anticipated in ordinary experience. What we anticipate is the wholeness of meaning, of which we can only hypothesize now and that will come as a future gift of God. 

Having decided to have a stance of faith in the Father of Jesus, for example, could grant increased intelligibility of our experience of finite reality. The value of this approach is that it broadens the concern of theology beyond the God-humanity relation. Clearly, theology does not derive from scientific reasoning. When scientists study nature, what that study reveals is nature. Knowledge of God derives from another place from which God speaks and from which human beings hear. It derives from human the experience of awe and wonder, a place of imagination.[14]

The tools of science have improved so much that it can explore the origin, sustaining, and end of this earth and even of the entire universe. Since God is not an observable object within the universe, theology would not expect science to discover God in its explorations. From the theological perspective, science is describing a work of God when it studies the planets as well as origin and end. Thus, the world science describes needs to be understood theologically as the world God has made in this way and for divine purposes. 

Given that many theologians and believers have set aside ancient notions of the origin, sustaining, and end of the universe, all of which derive from the human imagination and are designed to explain philosophical and religious notions of the world and of humanity, we need to consider whether such ancient notions have anything us today. 

Given the ancient origin of both myth and religion, one ought not to expect them to have an account of the origin and end of all things that exist that would be consistent with the science of today. To approach such texts as we find in Genesis 1-3 regarding origins or various Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts regarding the end literally, historically, or scientifically, is to approach them anachronistically. One will miss the point of the texts, which is not to address the questions of modern science. Rather, they address matters of human existence, such as the relationship between God and humanity, as well as human beings and the world of suffering and evil they experience. Approached in the way one might good poetry or a relevant story, one might have an encounter with the world of the text that will reshape your experience of your world. This would mean that the church will need to reinterpret what it means in the creed when it affirms: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” It will also need to rethink what it believes about the end of all things when it says of Jesus, now ascended to the Father, but “from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead … we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” My point is not that the faithful church cannot still affirm its belief because of science, but that the way believers today envision their fulfillment, which will require the use of imagination, would be quite different from that of the believers who formed the creed of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381). 

We need to think critically about the divine actuality to which religion points.[15] We need to comprehend the meaning of the reality of God. There are classical and modern attempts to conceptualize this actuality. The concept of mediated immediacy is Hegelian, suggesting that all experiences of God is through self, other people, and the world. God is not an element in the world, but behind all these elements.[16] The experience of God to which many people give testimony is not proof for the reality, but one dares not dismiss the universality of such experience easily. Some persons also testify they have had no such experience, so one ought not to dismiss this easily either. Every person has the possibility of such experience.[17] One problem with the appeal to experience is that it opens the door to the psychoanalytical critique of such experiences, which will focus upon an infantile hatred of the father and the infantile sense of union with the world. Thus, religious experience is an infantile regression. It may well be neurotic, although given the healthy way in which many religious interact with the world, this would be hard to defend.[18]

The insight of Paul in I Corinthians 1:26-29, that God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the strong, finds a witness in theory of evolution. It ought to humble us that we arose out of such weak and ignoble circumstances. Further, the image of a self-emptying and intimately relational God as an outpouring of goodness and love is the very essence of the Christian view of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Surely that revelation has also disclosed the manner of the relationship God has with all of creation from its beginning.^[19] Advanced and increasingly complex forms of life arise out of simpler and weaker forms. Christianity has no reason to escape this modern picture of the world. Yes, God could have made the world that science describes.

Creation already suggests the desire of God to live in loving fellowship with that which is not divine. God is creative, continuing to create, recreating, and sustaining the covenant contained in creation. God works by persuasion, consistent with God being patient and kind as God leads creation toward its destiny. God enters a dialogue with rebellious and free human beings. God is the gardener in the vineyard of the world, fostering and nurturing its continuous evolutionary growth throughout all ages. God is companion and friend, inspiring us to achieve the best. God creates by persuading the world to move toward the best individual and corporate life possible. Coercive power is not a good in itself. Motivating people through persuasion is the way God has chosen to work in the world. This view of the action of God in the world is consistent with the traits of the patience and kindness of God in dealing with human beings as related in the Bible. God suffers with those who have gone astray. Divine persuasive power maximizes individual freedom, respecting the integrity of everyone in the very act of guiding the development of that individual toward greater freedom. Having called individuality into existence, God respects their independence through persuasion rather than force. Such actions are divine because they have their source in the love of God, who willed free and independent persons. The extent that God exercises coercive power, God would restrict the freedom of individuals and diminish the reality of the world and impoverish the divine experience. God abandoned angelic marionettes who merely thought the thought of God because they are extensions of the being of God. God has elected to enter a dialogue with sinful, yet free, humanity. God has seen value in a world that is not a mere echo of the being of God. The freedom of the divine origin of the world and the holding fast to creation belongs together. As we take seriously the science of our time and a proper reading of the Bible and Christian tradition, persuasion is an effective way to reflect upon divine activity in the world. One can properly call persuasive any divine power which so influences the world without violating its integrity, while the necessary self-activity of the creature insures the spontaneity of response. This spontaneity may be minimal for protons and electrons, but during the evolutionary advance, sustained until now, it has manifested itself in ever-richer forms as the vitality of living cells, the conscious activity of the higher animals, and the self-conscious freedom of humanity. Spontaneity has matured as freedom. On this level, it becomes possible for the increasing complexity of order to direct itself toward the achievement of civilization, and for the means of divine persuasion to become ethical aspiration. The believer will affirm that in the ideals we envision God is persuading us, but this self-conscious awareness is not necessary for its effectiveness. Not only we ourselves, but also the entire created order, whether consciously or unconsciously, is open to this divine persuasion, each in its own way. The smaller parts scientists study belongs to a larger context out of which larger forms that are more complex emerge and science cannot reduce entities to their parts. The emergence of living entities depends on the total situation of the universe and its expansion. The emergence of humans is not simply a matter of chance, but part of the laws of nature. Living entities emerge in abundance and compete for use of the energy in their environment. The wealth of new forms contains new possibilities of utilizing the conditions of life. The Bible (Psalm 104) testifies to the richness of life in its variety. God has given living entities the power to be fruitful. Sexual unions of individuals within a species acquire a historical dimension and creatively open up space within which life can expand. 

            Let us pause to consider a religious notion of the end that seriously considers science. If God is the transcendent source and goal of the cosmic process, another picture emerges. As the source of the processes of the universe, God will redeem it from transience and decay. Persons have a destiny beyond their deaths in which all hurts will be healed and the purpose of God for them will reach fulfillment. In the transition from time to eternity in which this redemption occurs, there is sufficient continuity to ensure that individuals share in the life to come as their resurrected selves, but sufficient discontinuity to ensure that the life to come is free from the suffering and mortality of the old creation.[20] When human beings as complex systems die and are fully incorporated by God into the divine life, they experience themselves for the first time as a completed reality. The human experience of time is always an experience of perpetual perishing, a flow from the future in terms of what one sees as possible for oneself right now, into the present where one decides about what to do next, and from there into the past as a fully determined event in one’s life history. In contrast, eternity will be experienced as a dynamic togetherness of past, present, and future. In eternity one sees the fullness of one’s life-history as an integral part of a higher-order process that never ends in the inner trinitarian life of God. Time exits within eternity and time shapes eternity.[21] The dissolution of the universe through entropy means physical entities will not survive, but patterns of existence and activity will survive within the inner life of God as shared with finite creatures. The past universe exists within the divine memory as the sole non-temporal reality. Everything is preserved within the inner life of God. The end is a triumph of divine and creaturely activity. The end gives glory to God and satisfaction to finite creatures as they appreciate their role in being part of this end. Our personal end and the biblical vision of a last judgment unite in one event. As Genesis 1-3 are metaphors regarding the beginning, so biblical talk of an apocalyptic end are metaphors of human accountability to God. The end will be beautiful.[22]

Here is the point where science, philosophy, theology, and biblical study intersect. Such a view encourages reflection upon the responsibility that increasingly complex forms of life have for lower forms, and thus, encourages moral reflection. Theologically, it encourages reflection upon the logos or rational nature of the cosmos and its relation to God, and it encourages reflection upon the Divine Spirit as the energy that keeps moving creation toward new forms. 

The churches need to acknowledge that their sacred texts are not scientific texts, and that science has developed the technical tools by which we gain an understanding of the origin of all things and the end of all things. Doing so will free the churches from needless debates with science and engage the movement of the biblical text as it points toward God, the relationship between God and human beings, and the relationship human beings are to have with each other and with the world God has made.

B. The human life-world: a scientific world-picture of the human experience of space-time

We are now ready to consider a transition to the human. It was a sudden and quiet transition. The distinctive aspect of human beings is the mind. The brain grew four times between the first human fossils three million years BC and when the first Homo sapiens emerged around 200,000 BC. In evolutionary terms, this is rapid growth. Much of the growth occurred in the portion of the brain that involves language and its symbol-based product, culture. Minds emerge from this system and become a system of relations as well. Self-consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself. Self-consciousness liberates the body from the genes. In this sense, the insistence by Socrates that “soul” must rule “body” has a foundation in science. Genes become largely passive in the body of human beings, allowing the predictive capacity of the brain to ensure their survival, even to the point of going against the message of the genes. In this sense, the brain modifies the biological process of natural selection.

The religious quest represents a basic human quest. It represents humanity at its best, as it seeks a future that will be meaningful and whole. Of course, the various religions also speak with differing voices. I do not find it helpful to find some kind of religion of humanity that unites them all. Rather, each religion will exert its influence on its adherents and those around them. Adherents will demonstrate in their lives the success or failure of the beliefs, values, and worship of the religion. The history of religions contains many religions that have died. The religions that remain are the strongest at present. They will make their case, ideally, in a culture of freedom, through persuasion in word and deed. For the Christian, if Jesus Christ, as the risen Lord, is whom the New Testament and the church proclaims, then God has graced humanity with a glimpse of the future. For Christians, that future is a fulfillment of the love God has for humanity, shown in Christ, and is a fulfillment of the hope for enduring and whole life.

The nature of voluntary motion and consent create the possibilities, the undifferentiated keyboard, that is the human being. We need to explore how this is the case. We can pursue this theme best if we bracket the domain of human fault. This bracketing allows a focus upon the will. 

Self-identity as person emerges from moment to moment as already involved in various activities while we reflectively understand that identity over time, thereby learning what makes us unique in relation to others. 

We can begin with the sense of space. Intentionality, which is a decision we make that relates us to an object or project in the world, means that humanity is not reducible to elementary actions in the brain or to genetics. This voluntary motion suggests that we have power. We become the agent of our intentions. 

We can then consider the sense of time. Each decision moves us toward a project that has a temporal structure, so to decide is to anticipate. Our intentionality moves us toward the future. Perception itself occurs in anticipation, through glimpses and clues. Anticipation retains the past. The future is the fundamental situation for the decision and project. The future is a condition for action. Future contingencies open possibility. The presence of consciousness means that the possible precedes the actual. Possibility requires the project and the power or ability to do it. Further, presence to my self is a condition for deciding and intentionality. I project myself into the action to be done. I throw myself ahead in anticipation of the completion of the project. I meet myself in my project. I cannot exile or isolate myself from the power of acting and willing. The self I will be is not already given from the past but opens before me as a possibility in action and decision.

Any discussion of human life begins with the reminder of the finite and therefore ambiguous quality of human life. Finite life has hurdles, riddles, unresolved problems, potential for growth, falling and so forth. Such a life has physical limitations, the most dramatic of which is the ultimate disintegration of our lives toward death. We have obvious external limits. The ambiguity of human existence includes the presence of natural and moral evil. Any attempt to express notions related to human flourishing is inseparable from the ambiguities of every-day life. One who passionately engages life will also experience the pain of life. The more one gives oneself in faith, hope, and love, the more intensely one experiences life and death.^[23]

The response of persons to suffering is part of the cognitive act of being responsible. Suffering is part of the messy emergence of life. Suffering, death, and mass extinctions have been constitutive of the ongoing creation of life on earth. For the naturalist, suffering is a warning system that prepares the person for great or sudden evil. It has nothing more than adaptive significance, sorting out those organisms that can withstand it from those that cannot. It encourages the responsible moral acts of honor before others and courage while facing the absurdity of life. It is a tragic stance. 

As science reflects upon natural selection, one cannot help but note the staggering amount of suffering and death that occurs for a single, slight advance in the history of an organism. In fact, one of the reasons Darwin shifted his religious views was the immense amount of suffering written into the process of evolution. He did not want God involved in the process, it seems, for it was true brutal. Consequently, he resisted any notion of leaps in evolution. 

Here is why suffering is such an issue. Often, this advance for one organism means its own survival and the suffering and death of another organism. Although an individual organism learns to survive through cooperative efforts within its species and between species as well, this fact does not diminish the suffering involved. 

For Darwin, it became difficult that God would have anything to do with such a violent process as he was seeing in evolution. He went from deism and possibly to atheism. 

Let me see if I can separate two of the problems that Darwin had.

True, the evolutionary process, as he defines it, involves suffering. The co-existence of entities and events involves conflict, destruction and reconstruction. Humans live off lower entities, true, but they also live for them. The poetic image of Genesis 2: 15, where Adam is in the garden “to till it and keep it,” is helpful here. True, there is suffering involved. There is a giving and a taking of life that is part of the evolutionary process. Birth and death are facts for living things. It is also a fact that living things feed off other living things. One can view this as purely destructive process. I confess that nature channels often give me this impression. Yet were it not for a process something like this, living things would “endure,” but would there be the variety and complexity we have today. Even when it comes to human history, the passing of generations allows for changes to occur, some of which will be bad, of course, but others will be needed in order to make progress. We recognize our dependence upon other living things, as well as future generations who will need to survive because of our care for the environment. The fragile quality of life entails suffering, but it also elicits from others the need to nourish it.

For Darwin, the suffering that he described led to a theological conclusion: he found it incredible that God would create such a violent process. Evolutionary theory calls into question the theological proposition that God sustains this world through, love, goodness, and faithfulness. 

To deepen the problem further, the purpose of evolutionary advance is often to make other animals suffer or die more surely. Organic design thrives on pain, and pain thrives on organic design. Clearly, the universe as it is has an immense degree of suffering and death written deeply into its existence. If life is anywhere, suffering and death will be present as well. Science raises the philosophical question of why there is so much suffering. Of course, this is an ancient riddle that does not have an easy answer, and may not have a satisfactory answer. 

Evolutionary theory is hardly the first discipline to raise the question of suffering. Hegel^[24] referred to the messy processes of nature and of history as violent. Pain is a quality of living things that arises out of their need or lack. Yet, the “end,” that is, creatures like us, who have rationality and freedom, whom history tells us do not use either for good ends very often, has a “means” that appears quite different. The “means,” science now tells us, is that of violence, suffering, and death. The “means” is as much law-like regularity as it is randomness or chance. He famously refers to the “means” as the “cunning of reason.” In one of his few examples, he refers to a house that appears as an end in relation to the tools employed for its production. Yet, the stones and beams, the wheels and axles, and so on, which constitute the actuality of the end fulfill that end only through the pressure that they suffer, through the chemical processes with air, light, and water to which they are exposed and that deprive humanity of them by their friction and so forth. They fulfill their destiny only by being used and worn away. They correspond to what they are supposed to be only through their “negation” of what they are in order to be part of “end” from which they are quite different. 

I do not mention Hegel here as a way of accepting his system. Rather, I mention him because I think that at this point, he can help us view the evolutionary process in a way that is other than the pure victory of “survival of the fittest,” a notion that has opened the door to abuse of evolutionary theory. Instead, fitness for survival, while an obvious element of evolution, is only part of the story. The difficulty of the evolutionary process has as its purpose in the emergence of higher, increasingly complex forms of life. The organism seeks its most full expression of which it is capable. Creatures like us, who have reason, are the “end” of a process that involves intense struggle, suffering, and violence. The sacrifices have been for increasingly “noble” expressions of life. Now, I put the words just used in quotes because evolutionary theory as presently expounded would not agree with their use. My point is that if fitness for survival were the only criteria for evolution, “life” would have stayed single-cell entities, for they will survive long after multi-cell, rational creatures like us will find this planet uninhabitable. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that another force is at work, one that draws living things forward to the best that organism can become. 

I seriously doubt that we as finite and thinking creatures will ever have a large enough picture of the “whole” to feel fully at peace with all the suffering inherent in being a living thing within this universe. Yet, if Hegel is right, and there is some noble purpose to it all, we might find some measure of acceptance of the tragic dimension to all living things.

Something more than natural selection is in play in the human striving against suffering, something that has an anticipatory character. Where there is courage there is also vitality, a commitment to life for the sake of life, a refusal to cease striving even when such striving is futile. This makes sense if it is part of a responsible, anticipatory act in an unfinished universe, in which suffering is its dark side. Striving against suffering is a responsible moral act in hope of its final vanquishing, an anticipation of the emergence of an eschatological plentitude that awaits humanity.[25]

 

Theoretical and Practical Consideration of an Ontology of the Self and The Shared Human World: Philosophical Anthropology and Religious Texts

 

The theoretical consideration gained through science can take us a long way to understanding human being-in-the-world, but it is not enough. Human reflection and meditation upon the world and the resulting human action provides fertile opportunities for considering what it means to be a human being, to be this unique individual. This will lead us to consider other types of texts if we are to complete our consideration of the wonder of humanity amid a dominantly lifeless universe and as part of the evolving life on this planet. These texts will be philosophical, psychological, and religious. 

1.     Self-Identity Through Affectivity an Expression of Care for Self

Self-identity, living with the question of who we are and why we are here, is a difficult one.

Character arises out of perspective, desire, choice of self, and habit. Character shows that I see humanity from a place or angle. Happiness is another practical way in which we sense our lack of balance in life, for in it we narrow our notion of the meaning of our lives in the context of our quest for participation in the wholeness of life. The moral feeling of respect is the fragile synthesis of character and happiness that forms the person. The forming of a person is a life-long project. Learning to be human in the way we treat self and others is the path toward happiness, which connects us to the quest for meaning and contentment. The fragility of the project suggests the loss of innocence, a lapse, a loss, a fall. It suggests a division within the self, a feeling of disproportion. 

Given the significant role of feeling or the affective life, the question of method arises as to whether a philosophy of feeling is even possible. 

Otherness is the heart of the formation of the self. The dialectic of self and other keeps the self from occupying the place of being a foundation, keeping us from exalting or humiliating self, both of which can lead to an isolated notion of self. The development of self leads to a perspective on the world uniquely its own while also disclosing an ambiguous natural and social world that transcends the self. Any holding of past or future is precarious. Possession of the present is no guarantee of the future. The incarnational nature of perception means the perceiving subject is always changing. Consciousness is perceptual. The living present that is continually reborn in perception, where the perceived thing is part of a totality open to a horizon of an indefinite number of perspectival views that blend with each other according to a given style. Perception opens a window upon the world. At every instant we coordinate experience with the previous instant and that of the following. All sensation is part of a field of space and time, with things within the field being stable and constant while also being part of an open system as a temporal process. We construct a social world, a culture, that both reflect the community of persons they experience, and shape their experience of that community. The human world is a symbolic world in that sense; shown in the institutions it creates and the values by which it lives. This world created by human thought and action has its type of objectivity. Yet, the Other may be from a different culture. Each culture has its orientation rooted in what human beings create. We gain access to another culture through the experience of someone else, developing a form of empathy, by which we project ourselves into the alien cultural community and its culture. 

