On Sin as Human History Comprehended

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I want to thank Lee Danes, Jason Harman, Jason Hoult, and Mohamed Khimji for reading my essay-review and for sharing their comments on it with me.

Notes

1. All biblical citations are from the Revised Standard Version.

2. See Søren Kierkegaard, Judge for Yourself! in vol. 21 of Writings, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

3. Spinoza, Opera, vol. 2, ed. Carl Gebhardt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1925).

4. It is important to see that Proposition 68 of Part IV of the Ethics is unique in two significant ways. First, it is the sole proposition of the entire treatise in which Spinoza puts forth a “hypothesis” that he then proceeds to reject. Second, of all the propositions in the five parts of the Ethics it is only in this proposition that Spinoza directly comments on a biblical passage.

5. Spinoza points out in his Political Treatise (in Benedict de Spinoza, The Political Works, ed. and trans. A. G. Wernham [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958]) that the theologi who argue that Adam and Eve were free before the Fall, i.e., that they were free not to fall and that they lost their freedom in their fall from paradise, themselves fall freely into irrational contradiction. For what they fail to see, Spinoza points out, is that freedom involves the use of reason (and reason, we may say, presupposes knowledge of good and evil, i.e., the difference between adequate and inadequate ideas, to invoke yet again Spinoza’s own terminology). Thus, Spinoza observes, “we must admit that the first man [before the Fall] did not have it in his power to use reason correctly, but was subject to passions like ourselves. ... In consequence, it is quite impossible to call a man free because he can fail to exist, or fail to use reason; he can be called free only in so far as he has the power to exist and act in accordance with the laws of human nature. So the more free we conceive a man to be, the less we can say that he can fail to use reason” (chap. 2, par. 6–7, 271). Adam and Eve, we see, did not possess freedom prior to the Fall. They were not free to fall (they were not free not to fall). Adam and Eve, consequently, did not lose their freedom but rather became truly and properly free in “falling” from paradise (as the state of nature) into the covenantal relationship of historical existence in being like God in knowing good and evil. See my Spinoza, the Bible, and Modernity, vol. 1: Hermeneutics and Ontology; and vol. 2, Politics and Ethics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007; paperback, 2009).

6. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971).

7. See Hosea 6.6: “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, / the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings.”

8. Also see Romans 6.1–2: “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means!” Paul writes further in Chapter 6 that those who, in yielding themselves to God, “have been brought from death to life” and who have made their bodily members, not “instruments of wickedness” but “instruments of righteousness… are not under law [sic!] but grace. What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!” (13–15).

9. St. Augustine, The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love, trans. J. F. Shaw, ed. Henry Paolucci (Chicago, IL: Gateway, 1961), 139.

10. See, for example, The Enchiridion, 98, 99, 114, 117, 134, 142–43.

11. Spinoza points out in the Theologico-Political Treatise that neither sin nor God is found (exists) in the state of nature. It is evident, then, that, because sin and God exist (are found) solely in the civil state, they are ethico-political, i.e., historical, concepts.

12. Widespread in early Christianity, Docetism was the (Platonic) doctrine that the historical Jesus of flesh and body was simply an appearance (dokein means to appear/to seem) and that, as truly God, he was not truly man. The First Church Council of Nicaea (325), in explicitly endorsing the doctrine that Jesus as the Christ was truly God and truly man, unequivocally rejected Docetism. (It is not clear to me why Fredriksen does not discuss the doctrinal decisions of the major church councils, above all, those of Nicaea in 325 and of Chalcedon in 451.) We may note, consequently, that it is the paradoxical relationship of divine and human that characterizes the historical as the dialectic of the eternal and the temporal. For it is important to recall that (infinite) Spirit is at once divine and human, as Paul makes clear in, for example, 1 Cor. 2.10ff.