We need to recover the mixed structure of feeling as spiritedness, which sometimes sides with reason and sometimes with desire, revealing a restless heart that does not have satisfaction or rest.[26] Feeling reveals the thing quality of our experience of the world but also reveals the inwardness of the self. It brings to our awareness the significance of sociality in the emergence of the self. 

The path of suspicion regarding the identity of the self that the therapeutic situation provides is the path toward assurance or attestation of the self. Suspicion haunts this attestation. In seeking an orientation for our lives, we already sense our disorientation, a sense of homelessness and lostness. The authenticity of self we seek is through facing this disorientation. Not to face this lostness is to live in flight of the authentic self, merging who we are into the conventional crowd. However, we will need to hold together moving toward our destiny with regression to childhood, synthesis and analysis, recovery and suspicion, adulthood and childhood, possibility and repetition, history and fate. The consciousness of the child has its truth in the father figure, which is the first model or ideal of the child. Like the slave in Hegel, the child has traded security for dependence. The id-ego-superego fits into the three-fold dialectic of opposition in Hegel that gives birth to meaning.[27] We do not have a clear and distinct idea of who we are. We are not what we appear. Contrary to everyday experience and common sense, consciousness does not rule over the meaning of our lives. The personality we form is a mask we have constructed through the various stages of life as we resolve the conflicts of each stage. Because the self is the result of dialectical formulation through lived experience, the self is not now what it shall be. There are dimensions of the self that are hidden from us that will guide our thinking and acting in this world. This decentering of self also saves philosophical reflection from its former assurance and certainty. The illusion of the certainty of self and its fake knowledge must be shaken to give genuine access to the subject. The subject is not the subject one supposes through consciousness or common sense. The subject requires an archeology but the project of becoming an authentic self cannot be completed without a teleology. Each approach de-centers the self and through the hermeneutics of suspicion uncovers the self and sets the self on the way to authenticity. The subject mediates self-consciousness through the figures that give a telos to this becoming of the self. The self grows in time and has a history. The orientation toward fullness of life manifests itself in the community of fellow human beings, finding expression in the intentionality of feeling that draws human beings out of isolation through sympathy, but also the withdrawal from the world through fear. We make our lives. A human life consists of continual decisions regarding what we are going to be. We are deciding upon the future. Life is oriented toward what lies ahead. Such realities are the source of our confusion and perplexity regarding our identity.

Since human beings do not live by instinct and their actions could not be predicted with mathematical certitude, the matter of self-identity is fuzzy to us. This failure can lead to hatred of and aggression toward the self. However, there is a path to verification of the self. [28] The awareness that human beings are not now what they are destined to be is part of the process of liberation in becoming the true self. This consciousness of a lack gives strength in accepting the reality of human life and helps us become responsible for ourselves. Our awareness of self heightens as we cease to pay attention to the world, but this pulling back from the world is not effective. We are sent and relegated to the world. Immersion in the world is reflected in language. Through imagination, we become the synthesis of language and our unique perspective, between meaning and appearance, between speaking and looking. The consciousness that arises occurs in reflection upon the world. 

Positive and Negative Feeling

We can now explore some of the positive feelings that move us toward community and thus toward the authentic self we desire to be. All feeling is a form of rationality or thought without words, which explains why we must allow ourselves time to reflect upon their significance.

Aesthetic experience occurs in a moment and becomes an event. It occurs with this event, this sunset, mountain, beach, painting, symphony, poem, novel, and so on, that has captured the imagination. It can put us out of step with practical life. It can disrupt normal consciousness, experience, and behavior. It can disorient us. In contrast with drab everydayness, such experiences make life vivid, animated, and worth living, turning the attention toward something new that has demanded and captured our attention and fascinated us. These qualities give us a sense of urgency and moving forward to experience anew the things and people of this world. They also invite us to look backward to rediscover our path to the moment that captured us. We will return to daily life, but with new longing and desire. It comes from outside self and bids us to pay attention to it, contemplate it, and meditate upon it. The exterior nature of the event has become an interior event as well. The objective form of the aesthetic experience stimulates the subjective aesthetic experience. We may physically stop and revise our location to place ourselves along its path. What formerly held our attention recedes into the background. We may lose ourselves in the experience of a moment, an event from outside self. One can feel intoxicated and as if part of a dream. It is already present in the free play of human beings in their sociality and in their wonderment in the presence of their connection to the horizon of nature and to the mystery of who we are and why we are. When experienced through human creativity of writing, storytelling, or reflective curiosity, it discloses who human beings are. It exposes us to the depth and height of experience. The utilitarian approach to the world has the benefit using things to improve human life, consistent with a scientific and technical relationship to nature. An aesthetic experience reminds us that nature and the products of human creativity are valuable as they are. It has intrinsic value. It hints at the surplus of human experience. In the aesthetic experience, human beings pause and appreciate with a sense of amazement and wonder what they see and hear. We savor the moment. We encounter beauty as a greeting, in that as we come into the presence of something beautiful, it greets us. Beauty welcomes us and consents to our being in its midst. 

The experience can affect the way we live. It may reveal hunger we did not know we had. The event anticipates the harmony, unity, and wholeness we seek. Just as important, we long for repetition. It refines perception and develops the imagination. It can relieve tension and anxiety. It can quiet destructive impulses. It can assist in the integration of self with world. It can refine our discernment of what matters in this world. It invites us toward wholeness and unity with life. It reminds us that discovering meaning in our lives is more like music than words, more like poetry than prose, more like home than a hotel. It lives in stories, not scientific formulae. For meaning, we need an epiphany or insight as well as theory. As the beautiful demands our attention, it invites us on a journey to become increasingly beautiful persons in the interior life and in conduct. We have a new appreciation for our role in bringing new beauty into the world. Such aesthetic experiences are, therefore, lifesaving and life restoring. Since the experience is a gift, it encourages us to offer the gift to others. It invites an act of replication. An occasion of beauty prompts the begetting of children; it prompts a copy of itself. Enjoyment is in touch with the other person. Love of life is social and simply loves the happiness of being. Life loved is the enjoyment and contentment of life. Love reveals the aspiration we have toward the presence of being. Aesthetic creativeness is conceivable only on condition that the world is present to the artist in a certain way – present to heart and mind, present to the very being of the artist. If creative fidelity is conceivable, it is because fidelity is ontological in its principle, because it prolongs presence that itself corresponds to a hold that being has upon us; because it multiplies and deepens the effect of this presence unfathomably in our lives.

Aesthetic experience anticipates the beauty, splendor, and glory of reality. The aesthetic exists because wholeness and harmony exist. We also face the abyss of time and history, for nature and human history have a godless quality. Yet, amidst the abyss, we have this harmonizing and integrating experience of the aesthetic that anticipates the destiny of nature and human history. In this way, the aesthetic experience becomes an important doorway to the significant questions that have plagued humanity. As an act of love, contemplation of the beautiful awakens us to something beyond the abyss, beyond abandonment, disappointment, pain, and death that are so much part of human life, and suggests the welcome of reality, the Infinite and Eternal. Apart from this awareness, nature becomes cruel, and history becomes random and empty. The world is not as it should be. The aesthetic experience suggests the world is not now what it shall be. The aesthetic experience guards the wonderment out of which philosophical reflection begins. Often in flight from wholeness and integration, an experience we must not trivialize, the aesthetic experience occurs against a hoped-for harmony and wholeness of reality.

Development of systems of beliefs, becoming as comprehensive, coherent, and corresponding to as much of the world as one can, are key elements of what makes persons who they are. Such beliefs do not give us verifiable knowledge of the world. They do something potentially far more important in the way they provide a perspective or perception of the world that guides behavior as well. Even in their final form, they will have an aesthetic quality that attracts adherents. The ability to keep such systems open to further testing and engagement with other persons is the sign of a healthy system of beliefs. Closing oneself off from such openness is a sign of an ideological approach that is destructive of intellectual and personal growth. One may hold such beliefs strongly while showing regard and respect for strongly held differing beliefs of others.

Love permits us to see the ontological priority of Care in human action. It suggests that something does matter. The nagging suspicion of many is that nothing matters, leading to an apathetic approach to human action, becoming uninvolved with the world. Such sickness of living needs the healing touch of care. Care is the opposite of apathy. We rightly are suspicious of love, for it has a darkness that needs to be unmasked. It can be nothing more than the pleasure principle at work projecting our original dependence upon mother to the other (Freud). It has various sides. Eros is a dimension of love that reminds us that in the act of making love, two bodies remain distinct persons, the proper aim being intimate responsiveness to another. Philia or friendship allows others into our inner circle of care. Agape is a decision to love in circumstances where it may not seem reasonable. Love is a positive feeling that makes morality possible by being both the origin and goal of moral action, thereby freeing morality from becoming conventional moralism. It is an attitude that orients the character of a person to behave toward others in general. Love accepts the other. It accepts responsibility for the other. It is our response to the needs of the other. It respects the other in seeing the unique individuality of the other, separating the growth from the other from any utilitarian purpose that would serve us. It has knowledge of another. It is the affirmation of our life, happiness, growth, and freedom. Care is intentional, letting go of the self to freely experience the other. Love allows us to escape the prison of our aloneness, to genuinely discover the other, and in the process, find who we are, find our vocation in life, learning the purpose and meaning of our lives. 

Negative feelings also disclose a form of rationality that reveals the brokenness of human life. These feelings force us to reconsider the health, independence, and strength of the self implied in positive feeling. Mood discloses our brokenness and our striving toward wholeness. 

Lust, the desire to possess the beautiful, is the dark side of an aesthetic appreciation for the beautiful for its own sake, desiring to make it our own for our own sake, disclosing human brokenness. Lust clings to the finite and temporal out of the desire to make it yield a wholeness and meaning that no finite thing can give. It closes one off from the beautiful by diminishing it and making it conform to our desire.

Human aggression is an innate instinct that waits for the proper occasion to express it. The direction of this instinct is toward maximum aggression. The instinct serves the survival of individuals, groups, and as a byproduct, the human species. It is one response to a threat to the vital interest of individuals and groups. Another response would be fear and flight. Such aggression is different from the part of us that is predator in need of food. Meat eaters are not angry at that prey. They have the biological drive to eat meat. A uniqueness of human aggression is that it has the possibility of turning killing into a goal pursued for its own sake, desirable and pleasurable in itself. Humans can torture without reason. The need for territory does not explain human aggression, for battles occur with other goals in mind. Humans are destructive beyond the act of defense or predatory purposes. Here is the problem with human aggression, as it goes beyond predatory or defensive need. Humans are killers. Humans are the primate that kills and tortures members of our own species, taking pleasure in destroying life for no purpose other than destroying it, and feels satisfaction doing so. Humans have a record of extraordinary destructiveness and cruelty that exceeds the animal life out of which they came. The uniquely human problem is to discover the degree to which the way humans order life together contributes to the quality and intensity of their lust for killing and torturing. Human malignant aggression, in contrast to biological aggression, has its foundation in the conditions of human existence.

Just as love can take over the person, so also can violence. The inability of America and the nations of Western Europe to recognize the presence of evil in Hitler and the Nazi movement had devastating influence upon world history. Many people believe so strongly in peace and world brotherhood that they could not see Hitler or the destructive evil he represented. Human beings just could be that cruel in this civilized century; accounts in papers must be wrong. Personal convictions blinded many from accurately perceiving reality. They had no place for evil. They thought the world should fit their convictions. However, to fail to recognize the actuality of evil in our life together is itself evil; we become accomplices on the side of destructive possession by evil. 

We will not understand human aggression simply from biological and behavioral studies. We will need to explore motivating impulses. Psychology brings to the table a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one’s subjective needs and expectations, of character, and of conflicts between passionate self-preservation. 

Some human aggression is biological as external forces threaten our vital interests as individuals. However, sadism and necrophilia are not innate. We can reduce them when the proper socioeconomic conditions are favorable to the full development of our genuine needs and capacities, such as the development of creativity and self-actualization. Exploitation and manipulation make us bored and trivial people, far more open to sadism and necrophilia. Sadism is the passion to have absolute and unrestricted control over a living being. It has no practical aim. It is devotional, transforming impotence into the experience of omnipotence. Necrophilia is the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly. It consists of the passion to transform that which is alive into something dead; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. We can consider this differently. Biophilia is the passionate love of life and all that is alive. Ethics based upon this passion would include the idea that good is all that serves life and evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, and cuts it into pieces. The expansion of aggression is an alternative to the love of life. Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts us all. Necrophilia grows as the development of love of life is stunted. We are biologically endowed with the capacity for the love of life but psychologically have the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution.

Anger is closely connected to brutality and a delight in vengeance. Seeing others as anger sees them is a way of distancing ourselves from the humanity of the other. It can make it possible to do terrible things to the other. Yet, to not get angry when horrible things take place seems to be a diminution of our humanity. In circumstances where evil prevails, anger is an assertion of concern for human well-being and human dignity. The failure to become angry seems collaboration with evil.

Paul refers to enmities, referring to hostilities between individuals or communities, on political, religious, or racial grounds (Galatians 5:20).  Paul (II Corinthians 6:20) does not want to find certain vices among them when he visits, such as strife, referring to quarrelsomeness, contention, and wrangling (Romans 1:29 as well). Anger refers to outbursts of rage. Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics, 7.1149a3) refers to the menace of uncontrolled rage that does not hear the voice of reason. He compares it to a pet dog who vigorously barks before discovering if the approaching person is friend or foe. Quarrels (James 3:14, II Corinthians 6:20) refers to a mercenary spirit and selfish ambition, the seeking of followers and adherents by means of gifts, the seeking of followers, hence ambition, rivalry, self-seeking; a feud, faction. In Romans 13:13, Paul refers to the dishonorable life of quarreling, variously translated as strife, dissension, wrangling and rivalry. Dissensions refers to divisions.  Factions refers to heresy. In II Corinthians 6:20, he refers to disorder, also translated as disturbance, upheaval, revolution, anarchy, first in the political, and thence in the moral sphere. Such behaviors arise out of our darkness, our attraction to self-destructive behaviors, and turning away from that which is life-giving.

Anger provides the soil out of which our murderous and violent actions come (Matthew 5:22). Jesus understood that the dehumanizing act of violence has its roots in the dehumanizing of another person through our anger. Moreover, not only does anger dehumanize the other, but it also dehumanizes us. Every time we decide to allow anger to smolder inside of us, we become less than fully human, less than the people God created us to be. Instead of merely avoiding murder and violence, we need to embrace reconciliation, which leads to community. 

Among the seven deadly sins, anger may be the most fun. We get to lick our wounds, smack our lips over grievances long past, roll our tongues over the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, savor to the last morsel the pain someone gave you and the pain you give back. We have a feast fit for a king. Of course, the chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down so joyfully is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.[29]

The character we develop through moral reflection is our substitute from poor instincts. Character is the stable system of all non-instinctual strivings through which we relate to ourselves and to others and to the natural world. Our passions are answers to the existential needs that have their foundation in the human condition. Our instincts are answers to biological needs, while our passions are response to existential needs. We must view our passions from the perspective of the whole person and not either biologically or in a behavioral way. Our passion transforms us from a mere thing into a hero. Our passions, far from being repetition of childhood traumas, are our attempt to make sense out of life and to experience the optimum of intensity and strength we can achieve under the given circumstances. 

Life discloses its brokenness, illness, dependence, and weakness of the self in the anxiety and dread (Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Heidegger) with which human beings approach their lives. It becomes the point of departure in the question of the wholeness of human existence. Anxiety concerning the uncertain future creates a form of bondage in the present, creating a prison. It has a paralyzing power. The result is to grasp at things that cannot give us the security we desire.^[30] Care for self and security can lead to an unhealthy form of self-love.^[31] Striving for self-fulfillment becomes anxious striving for wholeness, inviting us to grasp at transitory and finite things to give us a wholeness they cannot give.^[32] Seeking recognition by others at any price, fearing an anticipated unfavorable appraisal by those whose opinion one values, this brief time and limited space becomes the sole definition of any fulfillment we expect. We follow the safe and quiet path of respectability rather than actualize the potential in becoming our true self. Anxiety sets aside a thankful and confident approach to life. It diverts attention from the possible wholeness of life. It reflects the basic alienation from the self, others, and from the world, falling from true and authentic life. It reflects boredom of life, developing into slothfulness, seclusion, and isolation, disclosing the misery of human life. It leads to feelings of malaise, discontent, and depression. Such feelings are indeterminate. They become a warning of a challenge confronting integrity or authenticity. Anxious striving for personal identity reflects preoccupation with the self, revealing the brokenness of human existence. We withdraw from our potential, attempting to ground the self in the self rather than in openness to the world.[33]Mediocrity, conformity, and unfulfilled potential of our lives become our struggle. We become part of the crowd but can imagine we could have done so much more with the one life we have to live. The prospect of death heightens anxiety and alienation. Anxious striving becomes dread when destiny discloses the real possibility that Nothingness is the end.^[34]

The Oedipal dilemma is an early form of this anxiety. Healthy children experience sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. This desire reaches its peak around four or five. The romantic love of the child for the parent is a hopeless love. It requires enormous energy for the child to appear sexually desirable to the opposite sex parent. The child cannot maintain the energy. The resolution of the dilemma, and its accompanying anxiety, occurs as the child accepts the reality that it cannot have an adult relationship with its parent. It cannot sexually possess its parent and be a child.^[35] The basic anxiety of children is the feeling of being isolated and helpless in a world conceived as potentially hostile. We develop a neurotic need for safety in a hostile world. We adapt whatever our past gives us to the possibilities and demands of the future. Such anxieties of childhood begin alienation from the real self. The need to evolve artificial ways to cope with others forces us to override genuine feelings, wishes, and thoughts. The drive toward safety makes us silence our true thoughts and feelings. We develop an idealized image of the self to gain security. Reality cannot coincide with this idealized image. The neurotic feels entitled to special attention, consideration, and deference on the part of others. We distort the world through endowing others with characteristics they do not have, see a completely ideal person, endow them with godlike perfection and power, or may seem them as contemptible and guilty. Such claims are egocentric. We may turn others into giants or dwarfs. We reinforce our insecurity in relationship with others. We cannot find the capacity for the heroic and living a full of life within the human condition; meaning and heroic action must come from beyond it.

All this can give birth to a sense of worthlessness or existential dread. Guilt can become pervasive and persistent. The conscience may writhe in its pain. We can objectify feeling in the desire for worth, dignity, and honor in the eyes of others. The quest for self-esteem becomes a desire to exist through the favor of the recognition of another. The fragile basis for this esteem is the opinion or belief of the other, which, in turn, has the fragile basis of my belief or trust in the opinion of the other concerning my worth, which leads to vanity and pretension. The struggle for recognition takes humanity beyond the struggle for self-preservation to a struggle to tear from the other an avowal, testimony, and proof, that we are autonomous self-consciousness.

2.     Human action as story

The naturalistic basis for human action is motion in space-time. The universe is constant movement. The body has many involuntary drives, but responsibility remains with us. Wisdom or foolishness is at the intersection of bodily need and choosing, where one might choose sacrificing a need for a larger goal. Pleasure is the result of a choice or stance, the achievement of the will and of deciding. This provides action with unity in direction. 

We have no excuses. We have chosen to live our lives the way we did rather than another way.[36] Suppose someone has chosen the project of being a great waiter of tables. Each little movement of his eyes, each movement of his hands, the way he walks, all of this represents choice. He could have chosen other projects, but he is choosing to turn himself into a waiter. When making these choices, he is moving his life in one direction and not another. Let us suppose at one of the tables is a couple, discussing this and that over coffee. The young man reaches across the table and puts his hand upon the hand of the girl. She does not pull her hand away. She continues to talk. She has chosen, decided, to move toward a relationship with this man. The waiter and the woman are becoming certain sorts of people through their choices. They shut doors and open other doors. There is always another way. To walk down one road is to choose not to walk down other roads. Too much of our lives is an attempt to evade responsibility for and make excuses for these choices. We might convince ourselves that this was the only thing we could do in this situation. That is a lie. We may have chosen because it was the easiest, or it would cause les pain, or required less risk, but I made the choice. There were other paths I could have travelled, but some seemed unbearably difficult, so I chose the path I did. 

The ability to choose, even in the most horrendous of situations, is a gift human beings have. Our choices are a form of participating in creation. Creation is unfinished, and human beings are co-creators with God. We create through choices. We may think we are just letting our lives drift along, but that is also a choice. Such drifting is being unfaithful to the gift of our freedom to choose and create our lives. When we choose, we walk down one road and not another, particularly the difficult, demanding, risky road, it can be a response to the hope for the better possible life. People choose how to live through debilitating sickness: resentment, self-pity, and anger. People can also choose to so with dignity, cheerfulness, and gratitude.

 

Speaking-writing have the character of an action. Speaking-writing becomes free of the intention and control of the speaker-writer. The listener-reader can take the initial presentation to places remote from the original intention. The speech-text is disclosed in front of the spoken word or text as it points toward a possible world. Understanding involves grasping the proposed world opened by the discourse.[37] Every speech initiative makes me responsible for what is said in my saying it. Some speeches are commitments or promises that bind me. The obligation made in the present engages the future. This initiative inaugurates a new course of things. Through the I can, initiative indicates my power. Through the I do it becomes by act. Through interference or intervention, it inscribes my act in the course of things, thereby making the lived present coincide with the instant. Through the kept promise, it gives the present the force of persevering and enduring. By this last trait, ethical signification clothes initiative, announcing the more specifically political and cosmopolitan characterization of the historical present. The historical present is the lived through present (not point-like) and the sphere of initiative. Since the promise places the speaker under obligation of doing something, an ethical dimension is present. 

We can understand better the significance of narrative in the act of storytelling, which shows its temporal character in its organization of the plot, in its selection and arrangements of the events and actions that have a beginning, middle and end. Plots are rule-governed transformations in which we discern temporal wholes, bring about a synthesis of various circumstances, goals, means, interactions, and intended or unintended results. The reader has an expectation that some form of consonance will prevail. When our expectation of some order does not find fulfillment, we feel deceived. Frustration cannot be the last word. The story is a sophisticated form of understanding. The plot offers a mimesis, having a mediating role between time and narrative, which is a creative imitation of human action. The plot is a mediation between individual events or incidents and a story taken as a whole. Thus, both a proper hermeneutics of the text and of human action is an important contributor to philosophical anthropology.[38]

The uniquely human experience of space-time requires narrative, which is meaningful if it portrays the features of temporal experience, narrative being the active process of representing temporal experience.[39] Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence

Hermeneutics leads us to explore narrative and what it says about the temporal shared human experience of the world. It leads us to consider fiction and history as paths to understand the shared human experience of the world. Common to both history and fiction is their temporal background. The primary task of hermeneutics is to seek in the text the internal dynamic that governs the structuring of the work and to seek the power that the work possesses to project itself outside itself and to give birth to a world that would truly be the thing or matter referred to in the text.[40] All this prepares us for seeing the work of the historian, who will need to justify the plot they develop, with its events and actors, by giving reasons for including some and excluding others. The plot occurs within institutional roles and the duration of the community. Plot is a mediation between the individual events or incidents and a story taken as a whole. Further, plot brings together factors as different as agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, and unexpected results. Plot mediates through a temporal process. The plot transforms the succession of events into a meaningful whole, it imposes a sense of ending, where the end governs the flow of events.

Narrative opens the way for meaningful human action. Narrative represents the world of action, the symbols in culture and the world of “as if,” that is, of fiction. History is a world on which human action leaves a trace. History may appear as an autonomous entity, as a play with players who do not know the plot. Historical time has certain reflective instruments. One is calendar time, which as a cosmological basis. The succession of generations, as in contemporaries, predecessors, and successors, has a biological and sociological basis. Archives, documents, and traces (a mark left by a thing) compose a third reflective instrument. The trace helps us reckon with time, gives of duration in time, and moves us toward a public view of time as over against a purely private experience of time. Cosmic time, time as counted by science, makes human life insignificant. The re-figuration of human life occurs through the poetics of narrative by which we encounter the ambiguities of time.

The human experience of time results in history, which transposes historical events into a higher level of complexity in the narrative. Historians must give reasons for why they have developed the narrative they propose. The plot the historian develops needs to be coherent with the knowledge we have of the events. Historical events are framed by the historian into a plot. These events are the variable within the plot, for events occur within a structure of events. At the formal level, plots are rule-governed transformations in which we discern temporal wholes, bring about a synthesis of various circumstances, goals, means, interactions, and intended or unintended results. The reader has an expectation that some form of consonance will prevail. When our expectation of some order does not find fulfillment, we feel deceived. Every point of view is the invitation addressed to readers to direct their gaze in the same direction as the author or the characters. In turn, the narrative voice is the silent speech that presents the world of the text to the reader. Only the confrontation between the world of the text and the lifeworld of the reader will make the problematic of narrative configuration tip over into that of the re-figuration of time by narrative. 

To be aware of temporality in narration is to move toward, to show what has been, and to make the story present for the reader. History and fiction refigure time, occurring at the level of human acting and suffering. We become agents of history as we suffer the effects of history. The victims of history undergo history more than they make it. They borrow from each other. Every narrative is a re-figuration of temporal experience, although the distinction of historical narrative is its claim to represent a real past, mediating between lived time and cosmic or calendar time. The mediation is open-ended, incomplete, and imperfect because it will reflect the differing perspectives of expectation of the future, the reception of the past, and the experience of the present, with expectation breaking the perspectives open. Historical writing has a debt to the dead. Tradition reminds us that we are not absolute innovators, but rather in the situation of being heirs. What we receive from the past are beliefs, persuasions, convictions, ways of holding certain things as true. The past questions us and calls into question before we question it or call it into question. The present is the moment of initiative, as experience and the horizon of expectation come together. An action isolates a closed system from the environment and discovers the possibilities of development inherent in this system. However, historical writing also uses the narrative form of imagination. It detects and transforms acting and suffering in its attempt to reconstruct the past. This inter-weaving of history and fiction gives us narrated or human time. The experience provided by past and present are not sufficient for the determination of the horizon of expectation. The present is a crisis when expectation takes refuge in an unrealizable utopia sought through political revolution and when tradition becomes only a dead deposit of the past, often through a view of divine revelation that binds the present to the past and withholds from the present the possibilities of human time. Initiative consists in the incessant transaction between these two tasks, by which we understand the force of the present.

Applied to religious texts, while they can be prophetic, ritualistic, hymn, and wisdom texts, they are often in the form of narrative. In the truth-claim contained in such texts, the natural and human world are harmonious and complementary with divine revelation. We can also apply this notion of understanding to all forms our reflective curiosity might take, since they all disclose who human beings are and the possible worlds such texts might open. Any expression of reflective curiosity that nourishes a love of truth in all its multiplicity of truth claims, recognizing there are no infallible interpreters of truth, including religion and literature, nourishes the spirit of philosophy. Such a statement sets aside all forms of ideological dogmatism and fundamentalism is inherently flawed.[41]

When applied to the biblical text, this understanding moves against viewing it as sacred or authoritative. The word has a privileged status in biblical texts, but not in the sense that it is frozen. This view of the text leads to a desacralization of the text. Something revealing occurs as part of the historical process of engaging the text. We join the direction of the world of the biblical text in its pointing us to God, to the symbol of sacrificial love and a love stronger than death in the Christ, opening biblical faith to that of an ultimate concern receiving the power of a word of interpretation, the feeling of absolute dependence resulting from a response to the new possibilities opened by encounter with the world of the text, and an unconditional trust or hope that relies upon renewed interpretation of the sign-events of the liberation from Egypt and the resurrection of Jesus.[42]

If we think of human existence in a shared world and culture as a drama, it might help us understand better what it means to engage in meaningful or good action. Human existence has complications, tensions, catastrophes, and reconciliations like what we find in drama and literature. Dramatic theory ponders what it means to have proficient writing, directing, characters, and plot. The play has elements of illusion and seriousness, frivolous and profound. The deterministic element of the play is the script. Yet, how the director interprets the script and how actors present it to an audience that receives it involve a dimension of freedom as well. The character has a role within the play, a role the director and actor consider together. Identity is important in such matters. Drama illuminates existence. It involves creativity. 

The horizon of the play is the nature and meaning of human existence. We see all of them wrestling with the good. Our struggle with the good often involves the good slipping away from the characters in tragic and comic ways. Continuing this line of thinking, we accept the role we have on stage, with its limits, considering a sense of mission. Thus, without a sense of mission, the role becomes a source of alienation. Weighing what is good and bad, we live in response to the event of encounter. The encounter reveals our freedom to respond to the call toward the good or to turn away from it. We accept the call to the mission and therefore accept the healing that the limits of our role can bring. Our role is finite. We enter the drama of human existence as part of an unfinished play, and our role will end before the play ends. Accepting the role and the mission means accepting changes that such a response will bring. We shape our identity over the course of our lives. Human life always contains unfinished business, so it will always have a dimension of the tragic. However, interpretation of the meaning of a finite-temporal life will not be appropriate until the end of the totality of the play, which is the stage of world history. This will call for some humility and simplicity. 

Such a world stage may require the embrace of the Infinite and Eternal, which gave the finite and temporal space for discerning what is good and acting upon it. The latent and vague possibility of the finite and temporal connecting the fullness of the Infinite and Eternal gives hope for a meaningful whole. Yet, the tragic outcome of human existence remains possible. Death is a disruption of the human experience of time. If the drama that is our lives individually and as world history is to have anything other than a tragic outcome, it will need to come from the embrace of the Infinite and the Eternal.^[43]

The question of what kind of life is worth living is not one we can escape. Such an approach to questions regarding goodness moves us away from considering what we ought to do, the usual question in ethical and moral theory, and moves us toward what it is good to do, be and love. We might think of this as the fullness of a human life, the pattern of life, some sort of meaning (even if not ultimate), or some sort of connection with a greater reality or story. The reason is that as fragmented as our lives may appear, we strive for a narrative understanding of our lives. Orienting our lives to what is worthy is part of a journey, a quest, of which our lives become a narrative. We make such decisions within cultures or societies that vary in terms of their values. Weighing such cultural differences is an important process, although it will never have the certainty that an epistemological approach would require. Rather, narrative relies upon testimony regarding what it is like to live within a certain culture. It would focus on the story.[44]

3.    Shared Human World

In considering a phenomenology of the other person, we begin with an element of the aesthetic. We are in free play with others. Such enjoyment can bring us out of ourselves, inviting us to have a home in and with the world, but it can also reinforce our egocentricity, and thus to the feeling of being a stranger in the world, alienated and separated. Self-identity arises out of this dialectical tension. This interplay leads to the experience of presence and absence. The questioning glance of the other leads to distance and absence, while the friendly intent and welcome of the other leads to the experience of home. We can treat the other as another version of us or seek the use of the other for selfish purposes. The question raised by the other is how we can coexist and still leave our genuine otherness intact.

Personhood and sense of self arises out of relatedness. Implicit in the mutuality of the personal is a principle of personal growth and the rhythm of withdrawal and return. The original field of interpersonal relatedness, the withdrawal of the individual from the field into the self to develop identity and individuality, in the return of the individual to the interrelation of persons to enrich it with the fruits of individuality and to endow individuality with its fullness and significance, is central to this rhythm. This suggests that we are first acting and engaged agents of relatedness, and thus, thinking follows this activity, which may well be rational, even if our action arises out of feeling and faith more so than conceptualization. Our withdrawal from relatedness provides the opportunity to reflect rationally upon our activity and thereby either verify or amend that behavior. Rational activity is self-transcendent in that it is both free and it reacts to the drives, impulses, and instincts of the other. Our capacity to act irrationally is part of our human rational nature, which in turn implies an agent who is free, finite, and fallible. Still, irrationality is a subordinate aspect of reason. For rationality ought to predominate over irrationality, keeping the latter in potency, we should always act rationally rather than irrationally. We apply rationality to matters involving action/behavior and the practical, feeling/emotion, and the intellectual/conceptual. Science is the obvious mode of conceptual rationality, the aesthetic is the mode of rationality in feeling, and morality is the mode of rationality in action.[45]

We consider self and world from the standpoint of our shared world. As social beings, human beings form self in a field of social relations, a process that develops self-consciousness and subjectivity. Identity formation involves the formation of trust toward the outside world and development of emotional life. These reflections will lead us to a hermeneutics of the shared world, and thus, to an ontology of the shared world. The world human beings share has never been a natural world. Their world is nature as they have interpreted it, shaped it, experienced its limits, and felt frustrated in their efforts. The shared world is the world of human relations. Although other forms of animal life have societies, the specifically human form of common life is culture.

The social world is the place where the exocentric destiny of individuals becomes a reality and where they establish their identity. The process of the development of the ego takes place in the social world. Subjectivity develops even while oriented toward cultural environments. Identity formation occurs in stages and through expanding social environments as one ages. Identity makes reliability and accountability.[46]

Self-identification occurs as we modify our social identity and integrate it into our projects that will become our identity. Our identity is something we create and define during social interaction. Basic trust opens us to the world. Self-identification involves us in trustful self-opening to the world. Identifying oneself always requires courage, appealing to Tillich’s notion of the courage to be. We do not decide to have basic trust; basic trust emerges from a process, the opposite of which is mistrust and anxiety that will lead to deformation of identity. Basic trust directs itself toward the wholeness of the self. Such wholeness is the goal of our development and therefore has a temporal structure. Freedom is the real possibility of being myself. Personality arises out of social interaction. The self arises out of the mirror of the expectations of others. The self exists in transcendence of itself. Personal wholeness suggests transcendence of the self and the freedom involved in engaging the social setting. Transcendence beckons individuals out of themselves to receive recognition of worth and value that can only come from beyond them. The movement outward also means a return inward, throwing further light upon our lives. An important aspect of this lure toward transcendence is the fear that our lives will be wrapped up in the prison of everydayness, and self-transcendence, the movement outward toward the shared human world and culture, promises the recognition human beings crave. This movement outward de-centers the individual. Language itself commits people to an externally oriented mode of life that takes other people seriously. People form their identity and differentiate themselves from others through language. A heightened sense of community can occur through language, but this can also be deceptive. Language is a bridge between the person and the world. Language also expresses the strangeness, separation, and distance between persons through understanding and knowledge. If we are open to it, even the strangeness of the other can be a source of wisdom. Vocation and the projects to which it commits also commits us to an externally oriented mode of life as it takes other people and other groups seriously. “We are” is the fundamental affirmation of our existence.

This transcendent relation frees us to be critically independent to any given social relation. The self-assertion of the individual against others and society may be the expression of a call to a more perfect fulfillment of the human destination to community. The person is not at the disposition of others.[47] The center or identity of any finite being is outside of itself. Individual finite things are always in community and thus experience elevation beyond what they would be as isolated individuals. We see this idea weakly in subatomic particles and in the community of cells. However, we see it strongly in the formation of consciousness. The future formation of self has its root in present encounters. In our joy, love, and care, the attention we give to the world around us will be crucial elements in the formation of self. The self is always on the way to wholeness. We are not now, what we shall be. Any experience of meaning and wholeness anticipates the wholeness that is ahead. Such anticipatory moments we humbly receive as gifts. Wholeness acknowledges the transcendent in the sense of the web of social life we encounter. Our self-transcendence is toward something rather than nothing.^[48] That movement is toward finding it within ourselves to recognize the value of the persons and institutions that are part of our experience and to experience recognition from the persons and institutions of which we are a part. We owe a debt to our destiny. However, we may well need to broaden this notion to include our debt to the Infinite and Eternal.^[49]

We could look at all this from the standpoint of human development. We have a symbiotic relation to life before we develop a difference between self and world. This difference will lead us to reflect upon a reliable basis of life in which we can put our trust. While we may give our trust to mother and then to father, we will need to learn trust while differentiating self from world and developing our identity. As we develop trust in reliable relationships, we engage in healthy and open relations with the world rather than taking flight from it. Every stage of human development involves acquiring a new actualization of that trustful self-opening to the world. Such decisions will require courage. Closing oneself off from such basic trust will lead to closing oneself from the world. Yet, openness to the world is basic to the formation of the self. Such a commitment involves love toward that which one places trust. Such considerations provide the basis for the religious commitment.^[50]

Learning the expectations of others is an important part of our maturing toward wholeness. This process begins early in our lives. Parents give us unconditional love as infants. As we mature through the first couple of years of life, they slowly expect us to accomplish certain simple things. Learning such expectations of others in this intimate setting prepares us for the expanding expectations others will bring into our lives. This will occur through teachers, religious organizations, and other settings. Slowly, we learn that culture has influenced us far more than we knew. The point is that the social matrix of the development of these expectations is natural and healthy. To continue to desire others to love us, regardless of our behavior, is the desire of an infant. As we mature, we understand that our words and deeds influence how they interact with us. If we want to receive love from others, part of our job as responsible agents of our lives is to become lovable. We need to learn to develop character and virtue for such lovable qualities to emerge.^[51]

Much exploration into the sociality of human beings suggests that human beings advance themselves individually as they learn to cooperate. As much as we struggle with ambition, learning to cooperate has been an important part of human societies. In fact, wisdom involves learning the appropriate place in our interactions for listening to divinely oriented ambition, learning the self-destructive dimension of ambition, and even learning the self-destructive dimension of serving. For example, ancient societies could be brutal. Yet, prehistoric men and women helped each other more than they harmed each other. Of course, they had some enlightened self-interest in doing so, but they did so, nonetheless. In all human societies, some individuals will come out ahead by harming others. Yet, most of the time, one maximizes personal good fortune by cooperating with others. Pre-historic human beings banded together for mutual aid. Hostile and destructive societies, such as Spartans or the Nazis, disappear while cooperative societies flourish. One could argue that good people do not finish last. Rather, they do better than bad people do. Most human interactions are win-win results, both parties coming out ahead. Of course, war is a “game” in which one party wins and the other loses, but most human interactions are not like that. The orientation of human beings is toward increasingly complex forms of social organization, thus moving away from imperial domination and war by the progressive adoption of interactions that provide the potential for win-win results. In fact, one could argue that the spread of global commerce brings a growing recognition of a common humanity.  One cannot do business with a people while executing them.^[52]

Anthropology of Disproportion Discovered in Affective life

            Human life is out of proportion. Life as experienced and lived lacks symmetry or proper relation. Human life is out of balance. This exploration will show why the question of who we are, the striving for self-identity, is so difficult for us. We need to consider what this disproportion of human life means for philosophical anthropology. This discussion will introduce terms that will be important for a discussion of the formation of the self, the rise of conscience, and the direction of the ethical. It will also anticipate a discussion of the sacred as reflected in the self in the notions of sin, guilt, and evil.

The first stage of an anthropology of disproportion is the passage between our finitude and infinite possibility. “Infinite” is the way in which we express our awareness of the interconnected quality of reality. Individual things participate in this wholeness, and this participation is what we mean by “Infinite.”^[53] Human beings desire the truth in the sense of wholeness of life, the good in the sense of what we owe to the world we inhabit and to other beings like us, and the beautiful in the sense of profound aesthetic experience. We express this desire in our personal lives in how we think and live. We also express the desire in the institutions we build. Behind such desires and the expressions in personal and corporate life is a type of love for life. We want to see the flourishing of life in general and of human life in particular. Each of these desires has a darkness as well, of course, and we will need to explore that darkness. Such is the nature of the dignity and misery of humanity. We have the capacity to turn that which is our gift into a curse we inflict upon self and others. Our experience, as reflected in philosophy and psychology, discloses both the dignity and misery of humanity. Our experience reveals both our quest for wholeness and the brokenness that plagues our personal and corporate lives. Our human experience of openness to our world, which shows itself in our capacity to learn across time to improve the human condition, meets its counterpoint in our tendency to close ourselves off from world. The infinite horizon of life meets the resistance within us to close off questions and think we have reached the end of such explorations. 

The second stage of an anthropology of disproportion involves the power of human knowing, especially as it allows us to reflect upon the human characteristics of action and feeling. My body opens me to the world by everything it can do. The world is a correlate to my existence. Human receptivity constitutes the openness of this finite one to the world. Our primary relation to the world is to receive. Such receptivity consists in our openness to the world. 

            The third stage of an anthropology of disproportion is the passage from the theoretical to the practical, from a theory of knowledge to a theory of will, from “I think” to “I will, I desire, I can.” Our philosophical reflection leaves the abstract, bare, and empty, and becomes practical in dealing with limitation of our lifeworld, dealing with values and counter-values, and thus make it difficult. The allure of a total philosophical reflection on the lifeworld is strong but deceptive, but we need to be willing to linger between what is and that total vision. 

First, character is how we will arrive at a practical finitude that we can understand based on the notion of perspective. All the aspects of finitude can be regrouped under the idea of finite perspective. By beginning with the affective perspective, we begin with things that appear interesting to me, through which we grasp the lovable, the attractive, the hateful, and the repulsive, which are the anticipatory stages of the human project. In this case, desire brings clarity, for it brings intentionality that arises out of a lack of and becomes a drive toward, suggesting the elective character of desire. Desire illuminates its aim through the representation and elucidation of the absent thing, as well as the obstacles that block its attainment. It anticipates pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, in being joined to or separated from the object of desire. To find oneself in a certain mood is to feel one’s individuality as inexpressible and incommunicable. Every desire for an object involves a feeling, love, and choice, of oneself. The practical perspective leads recognizes that habit fixes our tastes and aptitudes and shrinks our field of availability, but that such hardening of life bids us to look for the new mode of finitude intermingled with the spontaneity of life and will. Character arises out of perspective, desire, the choice of self, and habit. Character is the finite openness of my existence to the life-world. Character is a limitation. In one sense, nothing human is foreign to me. I am capable of every virtue and every vice. Character is how I see humanity from somewhere, from a certain angle, and a partial wholeness of the life-world. In this sense, character does not change. No spiritual movement or radical conversion will not make us into different individuals, even if our lives may be oriented by a new constellation of fixed stars. 

Second, happiness is how we will arrive at a practical infinitude that we can understand based the notion of meaning. All the aspects of infinitude can be regrouped under the idea of meaning. A disproportion arises between character and happiness. A theoretical concept of meaning considers the supreme good, that for whose sake everything else is done. Happiness is a termination of destiny and not an end of desire. The encounters of our life that are most worthy of being called events indicate the direction of happiness. Happiness removes obstacles and uncovers a vast landscape of existence, an excess of meaning. Happiness directs me toward the very thing that reason demands.

Third, the constitution of the person by means of the moral feeling of respect is how we will arrive at the practical mediation that extends the mediation of the imagination. Respect is the fragile synthesis that constitutes the form of the person. The synthesis of happiness and character is found in the person, first of oneself and then of others. The forming of person is a life-long project. Human fragility arises again, which will lead to a phenomenology of fallibility. I set before me the formation of me as a person, and this becomes my project. This project is the formation of my humanity. Desire is directed toward happiness as a totality of meaning and contentment. The project of forming a person is an end that at the same time is an existence. The self is given as an intention. Being human, learning to be human, is a path of treating oneself and others as human. The person is the synthesis of reason and existence, of end and of presence. All this suggests the fragile experience of forming a person. An ethical vision of the world presupposes a fallen sensibility of humanity. This suggests a loss of innocence that we can name as a lapse, a loss, or a fall. I am divided against myself, a disproportion that underlies the practical existence of human beings. The structure of fallibility makes this possible. Respect is rooted in a desire for rationality. 

All this will lead to a new analysis that shows the fragility of this practical mediation of respect for which the person is the correlative. An important aspect of this philosophical reflection is that myth in religion anticipates a philosophical reflection on the misery of humanity. 

A question we must face is that of a completion of the meditation on disproportion in the dimension of feeling. If feeling manifests aims, it adds a new dimension to human reality. Feeling manifests its meaning by contrast with the work of knowing, for its function is to interiorize the reality of the lifeworld we experience. Feeling divides in two through the mode of inner conflict. The reflection on disproportion comes to center itself on passion, which situates itself between desire and reason and whose specific desire is Eros. The disproportion of feeling is that of vital or sensuous desire and intellectual love, which we might call spiritual joy. The heart feels the discrepancy. A psychology of feeling is blind without the philosophy of reason. The infinitude of feeling gains clarity in a philosophy of discourse. The heart is the realm of the interpersonal schemata of being-with as well as the super-personal schemata of being-for and the intention of being-in, which would express itself as greed without the polarity of Care, which is the openness or availability to the lifeworld. Feeling anticipates more than it gives, it promises more than gives an actual possession. Mood is the proper designation of such feeling. Schematized as delight, joy, exultation, serenity, they have formless character that denotes feeling and denotes the openness of the human being to the lifeworld. Heidegger focused upon the mood of anguish, the underside of absence and distance, while neglecting the power of beatitude and joy in and through anguish. In this gap we are confronted with the disproportion in the dimension of feeling and the source of human affective fragility. 

A trilogy of passion (Kant, Anthropology) shows how passion shows itself. 1) In the passion for possession or having. Having adheres to me through feeling. We can see the disproportion of the innocent quest for having, by which the “I” constitutes itself by designating that which is mine, with greed, avarice, envy, and so on. The mediation of the “we” and the “our,” the “I” joins itself to a “mine.” 2) The passion of domination or power shows itself in work and economic arrangements under the reflection of the human spirit we find in political realm. Feeling becomes human by making itself coincide with the objects of high order in which human relations crystallize. 3) The passion for honor or esteem is the quest for worth in the eyes of another. The deranging passion is vanity and pretension. The self is constituted at the limits of economic and the political spheres, and at the outer bounds of those feelings of belong to a We, and of devotion an Idea wherein we distinguish a kind of affective schematization of philosophic Eros. In the quest for esteem is a desire to exist through the favor of the recognition of another.  The fragility of this experience is that the esteem that establishes it is merely opinion.  An esteem experienced in a belief is what can err more than anything. Because one believes it, the worth of the self may be sham, feigned, or alleged. It also may be neglected, contested, disputed, as well as scorned, belittled, choked back, and humiliated. The lack of esteem may be offset by a self-overestimation or by a deprecation of others and their values. Esteem is incredibly fragile and easy to wound. 

We have been pursuing disproportion through knowing, acting, and feeling, this last revealing human fragility. The heart is what is restless in me. When will I have enough? When will I adequately ground my authority? When will another sufficiently appreciate and recognize me? The universal function of feeling is to bind together. It connects what knowledge divides. Feeling binds me to things, to others, and to self. Knowing sets a world over against me, while feeling unites intentionality to the affection through which I feel myself existing. It binds me to things, to beings, to being. Whereas the whole movement of objectification tends to set a world over against me, feeling unites the intentionality, which throws me out of myself, the affection through which I feel myself existing. Quite simply, the desire of desire has no end. 

 

Conscience and the Sacred

To hold conscience to be the place of an original form of the dialectic between selfhood and otherness is an enterprise fraught with difficulties. We need to move toward a phenomenology of the sacred. Such a phenomenology would be different from the absolute knowledge toward which the Hegelian phenomenology progresses. The reason such absolute knowledge is not possible is the problem of evil.[54]

We will need to be alert to the use of metaphors like that of voice and the call, as well as the suspicion of good or bad conscience. The meaningful life is response to the call of being. It suggests that the interaction of self and other urge or obligate us to act or behave in certain ways. The call of conscience is from self and from others. Conviction arises in being enjoined, urged, or obligated to live well with and for others in just institutions and to esteem oneself as the bearer of this wish. Conscience becomes part of the structure of being human. To hear this call, we need to be silent and listen to both self and to others. I am responsible for what I am because I am that kind of being free to accept or reject my possibilities. The authentic self is with others and in the world, yet authentic living suggests a clear awareness of the self as a self and I accept responsibility for this unique life I lead, avoiding slavery to the other dominated self. Moralism and conventional morality have their problem here. If we allow the social norms of the group to which we belong to absorb us to the point where we no longer hear the specific call issued to us, then we have surrendered decisions regarding whom we shall be to others. In judgment, the moralist refuses to offer a confession of his or her own sins and thus becomes a hypocrite. The only way out of the dilemma is for the moralist to accept his or her oneness with the one judged. The moralist breaks the hardness of his or her heart. The moralist renounces the divisiveness and hardness of heart contained in the act of judging. He or she opens the path toward reconciliation through forgiveness. The world of reconciliation is the realm of the actual destiny of humanity and its urge toward what is true and good. In fact, the best way to view God is as the one who reconciles antagonists. The problems with moralism are deep, and they in fact are the problem the Apostle Paul had with the notion of Law. However, if all we do is unmask moralism, we have not finished the task of ethics. We need to restore ethics and morality to their proper ontological place.

This notion of calling opens the possibility of that an authentic life that arises from morally conscientious individuality. Beyond moralism is an authentic and moral engagement with others, a response to the call of conscience that we hear from that engagement. This moral posture provides corrective for inauthentic selfhood and losing oneself in the anonymous other. Morally conscientious individuals lift themselves above the prevailing expectations of the group to do justice to the other person considering a higher standard than what anonymous others find respectable. Morally conscientious individuals do not drift along impelled by the social tides. They subject their prejudices and public opinion alike to critical scrutiny. Authentic life may open the possibility of authentic co-existence. Authentic individuality opens one up to others in a new way and makes liberating solicitude possible. A relation of authentic care in which one can help others become transparent to themselves in their care and to become free for it. Moral conscience separates one from anonymous others. It also enables the individual to treat others as ends in themselves beyond the horizon of their public roles and situations.  Authentic life, understood in this way, does not isolate the individual from others. Crucial to genuine moral conscience is the refusal to lose oneself in the dictates of the anonymous other. It involves willingness to take one’s stand against what is fashionable, to criticize public opinion for the sake of the community, to judge what is right beyond the horizon of the taken for granted. That one thinks for oneself does not guarantee wisdom. However, the habit of critical reflection puts an obstacle in the way of banal evil. The presence of moral conscience attests to authentic individuation and freedom.

We will need to expand our notion of the debt we owe each other. The non-identity that makes itself felt in guilt involves inauthenticity (Heidegger) expands into disruption of the social order. The superego (Freud) as conscience receives its content from social norms and guilt involves transgression of those norms. Conscience has a social matrix that develops in the context of social relations. Such demands provide the context for a properly moral determination. Guilt is a debt, a responsibility for something.  Thus, we are the ones responsible for having a debt.  We owe something to others.  This guilt comes before our awareness of it. We do not have to list our failures or omissions. We simply are guilty. Conscience and guilt expose authentic self-hood and the basis of freedom. The consciousness of guilt presents itself as a heightened expression of the alienation of the ego from itself. The self who experiences guilt shows one as capable of having others hold that self responsible. Guilt occurs in a quite determinate objective situation, a transgression of a norm. One can also experience neurotic guilt that would be indeterminate. It would be the result, according to Freud, of an excessively strict superego. Guilt presupposes an authority, whether legal or moral. I am guilty, and in that awareness, I have a new decision to make. I can deny my guilt to myself. I can point to external causes that determined my action. I can even deny that any action is free, and therefore no one is ever guilty. Such decisions toward guilt lead me to inauthentic living. I avoid awareness of self. I can also decide to admit my guilt, recognize my responsibility for the action and that I deserve the censure that goes with it. If I seek a life free of the possibility of guilt, I have fled to my other-dominated self. When I confront my guilt, I am an authentic or true self. The authentic self is one willing to be open to the calls of conscience. Conscience and guilt move us toward respect for the dignity and worth of others. To alleviate guilt too quickly betrays a loss of that respect and dignity.

The struggle between actualizing of our true self and finding a reliable basis for trust on the one hand with our anxiety and alienation from the world on the other, reveals a facet of human life that calls for our attention. 

Conscience is one facet of human life that arises out of this struggle. Conscience shows the conflicts between individuals and social forms and expectations. Conscience reveals shame and guilt. It also reveals the call to our potential or possibility. Such a call to action from the conscience presupposes a sense of responsibility for our lives. Our calling is toward authentically living our lives, while guilt reveals our failure to live authentically. Conscience arises out of our social connections, while maintaining independence from the social world.^[55] Conscience is awareness of fault, especially as we fall away from our true self and lose the self in the crowd. Guilt is awareness of obligation and our failure to fulfill the obligation. Guilt is the result of our anxious preoccupation with self, for we have failed to respond to the call toward the authenticity of self. Guilt is a specialized feeling proper when one has transgressed an established norm. The concept of conscience had its origin in the experience of guilt. Being guilty is an expression of an ought, the content of which is the authenticity of self. Guilt as transgression becomes intelligible in this sense. The concept of action presupposes the concept of responsibility. The capacity for action has its ground in the call to authentic selfhood.

Further, the emergence of self and the rise of conscience suggest that we are agents of our lives and are therefore free to accept or reject the circumstances of our lives. As we act, we make ourselves. We accept responsibility for our act. Guilt is our failure to be the true self that would bind us in a healthy way to the community. The rupture between the community and us gives birth to anger and sorrow. The path to healing of this relation involves a discussion of repentance and forgiveness, which are important to the formation of the anticipated true self.^[56] Despair can lead to isolation while joy can unite us to the community.

The feeling of guilt that arises in conscience is the foundation of ethics. Ethics and morality emerge from an understanding of guilt. Guilt is a part of affective life that reflects the tension between identity and nonidentity. Guilt is a specialized feeling proper when one has transgressed an established norm. The concept of conscience had its origin in the experience of guilt. 

Conscience has a special place because in it is the whole of life vaguely present in the form of a positive or depressed mood, but at the same time, the ego of the individual becomes an object of consciousness as subject of deeds or omission concerning which the judgment of conscience declares it blameworthy. Conscience forms a bridge from the feeling of the self to self-consciousness in the narrower sense of an explicit apprehension and knowledge of the self. As a feeling, it precedes the incomplete retrieval by rational reflection of the meaningful interrelationships that ground the judgment of conscience.

If we continue with our move toward a phenomenology of the sacred reflected in the self, confession expresses the emotion of guilt in relation to evil. Confession brings fault to light in speech. We travel this path by re-enacting in ourselves the confession of human sin and evil that occurs in the religious consciousness. The reason that it is the most inarticulate expression of the confession of evil, and therefore, it is of philosophic interest. The experience of which the penitent makes confession is a blind experience embedded in the matrix of emotion, fear, and anguish. Confession expresses the emotion that without it would be shut within in itself. Language is the light of the emotions. Through confession the consciousness of fault is brought into the light of speech. The confession of sin reveals several layers of experience. Feeling of guilt points to the experience of sin, which includes all human beings and indicates the real situation of humanity before God, whether individuals know it or not. The original sense of sin is that of defilement, conceived of as a stain or blemish that infects human beings from the outside. The acknowledgement in the confession of sin is an experience of being oneself while also alienated form oneself. Sin is an alienation from oneself, an experience that is more astonishing, disconcerting, and scandalous than the spectacle of nature. Guilt, defilement, and sin is the living experience of fault put into language. Guilt arises as we focus upon a segment of truth, closing off ourselves from truth in its wholeness. Yet, this language, as primitive and as devoid of myth as it may be, is already symbolic language. The consciousness of self constitutes itself through symbolism. The elementary language of confession will be an important contribution to a philosophy of human fault. 

The experience of conscience as a response to a call, the suspicion inherent in the feeling of a good or bad conscience, the obligation or debt we owe to others as well as to oneself to live a meaningful and authentic life, the guilt involved in our failure to respond to the call or satisfy the debt we owe, is the foundation of ethical and moral reflection.

Given our spatial-temporality reality, even long-standing moral systems within religion undergo change regarding the content of a moral or ethical system. “Why should I be moral?” Such a question arises from one who either does not understand morality or does not care to be moral in their relation to others. We best avoid one who does not care to be moral. 

The origin of evil and wickedness is in the passage from the structure of human finitude to actual living through decisions of the will. The structure of human finitude includes the possibility of fall. Its irrational character means that only symbolic language makes it accessible. We can no longer bracket the notion of fallibility to develop a philosophy of the will. The human situation is characterized by the disproportion in the life of a being that is finite and oriented to an infinite destiny.[57]

4.    Phenomenology of the Sacred as Reflected in the Self

From innocence to fault: the Contribution of Religious Texts

We need to reconsider this discussion of philosophical anthropology when we introduce the notion of human fault. Religious texts are suited for this discussion because they expose human feeling regarding the shared experience of the world to reflection. Philosophy can think too much like science and form the illusion that human life is rationally ordered. It can ignore the significance of feeling, the sense of alienation from and attachment to, the shared human experience of the world.

We best begin with a philosophical reflection on myth in religion, for this allows us to consider the passage from innocence to fault. The history of religions contains myths of fall, chaos, exile, and divine blinding. The philosopher cannot immediately insert them into philosophical discourse. Exegeting such myths prepares them for an insertion into human self-knowledge. 

            The symbol gives thought. Any notion of guilt, for example, needs to pass through an encounter with psychoanalysis, criminology, and political philosophy. The theme of alienation we find in Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx is connected to the accusation made by the prophets of Israel. If thought starting from symbols unfolds by its encounter with these modern disciplines, philosophical discourse needs to lead to the speculative equivalent of the mythical themes of fall, exile, chaos, and tragic blinding, the notion of a free will that is bound and finds itself already bound. Such will be the theme that results in the philosophical consideration that the symbol gives to thought. 

This philosophy begins with belief and through reflection leads to knowledge. It is nourished on the fullness of language. Language and rationality are important to human existence and give humanity a distinct advantage over other creatures. Our possession of a rich system of consciousness, intelligence, capacity for language, capacity for extremely fine perceptual discriminations, capacity for rational thought, are all biological phenomena. To put a finer point on it, as Charles Taylor put it, the desire for cosmic connection, for an experience of joy, significance, and inspiration, suggests a higher and deeper than the everyday world around us. It hints that there is something more, that a well-lived human life is more than the abundance of the things one possesses. Such an approach opens the door for a religious conversation, although it cannot prove such a dimension to reality exists. The scientist who wants to close that door would not be pleased. This does away with the concern for finding a starting point for philosophy. It recognizes the narrow perspective of modern science and technology as forgetting something important about humanity and the sacred. Some persons will find the flatten and purposeless nature of the world described by science and technology as enough. For such persons, all we need to know in ontology is that atoms and cells exist. Such a naturalist and materialist view of ontology assumes that science is the only arbiter of truth. However, there are good reasons to think its precise, univocal, and technical language needs to be recharged with the fullness of language. The symbol gives, but what it gives is something to think about.[58]

The myth of the fall is the matrix of all subsequent speculations concerning the origin of evil in human freedom. The exegesis of this myth brings out a tension between two significations. Evil comes into the world as far as humanity posits it. However, to it must be added the powerful myths of chaos, tragic blinding, and of the exiled soul. Thus, humanity posits evil because humanity yields to the siege of the Adversary. 

            The task of philosophic reflection is to recapture the symbolism of evil, to extend these reflections into all the domains of human consciousness. What the symbolism of evil gives to thought concerns the grandeur and limitation of any ethical vision of the world. Humanity is as much a victim as it is guilty.

            Philosophical reflection considers the concept of fallibility as part of the innermost structure of human reality. To be clear, this way of considering the human condition allows us to avoid placing humanity in a fanciful domain, an intermediary place, such as between being and nothingness, between angels and animals. This suggests that humanity is the only being so unstable in ontological constitution that it is capable of being both greater and lesser than itself. The value of looking at humanity this way is that the existing individual is intermediate within oneself. 

The fallibility of the self shows itself in affective life, in alienation, and in the struggle between identity and non-identity. This fallibility reveals the ways in which humanity brings misery upon itself. 

To reflect upon the affective life, what can be difficult to appreciate is how dependent persons are upon the social world. Humanity is dependent on the social and intellectual traditions in which individuals find themselves, even where such social institutions turn against them. Human beings are dependent on what happens to them from day to day and from hour to hour without their cooperation. Human beings are dependent on the people who are with them, and upon everything given through them. This ambiguous and fragile heart represents the entire middle region of the affective life between the vital affections and the rational or spiritual affections, the transition between living and thinking. Yet, given human fallibility and fragility, every reconciliation is despite evil and is a thanks to something good arising out of evil, and confidence that something better will emerge.

If the being of humans has a connection to unfulfilled destiny, alienation will occur only in separation from this destiny. To write of fallibility is to say that the limitation peculiar to a being who does not coincide with oneself is the primordial weakness from which evil arises. The growing complexity of modernization, connected as it is with industrialization and bureaucratization, has undermined the public influence of all those agencies and authorities. The danger is that the role of such public institutions in assisting individuals to establish meaning has diminished, leading to a sense of homelessness. Social homelessness has become metaphysical in that one feels homeless in the cosmos, given the scientific conclusion of the random, meaningless, and purposeless universe in which life on this planet has evolved. All this suggests a lack in a secular and scientific theory. The basis of alienation in modern society is not economic, despite the constant barrage of an ideology of class, race, and gender separation, which is a purposeful misdirection from the problem with which secularity confronts humanity, but a manifestation of religious lack and undernourishment.[59] The alienation experienced by individuals living in modern, technologically robust society, results in the emptiness of the implicit promise of secularity, science, and technology to provide what one needs for human flourishing. 

The alienation caused by secularity throws such individuals back upon their egos and reduces them to their egos. They remove themselves from their true selves and question their identity. The process of alienation may begin as a separation from a specified person or group, but it leads to a generalized state of estrangement and apartness in which the ego falls back upon itself. This indeterminacy is essential to the feeling of self-alienation. The awareness of the social nature of the rise of our sense of self and individuality is a significant direction of philosophic and psychological reflection since the Enlightenment.[60] Human destiny as exocentric or open to the world carries with it the awareness leads of humanity as a broken presence and therefore the ambiguous nature of human behavior in the world. Human beings could accept their responsibility in answering the question of themselves, their question as to the totality of the world, their question of human destiny, and the operation of mastery over nature, by expanding their self-interest to include responsibility for others and for nature. Yet, exploitation and oppression to the advantage of private self-interest is another direction of human behavior. Exocentricity continues to constitute the ego, but its presence to the other now becomes a means for it to assert itself in its difference from the other. Presence to the other becomes a means by which the ego can dominate the other and assert itself by way of this domination. When the setting of the ego against the other becomes total and everything else becomes a means to the self-assertion of the ego, the break of the ego from itself and its exocentricity becomes acute. The ego endeavors to implement this arrogant claim in its relation to the world. In all of this, the ego distorts its own makeup. The ego does all of this, when it could find its unity in the exercise of its exocentric destiny and allowing its particularity to be canceled out and rediscovered at a higher level in the process. In its anticipation of things and in its reaching out to happiness, the finite ego is constantly taking as definitive reality what is in fact only a finite perspective.  At that point, it becomes the expression of human fault. Egocentricity makes it appearance determines the whole way in which people experience the world. This relatedness of everything to the ego is in the form of self love. All this suggests again that human brokenness is part of the natural condition of human existence.

The feeling of personal nonidentity means that the identity that is lacking is not grasped; for this reason, the nonidentity too remains vague. While human beings share with other animal life a self-centered organization of their lives, it also has an other-centered organization of life that has the effect of making the discovery of self-identity a journey toward others. This natural and structural non-identity of the self is not yet evil, but points to the human fallibility of the human condition, thereby modifying the notion that evil originates in an act of human freedom. 

One common way we observe the struggle with identity in the way we over-identify with anything external to us. 

One can over-identify oneself through feeling with the anonymous other of any group with which one identifies, losing oneself in the dictates of the group. This might happen through the warmth of fellowship with the group, but it might also happen through the disgust or hate one has for a group. In either case, feeling has turned the other into an absolute. 

We can also over-identify with the results of our thinking, believing the content of our knowledge has become absolute. We need to re-consider our presumed love of truth and knowledge. A sign of health in us is that we search for the truth. The opposite is also true. We human beings want to avoid people or events that deceive us. We do not want the deception of lies, distortions, and half-truths. A sign of sickness in us as human beings is that we try to avoid, distort or manipulate the truth. After I have shirked for a long time the recognition of a painful truth, I can find a real consolation in opening my mind to it. By opening my mind to the truth that hurts me, I have put an end to a long and exhausting inner struggle.[61]  The opposition to our natural striving for the true is the countervailing natural tendency to think we have reached the end of our explorations of the true. As important as knowing may be, knowledge has a dark side. It makes us prideful. Devotion to knowledge can make us forget that knowledge is not everything. Human knowledge is always partial. We are not completely in the dark, but we are in twilight. The things that matter to a human life are beyond what we can know. We need to discover who we are. Guilt arises as we focus upon a segment of truth, closing off ourselves from truth in its wholeness. 

The primary challenge to what I offer here is the contemporary use of ideology. Ideology is a fundamental closure in face of the wholeness of reality. It converts a partial aspect of reality into an absolute space that calls people to practical and usually political action. It seeks to determine the norm for the whole life of a society. It offers the appearance of a scientific interpretation of reality in the service of a practical and social orientation that it intends to legitimate. Religions need to guard themselves from becoming a tool of an ideology, for genuine religion serves a higher purpose. It cannot become the official bearer of specific imperatives contained in differing ideological formulations. A religion will tolerate, therefore, various political approaches to governance precisely because it refuses to turn a finite interpretation of reality into the infinite.^[62] At its best, religion in our secular historical setting is not a political ideology. Out of regard for their unique role in directing people to ultimate concern, to all-embracing reality, and to infinite disclosure, they affirm the relativity of all political agendas. They must refuse commitment to an ideology.^[63] Some religions have a belief system that requires political and cultural acceptance of their religious system, such as orthodox Judaism, political Islam, or Hinduism. Such belief systems are not compatible with secular, democratic, and scientific culture. Any ideology or belief system can blind one to the way things truly are in the world. One can even develop a fantasy ideology that exists only within the bubble created by true believers.

We can over-identify with what we do, the classic example being with a profession, where self-identity is wrapped into work so deeply that one cannot imagine life apart from work. In contrast, the quest for self-identity involves heeding the call of the unique person we are and living authentically and well by satisfying the debt we owe to self and to others. The practical result is that we hold ourselves loosely and not take ourselves quite so seriously. We can hold respectful conversation with those who disagree with us without trying to convince them they are wrong, accept those who have chosen other groups with which to identify themselves while recognizing the shortcomings of our group, and we can reach the stage where we let go of our chosen profession and continue to live well and happily.

Here is the point. Human beings who are trying to find their identity have a primary concern with themselves. They lack their authentic identity. When human beings who are concerned about themselves think that they come closest to their own identity through this kind of preoccupation with themselves, then they are alienated form their true destiny and their true selves. The awareness of alienation can lead to many efforts to overcome it. However, no human action can alter the condition of alienation if what they consider to constitute their alienation is not the think that really makes them alienated. A false identification of the source of alienation that leads to changed behavior will lead to increased alienation.

The symbols of evil in religion teach us something decisive about the passage from a phenomenology of spirit is a phenomenology of the sacred. The fragility of humanity is something that ought to obvious, given the capacity of humanity for evil. 

To take the phenomenology of the sacred as reflected in the self a step further, every field of horizon tends to transform into an object. We tend to transform the Infinite into the finite, the Eternal into the temporal, in a way that the symbol loses its power to move us beyond itself and thereby becomes something we can manage. The origin of false consciousness is this illusion, the social lies, the vital lies, and the return of the repressed. Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and Feuerbach, are already partial and rivals in describing this illusion. 

From Fallibility to Fault

We have been moving toward an understanding of humanity as fallible, which means that the possibility of moral evil is inherent in the constitution of humanity. This possibility does not exist simply because human beings are finite (Leibniz), nor does it exist simply because of human weakness of bridging the gap between the possible and the real. The philosophical anthropology elucidated thus far has stopped short of taking the leap from fallibility to recognizing that humanity has already fallen. To catch sight of this leap we will need to explore the symbolism of evil. Fragility is the capacity for evil. To say that humanity is fallible is to say that the limitation peculiar to the human being, who does not coincide with oneself, is the primordial weakness from which evil arises. Evil arises from this weakness only because it is posited, a paradox we must explore.

I want to explore three dimensions of symbolism.

First is the cosmic dimension of nature (Eliade). This symbolism expresses the opposition between the sacred and profane. The manifestation of the sacred is a hierophany, for it shows itself to us. The history of religions is the history of the manifestation of sacred realities. The manifestation is of something of a different order, a reality that does not belong to this profane world. The sacred tree or stone is worshipped because the objects show something that is no longer a stone or tree, but a sacred reality. By manifesting the sacred, an object becomes something else, while remaining itself. All nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The archaic society tends to live in the sacred or near consecrated objects. This is why destroying the city of an opponent, the center of its shrines, would throw the opponent into disarray. This involves an interruption in space. The experience of sacred space means the real unveils itself. Profane duration and sacred time also oppose each other. Time becomes a matter of intervals and liturgical festivals observed by rites, making time sacralized and sanctified, contrasting with the lack of significance of everydayness. Desacralized time leads to death. This death-like experience of history is the terror of history, the failure to situation historical moments, especially moments of suffering and evil, into a meaningful pattern will lead the modern into this terrifying experience. The cosmos is a divine creation that fills the world with sacredness. The world is a cosmos and not chaos. The sacred is equivalent to a power, a reality saturated with being. The religious person desires to participate in this reality and thereby experience saturation with this power. The religious person attempts to remain in a sacred universe. Individual life has a cosmic dimension and is therefore an open existence. The religious consciousness is open to the world, is never alone, and part of the world lives in the religious consciousness. Openness to the world enables religious people to know self through knowing the world, sharing in the sacredness of the cosmos. The religious consciousness is one that accepts the sacred as that which transcends this world but manifests itself in this world, sanctifying it and making it real. Life has a sacred origin. Human existence realizes its potential as it participates in this sacred reality.[64]

Such an experience of the world is different from one who lives in a desacralized world. Desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious people of modern societies. It makes it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of the religious person of archaic societies. For the modern consciousness, a physiological act, such as eating, sex, and so on, is an organic phenomenon. For the primitive culture, such an object can become a sacrament or communion with the sacred. The sacred and profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by human beings in the course of human history. The secular person has replaced religious tradition with plays, novels, movies, television mini-series, and poetry. The ability of such medium to produce symbols that allow the secular person to participate in them is a similar experience to most of human history that experienced the transcendent to derive such meaning. On a national level, rituals like saluting the flag, pilgrimages to national monuments, honoring past presidents, valuing the constitution, can have their parallels in the realm of religious faith traditions. Such writings form a type of philosophic dimension to the secular arrangements of society. The secular can have its aesthetic moments in its music and architecture at national shrines. Behind such experiences is something like what humanity has found in making personal faith commitments within the context of a religious tradition. Yet, the secular person may well experience his or her own terror in the face of a history that is full of suffering and evil which has no meaning or purpose.[65]

Israel represented a change in mythic awareness because the origin of the people is an historically contingent event of election. Further, the historical experiences of judgment and saving acts moved toward a promised future that would surpass all that hand gone before. With the turn away from the mythical orientation to primal time and the turning toward the future of God is eschatological expectation. The cultivation of worship in various centers in ancient Israel and eventually in the Temple, combined with the king were historicized. Israel brought them within its sense of salvation history. The institutions could become outdated in virtue of their integration into salvation history. Israel directed its eschatological hope to an unrestricted realization of the saving intention of these institutions that could fulfill their meaning only in broken fashion under the conditions of historical experience thus far. [66] The cosmic symbol contrasts with the primacy of proclamation in religions founded a revealed scripture. In contrast to such a homogeneous concept of manifestation and epiphany, Hebraic and Christian traditions give a privilege to the Word. [67]

In the sacred universe, the capacity for saying has its foundation on the capacity of the cosmos to signify something other than itself. It involves correspondence between earth and heaven. However, we need to be aware of the distinction between such a phenomenology of manifestation from the hermeneutic of proclamation. The Judeo-Christian tradition introduces a polarity into the religious sphere. This tradition focuses on the word of proclamation. In the Hebrew tradition, for example, the word outweighs the numinous. Hierophanies within the Hebraic domain withdraw to the extent that instruction through Torah overcomes any manifestation through an image. The ritual of Israel has its root in a historical vector that runs through the time of repetition and re-actualization rather than reactivation of the myth. The sacredness of nature withdraws before the word, the ethical element, and the historical element.[68]

The awareness of sacred places and rituals remind the individual of the interruption into the human world of the transcendent. Decisions by individuals occur within that context. Such interruptions of time and place allow one to participate in the transcendent.[69] Participation occurs through the power of the symbol. The symbol points beyond itself, in this case, the object of the tradition. One cannot access the symbol directly. The power of the symbol is that it opens up dimensions of reality to humanity that it cannot access by strict analysis. Aesthetic symbols are examples of the way in which the human spirit becomes open to experiences beyond pure analysis. The ultimate concern of the individual finds itself represented in symbols that evoke meaning and power. Such symbols can have an integrating power through elevating, quieting, stabilizing, and healing. Such symbols can also be disintegrating power through restlessness, depression, anxiety, and fanaticism. Another issue in the notion of the symbol is that of authenticity. The non-authentic symbol has lost its experiential basis. Attachment of the tradition to the symbol, rather than that to which it points, becomes idolatry. When the symbol is transparent, it becomes the means through which the ultimate concern reaches and therefore empowers the individual.[70]

Second is nocturnal dreams (Freud, Jung). Here is where an interaction with psychoanalysis can challenge us toward an insight regarding the symbolism of evil.[71] Psychoanalysis has a functional approach to symbols, it views the symbols as an illusion that deals with the harshness of life, which leads to understanding the symbols only in relation to their origin. It is a genetic explanation of religion. Religion is the reappearance of forgotten images of the human and individual past. This return of the forgotten, in the form of fantasy, is like the return of the repressed in the obsessional neurotic. In contrast, a phenomenology of religion will focus on the interpretation of its objects, it will explore the fullness of the symbols to reveal their truth, and it orients itself to a recollection of the sacred. We need to find our way toward the legitimacy of both approaches within their context. Exploring the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious might be one way to do this. Psychoanalysis is right in saying that we must arrive at consciousness, which demystifies the privileged status of consciousness. We do not know ourselves immediately, and the pretension that we do is a sign of our narcissism. Consciousness is a task in which we become increasingly conscious. The question becomes how the self emerges from childhood and moves through the successive stages of a human life. The best way to pursue this movement is not through the reductionism of Freud but through the phenomenology of Spirit we find in Hegel. This is a synthetic and progressive movement toward Spirit. Every figure receives its meaning from the one that follows it. The truth of one moment resides in the subsequent moment. Intelligibility proceeds from the end to the beginning, which supports the idea that consciousness is a task. The task of philosophic reflection is the work of deciphering symbols. For philosophy to discover itself, it must pass through an exploration of representations, actions, works, institutions, and monuments that are the works of the ego. The ego must lose itself in its works to find itself. Considering that reflection is a reappropriation of our effort to exist, it is practical and ethical rather than epistemological. Philosophy is ethical as far as it transforms alienation into freedom and beauty. We desire to be by means of works that testify to this effort and this desire to exist.  Such effort and desire are affirmed only by works whose meaning remains uncertain and revocable. We must conclude that the exploration of symbols immerses us in a hermeneutic conflict, for reflection both an archaeology and an eschatology of consciousness. Reflection requires a reductive and destructive interpretation because consciousness is at first a false consciousness. Yet, reflection also must also take the form of a restoration of the sacred. The meaning of consciousness is not in itself but in Spirit, in the succession of figures that draw consciousness forward away from itself. In contrast to Hegel, however, the end of reflection is only a promise, for the problem of evil will always form an obstruction for philosophical reflection.

Third is the poetic word (poetic imagination that plays with language). The poetic imagination is present in every authentic symbol. The philosophic significance becomes intelligible only if it relates to these three dimensions of symbols. 

Such symbols give rise to thought. The religious consciousness discloses relations in depth, the thickness and the transparency of present motivations. Symbols are signs. Every sign aims at something beyond itself, while the literal meaning constitutes the symbolic meaning and allegories are already interpretation. Symbols precede interpretation. Symbols are analogical meanings that form spontaneously and are significant. The symbolism of evil in humanity results in the philosophic concept of the servile will, and in turn represents the concept of fallibility. Philosophy tries to raise the symbolism of evil to the level of speculation. It does so through the symbols of defilement, guilt, and sin. The attempt here is to re-enact in imagination and sympathetically the experience of fault.

One example of the analogical meaning of a symbol is that an analogue of stain is the symbol of defilement. The conception of fault as defilement is a good example of this. The lateral relation focuses upon likeness and unlikeness with other ways of thought, the retroactive relation re-considers the past, which can lead to restoration of lost intermediaries and later suppression of distance.

Guilt also expresses itself through the indirect symbol of infection and lead to the notion of the servile will. Defilement is a power of darkness that needs to be taken way or expiated. Defilement is an objective event, for it infects by contact. This is why sexual expression is so prominent in discussions of purity legislation and in ethics. Purity and virginity have a deep connection for this reason. However, an ethics of justice and love will need to be pursued and then circle back to sexual expression. The point of expiation is to reaffirm order. Expiation aims at the restoration of the personal worth of the guilty person through a just punishment. Defilement is external to humanity and thereby freedom is taken captivity. Fearing defilement, humanity fears the negative judgment of the transcendent before which humanity cannot stand. This something that infects is a dread that anticipates the unleashing of avenging wrath. The infection is a symbol of the servile will in that it is a bad choice that binds itself. The seduction comes from the outside and is an affection of the self by the self, a self-infection, by which the act of binding oneself transforms into the state of being bound. Both symbols turn inward to express a freedom that enslaves itself. They are symbols when they reveal a situation that is centered in the relation of oneself to oneself. The symbol expresses the paradox of a captive free will. Deliverance from this situation is the central theme of salvation. Yet, to infect is not to destroy. It tarnishes but does not ruin. Regardless of how powerful and seductive evil may be, it cannot make humanity something other than itself. Evil may well be a radical evil (Kant), but it cannot undo primordial goodness. 

Punishment itself is a moment in the process of the cancellation of the stain or pollution of sin. In the judicial realm, punishment arises out of the idea of the free will and acknowledges the validity that one ought to be a person and respect others as persons. It acknowledges the contractual arrangement of the political order in which one lives. The violation of the rule is an injustice to which punishment responds. This punishment recognizes the criminal as a rational being who as acknowledged the ethical demand even while violating it. It separates the judging consciousness and the judged consciousness. This separation reveals the judging consciousness as hypocritical and hard, and it is the judging consciousness that must find its way out of the hell of punishment. This conflict can thus be resolved only as we move toward reconciliation and pardon. However, this means we are moving from the judicial sphere of the political order to the realm of morality and religion. This is why we cannot moralize or divinize punishment. Punishment sanctions distance between the judge and the judged, but transcending punishment leads to reconciliation and the language of forgiveness in religion or to community in the language of public morality. This leads to the law of superabundance (Kierkegaard). The late notion of covenant in ancient Israel can lead us to this law. The legal dimension of this covenant in Torah does not exhaust its meaning, as we can see in Hosea and Isaiah, as both prophets could refer to the conjugal metaphor for this covenant. The notion of justification in Paul reveals the absurd logic (Kierkegaard) of the gospel at this point. The law pretends to give life gives only death. The concept of law destroys itself and the whole cycle of notions that govern it: judgment, condemnation, and punishment, which are now under the sign of death. The logic of punishment contrasts with proclamation of the gospel, for the justice of God is manifested without the law (Rom 3:21). It is still justice, but the justice that gives life. Of anger, condemnation, and death we know that in Jesus Christ we have been delivered from them. When we have crossed the border into grace, we can look back on what we have been exempted from. This is the logic of superabundance. The logic of punishment is the logic of equivalence, for the wages of sin is death, but the logic of grace is a logic of surplus and excess shown in the folly of the cross. The gospel itself finishes the myth of punishment. Punishment is a memorial of a transcended past which does not have the status of illusion or that of an eternal law of truth. The theologies of vicarious satisfaction remain theologies of punishment rather than gift and grace. Punishment marks an epoch that remains a memorial in the preaching of the gospel, even while its myth has been shattered.[72]

What we can see is that the internalization of guilt consciousness means that the diminution of the value of existence that culprits experience calls by its nature for punishment in the sense of penance, or expiation that educates. Punishment acquires a new function in that of restoring the identity of the culprit. Conscience as a solitary experience becomes the measure of evil. However, we need to modify this with the notion that culprits must answer for the consequences of their actions. Blame is attributed to them independently of whether they admit their guilt and acknowledge their actions as faulty. Consequently, guilt in the sense of an attribution of blame exist prior to and independently of the development of a subjective consciousness of guilt. The history of Israel shows this, for it could distinguish between deliberate an undeliberate act in the Book of the Covenant, among its earliest documents, and the subjective internalization of the consciousness of guilt as a break in the relation to God coming only with the preaching of the prophets centuries later. The assignment of blame is for the sake of the community and its purification. Guilt consciousness is based on the readiness to answer for its consequences. The culprit accepts guilt, a process that begins in confessing fault, thereby becoming the author of the act. Analogous motives are present in Greek tragic poetry, which initiated the development leading to the formation of the idea of an individual conscience.[73]

A second example of the analogical meaning of a symbol is the analogue of deviation is the symbol of sin. The religious dimension of evil is not transgression. Sin involves a violated relation, such as missing the mark, deviation, rebellion, straying from the path. It suggests error. Pardon leads to return or restoration of the relation. It leads to redeeming the narrative. One held captive by sin means the problem of human existence will be that of liberation, of salvation and redemption. 

Sin is treated lightly in culture, as in something being “sinfully delicious” or “the devil made me do it.” What theology speaks of as sin needs to be known apart from revelation. The loss of meaning as experienced by many in secular society is a place to begin. An awareness of evil is also part of the culture, as evidenced in the attempt to track down “evildoers” and even the “Walking dead” series, which recognizes that things are so evil that they can only be dealt with by killing them.

A third example of the analogical meaning of a symbol is the analogue of accusation is the symbol of guilt. Accusation is presumed in the Kantian ethical imperative. Yet, obligation is not the primary structure of ethics. At the center of this symbolic system is the dominating figure of the paternal or Oedipus complex. The agency of accusation is the superego, representing the external world. If we are to demystify this dynamic, it will move from the morality of obligation to an ethics of the desire to or effort to exist. In locating ethical reflection in the identity of effort and desire, we acknowledge self-dividedness, lack, desire for the other. This desire would not project value into the heavens, where it becomes an idol. The kerygmatic moment of ethics needs to be recovered, and it can do so by focusing upon desire in ethics. Theology deals with relations of intelligibility in the domain of witness. Philosophy organizes in terms of the human desire to be. Philosophy recognizes at this point the ethical function of religion and the representative content of religion in the good principle as an archetype. The philosophical question is how human desire is oriented by this representation. This leads us to think of evil as a kerygmatic problem. 

Guilt is the result of accusation that occurs in the light of the promise in the kerygma. Demystifying accusation leads us to the feeling of guilt. Guilt progresses over the threshold of injustice and the sin of injustice. This removes guilt from the family and parental setting presumed in psychotherapy and moves it toward the prophet, who is outside the family, where wisdom rectifies the guilt, taken up again and transposed into reflective thought. Behind accusation and consolation is the anger of love, a grieving the Spirit.[74]

Guilt points us to the paradox of the idea of human fault in which one is responsible for being captive, which is the definition of a servile will. Guilt expresses itself through the indirect symbol of captivity, a symbol of derived from a theology of history in which a people are made prisoner through their sins. The symbol of the enslaved body in Romans 6 is an act and a state, which makes all human beings without excuse. In Plato (Phaedo, 82d-e), the bodily captivity is a sign of the servile will, the prison of the body being the work of desire and one cooperates in putting on the chains. To be lost is to be in the self-captivity of the bonds of desire. 

The principle that the concept of guilt presupposes a transgression of a norm is also documented in the history of culture, where the perception of this relationship precedes the development of guilt consciousness and the internalization of this consciousness. This origin for the guilt idea is important for the structure of its themes. The internalization of guilt is important, but the objectivity of the stain is retained in the idea of sin and is presupposed in guilt as well. Defilement and impurity are close to the Old Testament representations of sin and guilt, suggested in a continuity from act to consequence and from crime to disaster and death. Sin as a violation of provisions of the divine law is not everywhere as intensely personalized as it seems to be.[75]

Guilt places oneself before an invisible tribunal that measures the offense, pronounces condemnation, and inflicts punishment. It does so within the realm of the moral consciousness that watches, judges, and condemns. This interior tribunal incriminates the consciousness, mingled with the anticipation of punishment in the form of self-observation, self-accusation, and self-condemnation. Guilt arises with a scrupulous consciousness, which is a delicate and precise consciousness enamored by increasing perfection. I declare myself as being one who could have done otherwise. I recognize my obligation in my awareness that I should have done otherwise. It recognizes the obligation contained in the ethical demand upon my life. At this point, however, the freedom and obligation reflected in the experience of guilt receives an answer to resituate my existence in the light of hope, which becomes the passion for the possible (Kierkegaard), which strengthens the imprint of the promise on freedom. Freedom in the light of hope is a freedom that affirms itself despite death and is willing to even deny death. Repentance is already directed toward this future. Evil is not simply transgression of a law but a pretension of humanity toward being master of one’s life. Faith incorporates the hope of the end of evil, in the law of superabundance, that where sin abounded, grace abounded even more. Thus, faith leads to a benevolent view of humanity and its history. It takes the step from condemnation to mercy and enters the perspective of coming rule of God.[76]

Symbolism of Evil

The deep root of egocentricity is clear in our natural organization and in our sensible perception. Our perspective shows itself in the actions of human life, including self-love, being an expression of human finitude that must be distinguished from actual fault. This position would be justified if the ego were constantly mindful of the limitations of its perspective at any given moment and thus, by the fact of admitting these limits, were at the same time to transcend them. The transcendental synthesis of object-perception the ego does at the same time transcend the limits of its perspectives in that it is set among the things of the world. This means that egocentricity makes its appearance in human life long before we can consider moral behavior. It determines the whole way in which we experience the world. Perspective and transgression are the two poles of a single function of openness. However, in its anticipation of things as well as in its reaching out to happiness the finite go is constantly taking as definitive reality what is in only a finite perspective, and this self-enclosed perspective, which is not aware of its own finitude, is an expression of human fault. Therefore, sin is intricately connected with the natural conditions of our existence.[77]

We can now return to a religious text and re-consider what they say about sin, guilt, defilement, infection, and punishment. 

What biblical myth does, and Christian theology that arises from it, is clarify that sin and the resulting evil resides in each of us. The solidarity of humanity in evildoing blocks any path toward moralism, adherents wanting to stress their separation from sinners while denying they are at one with them. If one is looking for genuine evil, one is likely to find it within synagogue and church, for evil hides among the good. Satan masquerades as an angel of light. 

With the consideration of evil, we are pushing beyond boundaries of typical reflective considerations in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and political theory since the enlightenment. However, evil in ancient religious texts undergoes thoughtful consideration through myth. Even in recent history, as scientific, rationally ordered human beings, people seem comfortable dealing with evil with myth. Thus, stories include the zombie apocalypse, which arises mysteriously, and which one can face only by killing it. The Lord of the Rings also deals with evil with myth. Star Wars does so as well. It would be difficult to deal with it through clinical studies. 

The externality of evil is important for the moments when human beings identify themselves with the good, which is likewise something objective in their eyes. The difficulty is that the identification is not a stable one. The image of contagion or contamination is vague at this point, for it surrenders too much to the thesis of the externality of evil, thereby suggesting that apart from this contamination human beings are in themselves healthy. We need to clarify at this point by affirming the power of the lie that says good is evil and evil good and deceptively offers us life as the reward for sin, when in fact the outcome of sin is death. This deceitful character of sin enables us to understand how human beings can nonetheless choose what is objectively evil by compulsion. This means the servile will consists in that human beings regard as good what is objectively bad for them and therefore choose it. This situation makes it clear that human beings are the kind of beings who can find pleasure in what is objectively evil.[78]

Evil, defilement, or sin is the sensitive point, the crisis of this bond that myth makes explicit in its own way. Evil is the crucial experience of the sacred in which the threat of the dissolution of the bond between humanity and the sacred makes us most intensely aware of human dependence on the powers of the sacred. The myth of this crisis is that it places before human beings a complete understanding of humanity, giving both the orientation and the meaning of humanity from its narration. The completeness of the narration is that myth narrates a reminiscence and an expectation. Thus, it must embrace humanity in one ideal history, as does the Hebrew notion of Adam and the Christian understanding of the significance of Adam in Paul. One can refer to humanity as a unity because myth sums up the human type. This universality has the character of movement by narration, in recounting the beginning and the end of fault, thereby conferring upon this experience an orientation, a character, a tension. The narration encompasses beginnings and eschatology. Myth discloses essential history of humanity from its perdition to its salvation. The most significant aspect of myth is that it seeks to get at the enigma of human existence, the discordance between original innocence and the existence of human beings as defiled, sinful, and guilty. Myth accounts for this transition by its narrative. It points to the relation, the leap and the passage, between the essential being of humanity and the historical existence of humanity.

Myth is pseudo-rational for the modern person, but that is not fatal to myth, although it is fatal to knowledge. Plato provides an example in that he inserts myth into his dialogues without confusing myth with knowledge. The problem of evil is the occasion of the passage from myth to knowledge. The problem of evil presents a considerable challenge to think and a deceptive invitation to talk nonsense. In this case, the ends of reason exceed the means. The contradiction felt between the destination of humanity and the actual evil situation of humanity is acknowledged and confessed, giving rise to the gigantic question of why at the center of human existence. It was out of this question that the narratives of myth arose. 

It is in the rite rather than in the narration that this behavior is expressed most completely. Ritual action and mythical language point beyond themselves to a model or archetype that they imitate or repeat in gestures and verbal repetition, becoming the broken expressions of a living participation in the mythical time and space narrated. The significance of this mythical structure is that those participating in the ritual acknowledge the lost wholeness of human existence and seeks its recovery through re-enactment and imitation of the myth and the rite. Mythmaking is an antidote to distress and anxiety that reflects the unhappy consciousness. The narration has the character of a drama because the mythical consciousness does not experience fullness to which the myth relates in its narration of the beginning and the end of this mythical history. The characteristics of the myths of evil include the universality conferred upon human experience through archetypal personages, the tension of an ideal history oriented from a beginning toward an end, and the transition from an essential nature of humanity to an alienated human existence. The myth performs its symbolic function by narration because it wants to express is already a drama. The totality of meaning and the cosmic drama are the two keys that will unlock the myths of the beginning and the end.

The primary myth is the Adamic myth and the eschatological vision of history, for the Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition still proclaim this myth. Salvation becomes historical and presented as a temporal drama. Salvation is the sum of the initiatives of the divine and of the believer tending toward the elimination of evil. The eschatological representation means that the work of salvation is still pending until the Last Day. 

The narrator of Genesis 3 does not use full-blown myth.  Rather, he limits himself to the disorders of present life--shame, fear, dissonance between the sexes, ascribing them to human sin.  All sorrow, the author says, comes from sin, humanity's disrupted relation to God. It has its weakness in focusing upon looking for a culprit when there is suffering or evil, which then assumes that a price in suffering must be paid, thereby embedding expiation deeply into religious sensibility.[79] We must not consider this myth as if it is a mime of rationality, a rationalized symbol. It supplies a minimum amount of theological reflection in the process.[80] Joseph Campbell said concerning myth, "A myth is something that never was, but always is."  We must also reject the temptation of a dogmatic mythology that would interpret it is history or science. There was not a temporal moment when the problem humanity faces entered its history. Such fundamentalism has done a great disservice to exploring the meaning of the myth. Such a view pursues the intellectually inconsistent idea of combining two universes of discourse, that of ethics and biology.[81] It represents the origin and the end of evil. The idea of a fall of humanity arises in an irrational event in a completed creation. It presents a cleavage between the irrational event of the fall the ancient drama of creation. However, this fall becomes the story of the rise of sin within the heart of all persons. It shows that the problem human beings face is the structure of the self.

The fall supervened upon a perfect creation, meaning the event of the fall carries the weight of this mythology. They have passed through the intellectual world of the wisdom tradition. As an etiological myth, it relates the origin of evil to an ancestor of humanity whose condition is similar with our time and space, which is why speculations about a supernatural perfection of perfection before the Fall are alien to the intent of the original narrative. By ruling out any past epoch of created perfection, the reality of the gradual emergence of life allows religious aspiration to turn decisively to hope, taking anticipation seriously as underlying all of life, toward the wide openness of infinitely resourceful future, the only arena in which the fulfillment of the longing of life for perfection and release from suffering could be actualized.[82]The story is the most extreme attempt to separate the origin of evil from the origin of the good. The radical origin of evil is distinct from the primordial origin of the goodness of things. The Adamic myth portends an evolution toward a speculation of a higher degree, in which freedom will be the power of humanity to defect, to undo, and to unmake itself after creation. It narrates the passage from innocence to sin as the status of humanity destined for good and inclined to evil. It implies the representatives of humanity break the first and second commandment and break the tenth commandment by a profound reflection on coveting This drama has already happened. 

The story is tragic. They already had freedom and authenticity in their relationship with each other, with nature, and with God, but believed they could make advances by another form of freedom. The text goes on quickly from answering the question of from where we come, offering the theological perspective that humanity derives from an act of the Lord God to the question, "why do we behave differently from all other creatures?" Although set in paradise, humanity quickly turns away from God, the source of life, and therefore begins to die. We might well think of the story explaining the origin of death, as well as the difficulty involved in work and reproduction. Sin explains these things. It contains the five elements that will reappear in the remaining biblical accounts of sin: (i) the occasion for sin; (ii) the prohibition; (iii) the temptation; (iv) the sinful act; and (v) its consequences. The story contains an insight into the power of human desire that can tempt us toward self-destructive behavior. Humanity had authentic and open relationships with God and with each other. Yet, in the small act of eating forbidden fruit, humanity reveals its character. The temptation is the dilemma of maturity, and the moment of enlightenment becomes the moment of a sense of guilt and shame. The story connects sin and death. The story assumes that life comes from God. Since sin is turning from God, sinners separate themselves from the will of God and the source of their own lives. Death is the nature of sin and its consequences. As important as the appearance of the crafty snake is in this story, the focus is on human responsibility for choices. The story of Adam and Eve is the story of all of us. We think of the innocence and playfulness of children. Yet, at some point, we do something we know transgresses limits set by parents. We have shame and guilt. We hope no one discovers what we have done. The story puts everything into human terms. The serpent receives human qualities, and Yahweh continues to have anthropomorphic characteristics.  Yahweh speaks as father to child, evoking the childhood of humanity itself. The serpent asks the first question in the Bible. He questioned divine authority. He questioned whether humanity would be obedient. The serpent is nothing other than the embodiment of the human endeavor to escape all guilt and responsibility. The serpent emerges as a scapegoat.[83] In wanting to be like God, humanity is denying recognition of its own limits. Human beings want to become little gods so that they do not need to revere their creator. The desire to assume for oneself the role of a god is the worst form of idolatry. It suggests the arrogance of freedom without limits. The prevailing conditions of Adam, namely, his finitude, meant he would sin necessarily, but that the prevailing condition does not prevent Adam from not sinning.[84] Thus, every such action is as though the individual had fallen into it directly from a state of innocence. Regardless of past actions, human beings are not prisoners to them. It becomes the duty in each moment to choose our better selves. To do so is within our power, and if we do not do so, we are responsible in the very moment of that action just as much as though, we had stepped out of a state of innocence into evil.[85] We need to clearly see the link between sin, finitude, and death in that sinners deny the finitude of their own existence in trying to be as God. For this reason, they experience life as riveted to finitude, and this takes place through death. The distinction between finitude and death is one we can see here in the fact that the non-acceptance by sinners of finitude delivers them up to death.^[86] We are to seek the root of evil in revolt against the limit of finitude, in the refusal to accept one’s own finitude, and in the related illusion of being like God.^[87] The irony is that the destiny of humanity is toward fellowship with God. When humans snatch it as if it were prey, whether by way of religious activities or by emancipation from all religious ties, they miss it. They cannot achieve it by direct human action. The desire we have for the forbidden fruit means we think we have better knowledge for what will promote life. The serpent brings into the light the inclination to turn from will of God. The serpent suggests that they will find real life by transgressing the limits God set. This seduction suggests human beings are still capable of an improvement, there remaining a hope of a return to the good from which humanity has strayed. In the small act of disobedience, Eve discovered who she was. She wanted to lead her life independent of God. She also wanted to bring Adam into her orbit. Then, they broke the familiar relationship they had with God in Eden by hiding from God. The secretive nature of sinful behavior becomes clear. Yet even though Adam and Eve sinned together, the sin disrupts their relationship with each other. The experience of authenticity they had in Eden with God, with each other, and with nature, remains a hope, but is not human life as we know it in history and in our experience. Once they transgress, they have shame. They wrestle with guilt. Disrupting the relation to God, humanity now experiences the sorrow of shame, fear, and tension between the genders. The story is a powerful and graphic example of temptation. We see a wonderful description of the process of sin, having its origin in the breaking of the Ten Commandments, especially the tenth commandment that one shall not covet. She “saw” and had “delight.” She then “desired” wisdom that would come in disobedience to God. They turned away from the pleasure of the presence of God to the pleasure of their bodies. In doing so, they became slaves to sense and passion, which then blinded them from the source of their true pleasure and joy.[88] Temptation gives the impression of desirability and pleasure, but that following its path will bring suffering and pain. The places where we experience our deepest temptations reveal who we are. We might not like what we see. We may be afraid to see it. Yet, the temptation and the succumbing to it give us a deeper self-knowledge and self-awareness, one that may create profound remorse. Human beings are not divine, but they are not like other animals.  They have tantalizing visions of what they might be, while the truth of simple mortality torments humanity. The story begins with goodness and ends in the struggle with evil and death. 

The story becomes an example of what it means to grow up in the world as it is. Adults often look with a certain degree of attraction at child-like innocence in their approach to the world. Such innocence is like that of infancy and like that of higher order animals. Such innocence may call for training and correction, but we would not think of ascribing good or evil to behavior of innocence. However, human life has intervened. We have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We are no longer innocent. Every human being has experienced his or her own fall from that innocence. In that sense, each of us repeat the story of Adam and Eve. Even if we cultivate our immaturity into mid-life, we have been around the block enough times to know that life as an adult is not paradise. In the real world, where maturing means moving from innocence to knowledge, moving from unquestioning accepting to wise evaluating, but also to gaining worries, cares, responsibilities, and troubles. We then make growing up even harder, however, when we do not pay attention to the command of God. Thus, approaching the story this way still stresses that sin mars creation, but it does suggest that we might look for a different lesson from this garden story than we usually do. It suggests that we must find a way to deal with the reality that grown-up life is hard, and that, when it comes right down to it, each one of us is naked -- vulnerable. The harsh reality is that you cannot return to childhood again.

Their story reminds us that humans fall short of living faithfully with the Lord, even when placed in ideal circumstances. They made a choice any human would have made. The creation of finite things leaves the door open for such behavior. Human lack of knowledge, human curiosity, and especially the human wonderment of what happens if we step over the limit of a “no,” means that at some point, the man and woman would transgress the norm the Lord God established. The human journey always involves alertness to that which would deceive us and lead us toward self-destruction.

The story also provides the basis for an important aspect of the moral vision. The story of Genesis 3 is a figurative account of a fall or separation from God, and therefore from truth and goodness. The cleavage that occurs in relationships with God, nature, others, and self, presents a vocation of reconciliation. This reconciliation can only be with truth and goodness. God is actively reconciling to the divine life all that is alien. God reconciles what is particular and what exists in separation. God must restore to freedom that which is alien and fallen away from its true being. Humanity exists in the condition of rupture from the world. This is the unhappiness and misery of humanity with itself. Humanity does not correspond to its truth, to what it ought to be. Humanity is also not satisfied in the world. Unhappiness drives us back within ourselves. [89]

The Adamic myth subordinates to Adam some other figures that decentralize the story. The meaning of the myth resides in its power to evoke speculation on the power of defection contained in freedom. The symbol gives rise to this thought. The myth anticipates such speculation. The Adamic myth is the fruit of the prophetic accusation directed against humanity, for it makes God innocent and accuses humanity. Sin is located at a deeper level than the individual act or transgression. Repentance is not only for actions, but for the root of actions.[90] The way Israel recounted its history was the alternation between threat and promise, a dialectic of judgment and mercy. The ambiguity in humanity, created good and become evil, pervades all the registers of human life. The result is that the human condition is subjected to the rule of hardship. The hardship of being human makes the fallen state of humanity clear. Human life is not easy. We work hard to provide for ourselves, we work hard to have fulfilled relationships with people, women have desire for a husband and children, but must pass through the pain of childbirth, there is ever-present possibility of violence, and death casts its shadow over all human desire and effort. Our desires often lead to alienation from God, people who are close to us, and even from ourselves. The greatness and the guilt of humanity are mingled. The goodness of humanity is the result of creation in the image of God. The likeness appears as an absence of guilt, and therefore as innocence. I am created in a moment, and I fall in a moment. The event of sin terminates innocence. It is the discontinuity, the breach between my having been created and my becoming evil. The depth of the myth is in its telling of the fall as event, springing up from an unknown source, providing anthropology with the contingency of that radical evil that the penitent is always on the point of calling an evil nature. The myth proclaims the purely historical character of that radical evil. Innocence is older than sin. This one primordial event spreads out among other characters. In particular, the Serpent raises the evil infinite of human desire that animates the movement of civilizations, the appetite for pleasure, for possessions, for power, for knowledge. The restlessness that makes us discontented with the present is our true nature. The myth is the symbolic form of the critique of the illusion of appearance. The serpent is a part of ourselves which we do not recognize. The serpent represents the seduction of us by ourselves, projected into the seductive object. Each of us is tempted by our own lusts (James 1:13-14). The serpent is also outside, for evil is already there, ready to show indifference to the ethical demands of human relationships. And it symbolizes the chaos in me and among us, even though we remain destined for goodness and happiness. Human beings are not absolute evil, and thus, evil has this external quality, and to sin is to yield to its seduction. 

In the Bible, the Adamic myth is connected to the myth of the Son of man, a Messianic figure destined to end evil. He is the one who is coming, the Human One at the end. A savior establishes a new world. The interest is turned toward the future, toward the second creation, which will surpass the first creation even as it completes it. The eschatological judgment broadens and deepens the meaning of the notion of pardon in justification. Pardon is gracious initiative, movement from transcendence toward immanence. Humanity is acquitted. The symbolism of the judgment says that humanity is pardoned in the collective adventure of the history of salvation. The fulfillment of humanity is linked to a redemption of bodies and to the entire cosmos. The soul cannot be saved without the body, the inner cannot be saved without the outer, the subjective cannot be saved without the totality. 

With these symbols, we can reflect upon the meaning of the theological work crystallized in a concept like original sin.[91] To reflect on its meaning is to deconstruct the concept. The concept will need to be destroyed as a concept to understand its meaning. The reason is that as a concept, original sin is false knowledge, a pseudo-concept. Yet, false knowledge is at the same time true symbol. This process can retrieve the orthodox meaning of original sin, which is nothing less than the concept that evil is the work of freedom. This concept is faithful to the biblical tradition, resisting the enormous pressure that Gnosticism would present to turn evil into substance. Evil is not world. Rather, evil comes from us. The orthodox tradition did this through the story of the Fall. Humanity is the point where evil emerges into the world. Augustine would formulate this view against both the Manichaeans and the Pelagians. Evil is the inclination of what has more being toward what has less being. It is an existential and negatively oriented consent, the opposite of conversion. However, when Augustine took the concept of original toward meaning a guilt of a personal character which juridically merits death and a taint inherited by birth, took it in the direction of indicting humanity for evil and exonerating God. The concept of original sin becomes a quasi-Gnostic concept because it became a rationalized symbol for reason. This train of thought does not differ from the friends of Job, who exonerated God from the evil that had fallen upon Job by presenting the suffering of Job as a just response to his act of sinning. As a rationalized symbol, original sin refers to analogous concepts that have their excess of meaning. It refers to the confession of sin. 

The symbol of the fall is irreplaceable because it makes it possible to combine the voluntary character of evil with its quasi-nature, which consists in the fact that evil is already there before we produce it. In the teaching of the church the failure to attend to the symbolic character of the biblical story of the fall has led to a monstrous combination of a juridical concept of imputation for evil to be voluntary, and a biological concept of inheritance for it to be involuntary, acquired, and contracted. [92]

The penitential experience of which original sin is the rational symbol has three traits. First, the realism of sin, for sin is my true situation before God, my wandering course of being. Second, the sinful condition of the individual has a communal dimension. The collective confession of sin expresses a trans-biological and trans-historical solidarity of sin that constitutes the metaphysical unity of humanity. Third, sin is a power that binds humanity and holds humanity captive, reflecting human impotence, and therefore the misery of the human condition. 

Thus, the story of the Fall has symbolic power because it condenses in an archetype of humanity everything that the believer experiences in a fugitive fashion and confesses in an allusive way. It universalizes the tragic experience of exile that Israel passed through historically and gave it universal application. The myth has a power to reveal the human condition. Something is discovered that would have remained covered and concealed. In this case, in the story of the Fall, each of us discovers evil, finds it already there in us, outside us, and before us. Christianity has harmed itself by a literal and historicist interpretation of the Adamic myth, plunging Christianity into an absurd history and into pseudo-rational speculations on the quasi-biological transmission of a quasi-juridical guilt for the fault of an early ancestor.

The drama of creation is another mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. The divine creative act must struggle with chaos. Salvation is identical with creation, so the act that founds the world is also the liberating act. Ritual re-enactment of the combats at the origin enable participation in that liberating event. This type identifies evil with chaos, salvation with creation. In its canonical context, it serves as a prologue to the account of the history of salvation. The event nature of the experience of later Israel as expounded in its deliverance from captivity and its possession of a promised land was understood as the action of divine will and purpose. It would be later, when a theology of creation did not weaken the theology of salvation, that this event would be understood in the context of a theology of creation. This prologue is a didactic narrative providing instruction, set as a preface to the soteriological texts meant to render glory to the God the story of Israel. It is a graduated narrative leading from the vision of the order of the world to a summit, the creation of humanity, the supreme work of God. The movement is from an event-narrative to a word-narrative. We can see the link between wisdom texts and this text as well, as it provides an inventory of created things, an ordering, so fond of that tradition. Wisdom links the values of salvation with the values of the cosmos.[93] In the canon, the reader is introduced to a God who creates for good. God builds a beautiful home in which humanity, as representatives of God on earth, may care for that which God has provided. It does not present a theory. It presents a creed, a belief. In the canon, it takes its place as situating the story of the Patriarchs within the larger theme of the love and concern of God for humanity. It presents the logical and ordered processes of a transcendent God creating a universe into which God will introduce a species who are nothing less than God’s own children. The God who established a covenant with the family of Abraham and with Moses is the creator of the world. The text is not myth or saga, but Priestly doctrine, sacred knowledge preserved and handed down by many generations of priests.  The emphasis is that one can declare faith objectively.  The atmosphere is one of sober theological reflection rather than awe or reverence.  Israel made a break with the view of creation as a conflict between god and chaos.  There is no hint of that here.  It is extraordinary for its austerity. It is devoid of sensory detail. Its abstractness and highly schematic and formulaic structure convey a sense of the awe-inspiring majesty and inviolable sovereignty of the God on whom the narrative is unswervingly focused. God works six days and rests in regal repose on the seventh, blessing and hallowing that climactic day. The first three days describe the creation of generalities or domains and the next three chronicle the creation of the specifics or the inhabitants of the domains in the same worder. Creation culminates in the sabbath. The people will not hear of a command until Exodus 16. The seven days corresponds to no astronomical event. The number seven in the ancient Near East as symbolic of completion was widely held. God functions here in ways reminiscent of a priest, giving blessings and consecrating the Sabbath. The concern for order and clear boundaries typifies the Priestly Document. The account of creation here bears several striking resemblances to the construction of the Tabernacle mandated in Exodus 25-31 and executed in Exodus 35-40. This Tabernacle is the prototype of the temple in Jerusalem and the focus of the priestly service of the Lord. Other ancient Near Eastern creation stories conclude with the construction of a temple for the deity who created. The world is sometimes seen as the temple of the Lord. The Bible begins with the creative activity of God. God is the source and origin of the material world. God graciously conferred existence on individuals.  The beauty of the doctrine of creation is that of a reality distinct from God, one that is not an echo of God, and a reality that God affirms and with whom God desires fellowship. God preserves creation, continues to care for it out of love and goodness toward what God has created. God will bring creation to what Paul declares in I Corinthians 15:28, in which God will be all in all. This creative activity of God occurs within time, as in the symbolic reference to seven days. God takes time seriously. Creation is a testimony to the patience of God, who nourishes growth through time. The result of this creativity activity is unambiguously “good.” God takes delight in what God has created. We should note that the Old Testament makes little of the concept of the image of God: Genesis 1:26-27, 5:1, 3, 9:6, and Psalm 8:6-7. Of course, the daring equation of the man Jesus with the divine image is an unprecedented and radical innovation. The image and likeness, repeated in Genesis 5:1ff, implies that the image is still true of the descendants of Adam. Paul implies as much in I Corinthians 11:7 by referring to the male gender as made in the image of God. In I Corinthians 11:7-8, Paul followed common Jewish exegesis of his time by limiting divine likeness to the male gender, combining with Genesis 2:22-24. It became the basis for promoting the inferiority of women and the refusal of ordination to women. Paul got this idea of deriving the image of God for women through the man from the idea that she came from the rib of Adam. The problem, of course, is that the verses link the creation of both male and female directly to the image of God. In any case, the image remains, regardless of the differences in the genders.^[94] Christian theology presupposes human destiny is toward fellowship with God based on this notion of human creation in the image of God.^[95] God wants humanity to look carefully at what God has given them, especially the multiplicity and variety of life that lays before humanity. It all exists for the sustenance of humanity. The author stresses that everything that has the breath of life is for humanity. This story of creation derives the human task of rule directly from the fact that humans are representatives of God in the divine rule over creation. This is the point of the statement here, where the divine image and likeness have a direct link to rule over earthly creatures. In this way, our human dominion has a link to the dominion of God. As the image of God, humans are the vicars of God preparing the way for the dominion of God over the world.[96] In Christian theology, however, Jesus is the image of God with full clarity. Thus, in the story of humanity, the image of God was not achieved fully at the outset. It was still in process. The full actualization of the image and likeness awaits participation in the transformation into the image of Christ. The point is that human beings are not fixed beings. They have an unfinished nature.[97] Everything is created for a purpose, and at the end of the sixth day, God looks at it all and calls it "very good" – it is all functioning as he intended. This statement of creation being good and very good has its justification only in the light of the eschatological consummation. Only in the light of the eschatological consummation may one say things of our world, given all its confusion and pain. Yet, those who say it despite the suffering of the world honor and praise God as their Creator. The verdict “very good” does not apply simply to the world of creation in its state at any given time. Rather, it is true of the whole course of history in which God is present with the creatures God has made in incursions of love that will finally lead it through the hazards and sufferings of finitude to participation in divine glory.[98] The Sabbath affirms the goodness of God as creator and the creation that God made. The fact that God rested means that God did not continue the work of creation. God was content with the creation of the world and humanity. God was satisfied to enter this relationship with this reality distinct from God, to be the Creator of this creature, to find in these works of the Word of God the external sphere of the power and grace of God and the place of the revealed glory of God. The saga reveals a limit. God had fixed it for God and had now reached it. This rest shows the freedom of God and the love of God. The seventh day is a “God with us” moment in the sense that God moves into creation to dwell with us. In the first six days, God builds a house. On the seventh day, the house becomes a home. The Creator delights in creation enough to want to be with it. God derives pleasure from what God has created. The outcome of creation is divine rest as God moves in and settles down with creation. The point of the story is not a scientific account, which in fact misses the point. The point is that creation is the place where God lives in which God delights. 

The tragic vision of existence is a third mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. Greek tragedy is the full manifestation of this type. Such a tragic vision of humanity shows that the fault is indistinguishable from the existence of the tragic hero, for he is guilty even though he commits no fault. Salvation consists in an aesthetic deliverance issuing from the tragic spectacle, internalized in the depths of existence and converted into pity with respect to oneself. Yet, the Adamic myth receives a new insight when one looks at it through tragedy. The Adamic figure is tragic. He thematizes a mystery of iniquity that is not reducible to the clear consciousness of an event act. It points to enduring dread. The tragic appears in the enigma of the serpent. The tragic theology that emerges because suffering is not explainable simply by ethical lapses. The book of Job is the supreme example of this enigma. The tragedy of the suffering servant goes beyond Greek tragedy.

The exiled soul is a fourth mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. This myth has played a considerable part in western culture because it presided over the growth of Greek philosophy. It divides the human being into soul and body and concentrates on the destiny of the soul. The soul comes from elsewhere and strays here. This myth could merge with the myth of the fall and blend their influences in an indistinct myth. Exile meant the downfall of sacral kingship and the significant failure of the House of David. Yet, the destruction of temple, the removal of king, and the departure of leaders from the land, did not mean the end of the people bound to their covenant with the Lord. The old traditions embodied in Moses and the Tribal Federation of submission to the will of Yahweh and adherence to the egalitarian society envisioned then gave a people in exile a new hope and vitality. That old vision would need to be reshaped to face new historical realities, but that ancient vision invited people in exile to envision possibilities not imagined before. It would also become the basis for Jesus re-imagining the rule of God in a new way for his time as well.[99]

The response to the Babylonian exile varied. First, some in Judah returned to the worship of other deities, especially the familiar deities of Canaan. They became convinced that their suffering was the result of neglecting another deity. Second, some in Babylon accepted the idea that the Babylonian gods were victorious over the Lord. A third response was the recognition that the Lord judged the people of the Lord for their breaking of the covenant. This was the verdict of the canonical prophets and the Deuteronomic History. It was the view of II Isaiah and Ezekiel in exile. The acceptance of the prophetic verdict upon the suffering and defeat of Israel and Judah was a crucial factor in determining the attitude toward the disaster of exile. The experiences of judgment prior to the exile are drawn together in a notion of the day of the Lord that will bring both judgment and redemption to the people of God.[100]

This period is a creative one. It faces momentous events that pre-exilic prophets anticipated as a judgment of the Lord. They foresaw a possibility that the prophets and scholars of the exile could look back upon as reality. Regardless of the Ancient Near East background for these efforts, the prophetic movement in Israel is unique its coherence and its principal place within the Old Testament.[101] Thus, the primary focus of this study is the text. This does not make the text easy, for our understanding of this period will be affected by the decisions we make regarding other which texts we must consider. While II Isaiah and Ezekiel are obvious, how much of the Deuteronomic History, which parts of the prophets have exilic additions, and even how much of the work of the Priestly Document are up for debate. 

Further, this period remains a significant part of the Old Testament. It was an era confronted by the traumatic event of the judgment of God upon Israel and Judah that removed the House of David, the land, the city, and the Temple from the experience of a people who viewed each of these as promised by God. The way in which the institutional, intellectual, and prophetic leaders deal with the event of judgment would lead to creative theological transformations that are significant for our understanding of the Old Testament. Thus, this period does not simply provide background for an understanding of early Judaism, or for background on the New Testament. This period will make a significant contribution to the development of Old Testament theology.

We see the creativity of this period in the massive amount of material that comes together through the work of the scholars in exile. These scholars and their children were part of the royal court in Jerusalem, they were part of the various prophetic communities that preserved pre-exilic prophets, and they were part of the priesthood. These elites were busy preserving the labors of centuries. We see the result today when we read the Torah, the Deuteronomic History, Hosea, Amos, Isaiah 1-33, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Obadiah, Lamentations, many of the psalms, Ruth, Song of Solomon. They were not just collecting the scrolls. They were also updating the material to reflect the prophetic interpretation of what had occurred in Israel. That interpretation seemed valid, given the horrors of defeat and the jarring experience of the destruction of the Temple, the downfall of the House of David, and the experience of exile in Babylon. It is amazing that, given their experience of suffering that resulted from the silence and inactivity of the Lord, they responded with such theological and philosophical creativity. Out of this experience came the belief that the Lord was not just the patron deity of Israel, but was the one God of us all, the creator of all that is, and therefore that the belief that others gods existed, which pre-exilic Israel also accepted, was no longer an accurate picture of reality.

Redemption: Beyond Sin and Guilt Through Forgiveness

If human beings are going to engage in redemptive behavior in dealing the unexpected consequences of human action, we need to turn to forgiveness, which serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose sins hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever. 

The essence of discourse is ethical. Human life is facing the fact of the supreme ordeal of freedom is suffering. The relation with the other does not move toward a totality, but rather, toward mutual regard and respect. I pause and recollect myself, proving I am one who is not at the mercy of the life process or that I have no hold upon my way of life. With the act of recollecting myself I take a position in the world. In my recollection, despair is always a possibility, even though this mood is always a betrayal. Life is deeply tragic. The will toward the negation of our life can overwhelm anyone. At the root of despair there is always the affirmation that there is nothing in the realm of reality to which I can give credit, security, and no guarantee. It is a statement of insolvency. In contrast, hope implies credit. Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle that is in connivance with me, which cannot but will that which I will, if what I will deserves to be willed and is, in fact, willed by the whole of my being. Here is the center of the ontological mystery. Such hope has a prophetic tone. Hope is akin to courage. Courage faces danger with full recognition of the situation, but reduces that situation to nothingness, treating it as of no account. Yet, it fully appreciates the gravity of the situation. One who has hopes for a world of justice and peace has a prophetic stance toward a future that will come, giving one the courage to face the challenges to that hope. Hope and despair subsist until the end. They are inseparable. The opposite of hope is dejection, expecting nothing from self, others, or life. Life becomes immobilized, congealed, and frozen for such a person. Tragedy is behind hope. No matter how dark things may seem, my present intolerable situation is not final. Hope says there must be a way out. Hope does not close in upon oneself; it radiates toward and embraces others. Hope implies an expansion of time. A closed view of time is a form of despair in which one expects nothing from life. Closed time also shows itself in the boredom of fulfilling daily tasks as the sole task of one’s life. Hope is another name from the pressure of transcendence that becomes the driving force of the human pilgrim. Even weakened life has a sacred quality. Such considerations recognize the ambiguity of life but also recognize the incomprehensible unity of what we thought might have no connection, such as being and death. As the myth of the phoenix shows, all life may hold within it the promise of resurrection. While the structure of the world in which we live permits despair, yet it is only such a world that can give rise to an unconquerable hope. Despair can be the springboard to the loftiest affirmation. Speaking metaphysically, the only genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on ourselves.

Ethical alterity suggests that the other person is a positive moral force. Goodness consists in taking up the position that the other person counts more than oneself. The other person becomes one for whom I am responsible to know and share a world, but also to recognize the alterity of the other. The face of the other is an enigma from which comes a command. Goodness emerges as the responsibility I have for the other person. The command I hear in the other is the experience of the divine shining in the face of the other. Sacred history is not the journey of Odysseus, who ventures courageously on a journey only to return home, but the journey of Abram, who leaves his ancestral home never to return and never truly arrives at his destination.[102] The well-known statement by Plato in Republic 509 is that the good lies beyond being, which suggests that our basic philosophical questions are to be found beyond metaphysics in ethics.

At the feeling level, we are aware of a weakness and helplessness that continues with us in life. We are aware of Power beyond us that can generate awe and wonderment at the beauty, majesty, and beauty of our world. Our receptivity to experience in our world is our welcome to our world. Contemplation is a form of looking, and looking for, that takes the object, if there be an object, into oneself. Contemplation becomes an ingathering oneself in the presence of the object contemplated. It transcends the inner and outer world. Contemplation arises from an anxious self-questioning of the relation between me and my life. “Being in a situation” is the formation of the self we remain wanderers, itinerant beings, who does not come to complete rest. To be in a situation and to be on the move are two sides of the same human experience. Creative development occurs with being in a situation. The capacity to follow out a long, continuous thought is rare today. True intelligence is the enemy of the ready-made. One needs a distance or aloofness and refuse to immediately jump in to participate. One needs to be willing to live on the borderland, resisting the temptation to merge with the object. Living in this borderland helps one maintain a properly critical spirit. Failure to maintain this critical spirit toward one’s own ideas, opinions, and the groups to which one was joined oneself, is one of the worst calamities that threaten humanity. We can also experience dread of the world because of random suffering and pain in the world as well as the destructiveness of human beings to each other and the destructive qualities one has within. 

We are fearful people. We are afraid of conflict, war, an uncertain future, illness, and, most of all, death. This fear takes away our freedom and gives our society the power to manipulate us with threats and promises. When we can reach beyond our fears to the One who loves us with a love that was there before we were born, and will be there after we die, then oppression, persecution, and even death will be unable to take away our freedom.[103]

A surprising possibility is that refusal to forgive may be a moral act. Not forgiving may be a legitimate action, with its own progression, motivation, and justification. In many circumstances, the proper and most emotionally authentic course of action may be not to forgive. Such moral unforgiveness could be that of a truth-teller who refuses to pardon and avoids the temptation presented by reconciliation. Such a stand would say: Excuse me, but I will not reconcile with you until you acknowledge that you have abused me. You say: Thank you very much but I will not forgive you unless accompanied by the confession and repentance that I John 1:8-10 commends. Easy forgiveness makes for hard justice. Justice, in fact, will not happen through the path of easy forgiveness. When people persist in mouthing empty phrases and despising discipline, justice cannot happen. Thus, we may need to consider that forgiveness and unforgiveness are not opposites but points on a continuum. The same internal processes can lead to emotionally authentic resolutions in either direction. Anyone who has gone through the profound and punishing process of conscious forgiving or not forgiving emerges more self-aware, more related to others, and less burdened by the past. A famous saying is "Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent," commonly translated as "To know all is to forgive all."[104] This is not quite right. Understanding need not lead to forgiveness, but it can lead to wisdom.[105]

However, in most cases, forgiveness is the path of redemption. Reflect upon the difference between karma and grace. What you put out comes back to you, as in “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, or even “as you sow, so you will reap.” You know the law of physics that for every action is an equal and opposite reaction. Karma is at the heart of the universe. It seems like grace has come along to upend all of this on the level of personal relationships. Grace upends our relationship with God. It defies reason and logic. Grace interrupts the consequences of your actions. In my case, and I suspect in your case as well, that is good news. Most of us have done plenty of stupid things, and much worse. Grace does not excuse our wrongs. Grace acknowledges in personal relationships that none of us will live our lives perfectly. We need to give and receive grace to maintain relationships that matter. In our relationship with God, grace acknowledges that we will never be religious enough. Somewhere, probably where we least expect it, we will fall short. Fortunately, we do not have to depend upon our religiosity. We know of this grace because God has offered it in Jesus Christ. Because of Christ, grace defeats religiosity and replaces it with grace.^[106]

The letter to the Hebrews places so much emphasis upon forgiveness of sin. It does so based upon the Old Testament sacrificial system in the First Temple and the Jewish practice in the Second Temple. I would like to ponder for a moment why giving and receiving and forgiveness is so important. 

The focus of the sacrificial system was forgiveness of sin. The problem with this focus is that it is too narrow. 

 

Freedom

All human beings experience the distortion of their human destiny as seen in the structure of their own behavior. 

Others are already within me. They are a presence to which I need to be faithful. Even with their death, there remains within us a power to keep a likeness of their presence. Fidelity is creative in that sense, participating in a dialectic of hope. Some people reveal themselves as present and become available to the other. They make room in their lives for the other. They have a way of listening that is a giving of themselves. Presence reveals itself in a look, a smile, an intonation, a handshake. Alienation reveals itself in unavailability to the other. The structure of the universe may well be meaningless, but when we become available, we overcome or resist that meaningless structure. Such a person is devoted to the notion that freedom recognizes that one does not belong to oneself. We act with hope and courage.

The goal that determines freedom is one’s own self. Freedom consists in the effect of the human destination on the life situation of any given moment. Freedom has to do with personal existence as a single whole that manifests itself in individual actions and decisions, with the result that human beings claim their present life situation as their own in the light of their human destiny. 

 

Toward Theology: Reflection on the Correspondence of Humanity with the Divine

 

The intelligence and desires for humanity is not so broken that the image of God is no longer reflected in them. If one admits this, then correspondence between human nature and its creator is something we should assume. 

The constant presence of the questioning by the self is itself an expression of divine grace in the sense it generates dissatisfaction with the finite things of our experience. Yet, actual knowledge of the divine will need to come from another sphere.

That sphere could result in a phenomenology of the sacred as reflected in the self, which is the numinous experience as awesome, overwhelming, and powerful, is possible because its manifestation has a form, structure, and articulation. The experience of a dimension of human life that encounters the holy or sacred in a hierophany, which shows itself in ascribing things, powers, persons, and institutions as holy. The sacred has a spatial-temporal dimension. Such experiences arise out of the productive imagination, because the experience gives us something more to think about than what the rational presentation of a concept could do. The experience leads to consecration of the world through ritual and myth. The fetish, sacred power residing in a staff, scepter, spear, ark, the king, the priest, objects in a temple, and so on, arise from the experience of Power that shows itself in these ways. The feeling states belonging to such experiences range from bliss to despair as well as the nearness or remoteness of the divine. They lead to a position or stance toward the sacred of that of faith that would include awe and adoration or rejection of that experience. Love is the act through which one apprehends the value of the sacred, a love directed toward a person, even if that person is divine in some sense. Such experiences still arose out of the communal form of togetherness that will have a tradition of naming saints, genius, hero, priest, and so on.[107]

 

 

---

[1] (Behe 1996).

[2] (Bracken 2014), although he is expressing a view based on Whitehead, and which I incorporate throughout this part of the essay. This is also a brief way of re-thinking Pannenberg and his notion of field theory and the field of force.

[3] (Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith 1993), Editors Introduction, 13.

[4] The fossil record has a few of what we might think of as transitional forms, but nothing like what one might think. Further, what would the transition between lifeless matter and a living cell even be? Evolution by identifiable steps, as Darwin suggested, is possible, given billions of years of a random process.

[5] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, 1988, 1990), p. 113-29. 

[6] (Bracken 2014) 220-4.

[7] (Haught, Is Nature Enough?: Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science 2006), location 634-40.

[8] (Goodenough 1998), 66.

[9] (Peters 1998), Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Human Life: Creation Verses Evolution?” 

[10] (Collins 2006), 130ff.

[11] (Crosby 2002), 106-114.

[12] (Hegel, Philosophy of Nature 1830, 1970, 2004), (Hodgson 1994), (Barrow 1986), (Breuer 1991), but this is against (Dennett, Breaking the Spell 2006) (Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea 1995) (Dawkins, The God Delusion 2006) (Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 1976)

[13] The two core doctrines of positivism as summarized by Quine (20) in his famous Two dogmas of Empiricism, are:

One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.

            An alternative is constructivism, which stresses that people construct their knowledge of reality, thereby stressing the significance of personal perspective and lessening the significance of objective reality.

            Critical realism in this essay is an attempt to do justice to both the objective and subjective aspects of human knowledge of the world.

[14] (Peters 1998), Ted Peters, “Science and Theology: Toward Consonance.

[15] I have incorporated notes from a course taught by Larry Wood, Philosophy of Theism at Asbury Theological Seminary. 

[16] John Baillie, The Experience of God, 89-97.

[17] C. D. Broad, The Argument From Religious Experience, 113-121.

[18] William J. Alston, Psychological Explanation of Religious Belief, 122-147.

[19] (Haught 2007), Kindle edition 1140

[20] These statements are consistent with John Polkinghorne. 

[21] (Bracken 2014) 225.

[22] (Bracken 2014) 225-30.

[23] (Karkkainen, Creation and Humanity: A constructive Christian theology for the pluralistic world 2015), Section 16, location 12855ff

[24] (Science of Logic, p. 746, 750, 770)

[25] (Haught, Is Nature Enough?: Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science 2006), loc 1827-20o46.

[26] (Republic, Book IV)

[27] (Ricoeur, Oneself as Another 1992)

[28] (Ricoeur, Oneself as Another 1992)

[29] (Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking Harper & Row, 1973, 2).

[30] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67), Volume II.2, 598-9.

[31] (Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament 1951), I, 243-44 on fear in Paul and 241-42 on care.

[32] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 96-104.

[33] (Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin 1844,, 1980); Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Freud, The Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1940.

[34] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67) Volume III.3 [50.3] 334-49.

[35] (Peck 1983), 154-5.

[36] (Sartre 1943, 1956).

[37] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” 1971.

[38] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “Explanation and Understanding: On Some Remarkable connections between the theory of text, action theory, and the theory of history,” 1991.

[39] (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 1984, 1985) is the basis for these reflections on the world of the text, narrative, and the application to life-world.

[40] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “On Interpretation,” 1983.

[41] James E. Hamilton, “Nineteenth Century Philosophy and Holiness: A Study in the Thought of Asa Mahan,” a paper presented at Asbury College in the 1970s.

[42] (Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination 1995), “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 1974; “The ‘Sacred’ Text and the Community,’ 1979.

[43] (von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory 1976-1983)

[44] (Taylor, Sources of the Self:The Making of the Modern Identity 1989), Part One.

[45] Walter G. Jeffko, “A Personalist Concept of Human Reason,” International Philosophical Quarterly XIV (June 1974), 161-80. 

[46] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 191-242.

[47] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 224-42.

[48] (Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology (2 Volumes) 1967, 1971), Volume I, 166-7.

[49] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 113-4.

[50] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 226-34.

[51] (Peck 1983), 161.

[52] Wright, Robert. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000).

[53] Nicolaus Malebranche (The Search for Truth, Book Three, Part Two, Chapter 6, 1674-75).

[54] Throughout this section I rely upon the following works: (Ricoeur, Oneself as Another 1992) (Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil 1967) (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985)

[55] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 295-312.

[56] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 301-3, 308-10.

[57] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 104-5.

[58] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,”, 287-8.

[59] Peter and Brigitte Berger and H. Kellner, (The Homeless Mind 1973).

[60] This will lead us to look upon sin differently from the ancients as well.

[61] (Levinas, Totality and Infinite: An Essay on Exteriority 1961, 1969) Introduction by John Wild.

[62] Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations Volume VI, 43-45, 52-57.

[63] Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations Volume VI, p. 43-4, 52-57. 

[64] (Eliade 1957), summarizing his reflections.

[65] (Eliade 1957); (Smart 1996).

[66] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 1, 185-6, (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 496-7.

[67] (Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination 1995), 18. 

[68] (Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination 1995), “Manifestation and Proclamation,” (1978) 52-57.

[69] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 1957 and Ninian Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred, 1996.

[70] Paul Tillich, “The Meaning and Justification of Religious Symbols,” in Religious Experience and Truth, 1961, edited by Sidney Hook.

[71] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: II,” 315-324,

[72] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “Interpretation of the Myth of Punishment,” 354-377.

[73] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 291-3.

[74] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), The Demythization of Accusation,” 335-353.

[75] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 289.

[76] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “Guilt, Ethics, and Religion,” p. 425-439.

[77] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 106-7.

[78] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 118.

[79] (Haught, Is Nature Enough?: Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science 2006), loc 2006.

[80] (von Rad, Old Testament Theology 1957, 1962), Vol I, 154.

[81] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,” 299, 306.

[82] (Haught, Is Nature Enough?: Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science 2006), loc 2031.

[83] Palaver, Wolfgang. René Girard's Mimetic Theory (Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture) (p. 205). Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition.

[84] Leibniz, Theodicy: Essays on the Justice of God and the Freedom of Man in the Origin of Evil, 1710, Part Three, 368, 369.

[85] Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Realm of Reason Alone, Book 1. 

[86] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991) Volume III, 560-61.

[87] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume II, 171. 

[88] Malebranche, (Search For Truth, Book 1, Chapter 5)

[89] Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 209-218

[90] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 120; (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 1998, 1991), Vol 2, 239.

[91] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “Original Sin: A Study in Meaning,” 269-286.

[92] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 104-5.

[93] (Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, 1995) 1971, On the Exegesis of Genesis 1:1-2:4a, 132-4, 142.

[94] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 2, 214-5 and Volume 3, 390.

[95] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 2, 180.

[96] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 2, 203.

[97] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991)Volume 2, 216-7.

[98] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991), Volume 3, 645.

[99] (Mendenhall 1973), 209.

[100] (Ackroyd 1968), 39-49.

[101] (Ackroyd 1968), xiv.

[102] (Levinas, Time and the Other 1987), Introduction by Richard A.Cohen.

[103] Henri J.M. Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (HarperOne, 2009).

[104] Madame de Stael, Corinne, Book 18, Chapter 5.

[105] Jeanne Safer, Must You Forgive, Psychology Today, 1999.

[106] Bono: In Conversation, inspired some of these reflections on karma and grace.

[107] (Scheler 1973, 1913-16), 108-9.