No other word gathers up in a single stitch the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, the moral, the ecological, the social, the cosmological, and the theological character of the brokenness of human life and of all of creation. To be able to use the word “sin” is to be able to speak with honesty about who we are with and to each other.
– Thomas Long, Editorial on “Sin”
In Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation, Barbara Brown Taylor laments the degree to which Christians have forgotten how to speak about sin and even how to use the word. Drawing on Karl Menninger’s frequently-cited book, Whatever Became of Sin?, she compares Christianity’s distinctive rhetoric—and the particular passions that it names and produces—to the dominant cultural discourses flanking it on either side. On one side is the legal language of prohibited acts and of punishments proportionally meted out to individual transgressors. On the other is the medical language of sickness and cure, of physicians and therapists who diagnosis and sometimes cure the diseases of their patients. Conservative churches often adopt the language of the courtroom’s punishment and amnesty, while liberal Christianity prefers to speak of human affliction and the (often universal) Christian cure. But according toTaylor, neither of the dominant discourses adequately translates the particular ways that Christians traditionally speak of sin. At full stretch, Christian hamartiology—our talk of sin—would draw from both the legal and medical models, combining them somewhat paradoxically, while remaining reducible to neither.
In this light, sin is both a condition that afflicts us (note the medical language) and an act that we have chosen (note the legal language). Our condition requires a divine physician who is also a judge, forgiveness that is therapeutic as well as forensic. Such incorporation of legal and medical models into Christian discourse dates back to Augustine’s own paradoxical description of human failure. Augustine first distanced himself from his earlier, Manichean understanding of evil and suffering as an original, “natural” part of existence, emphasizing instead the original goodness of creation and humanity’s culpability for making it otherwise. Toward the end of his career, in light of Pelagians who—seemingly following the earlier Augustine—emphasized human responsibility and the concomitant ability not to sin, Augustine spoke of sin as a condition into which we are born, an infectious disease that gets us long before we choose it.1
When Augustine comes to articulate both positions at once, he says that each of us is freely bound to sin necessarily. We are responsible for choosing the disease from which we suffer. To accept that one is simultaneously responsible and powerless is no small venture, testified perhaps by the unique struggle of the many addicts and alcoholics who take full responsibility for a condition that they are powerless to change.
In this essay, I want to explore some of the cultural developments of our late modern society, especially with “the triumph of the therapeutic” and the rise of psychopharmacology, that make the lost language of sin and salvation increasingly difficult to retrieve. I have begun by mentioning Taylor and Augustine to suggest that hamartiological and soteriological language—and the dispositions it supports—has always been more odd and less univocal and circumscribable than its professionalized counterparts. Our current cultural landscape, however, is considerably more labyrinthine. Whereas Taylor and Augustine write of finding a middle voice between legal verdicts and medical diagnoses, our current task is to find any critical leverage beneath the widespread cultural assumptions that define—and significantly limit—how Christian beliefs and practices might be understood.
The predicament is complex. The current cultural capital of neurobiology, and its threat to replace mind and spirit with brain and body, has all but driven Christians from interpreting salvation (from salus, meaning “health”) in terms of material healing. In the face of these recent reductionistic accounts of bodily health, it has seemed safer for Christians to emphasize their more moralistic and epiphenomenal interpretations of human freedom, guilt, and forgiveness. I want to claim, however, that Christians should resist this widespread association of sin with individual acts of moral or legal failure. They should continue to understand sin in terms of deeply embedded concrete pathologies, and salvation as deep therapy (therapeia: the practice of being served or waited on).
But it is difficult to do so without muttering psychobabble that is unhelpful and perhaps un-Christian. As I explain below, our late modern era has so associated pathology with inculcated repression, and therapy with cathartic release, that Christian practices inadvertently promote vacuous notions of authenticity and unmediated experience when they understand salvation as healing. Whereas older Christian traditions have understood Christian therapy in terms ofaskesis—the acculturative schooling of desires—our post- and pseudo-Freudian culture has taken such inherited restraints as that from which an individual needs salvation. Modern liberal theology follows suit, associating authentic religion with the immediate experience available to those who have become religiously unrepressed. How might contemporary Christians speak of spiritual sickness and wellbeing when our culture has all but reversed Christian categories? The expeditious rise of the pharmaceutical industry makes matters worse by providing a false alternative. It would seem that our only options are real passion or artificial emotion. Does spiritual health always take the form of either antidepressants such as Prozac or Zoloft or of a more “natural” high? Is a third option (still) available? How might Christians critique neurochemical control over our mental and spiritual life without falling into a celebration of an “authentic,” unmediated experience that seems no less produced by the psychopathological industry—indeed, one that might be its most widely consumed product?
From Courtroom to Confessional
Despite distinguishing Christian hamartiology from both medicine and jurisprudence, contemporary Christians do not seem equally nervous about an interpretive takeover by either. To most, modern medicine seems far more threatening. Menninger, whose Whatever Became of Sin? sets the terms of many analyses to follow, is quite explicit here. He defines sin as either “transgression of the law of God; disobedience of the divine will; [or] moral failure”—seeming to equate the theological and moral definitions.2 He claims that it is precisely this moral/legal/theistic understanding of sin which is threatened by modern medicine, including his own field of psychiatry. Notice here how “sin” comes to be all but equated with individual transgressions of a moral law, and how science and medicine pose the primary cultural threat.
More subtly, and in direct response to secular therapy and pharmacology, Mary Louise Bringle questions whether despair should be treated as sickness or sin. (Her response to this either/or is both/and, and she draws deeply from Gregory, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, and psychodynamic theory to form it.) Although her answer is complex and compelling, her question is less so. When one compares the question of whether despair is a sickness or a sin to the typology that I’ve borrowed from Taylor, it is clear that “sin” tends to become equated with moral and legal categories, with their emphasis on individual responsibility, against which Bringle offsets the a-moral, un-theological rhetoric of “sickness.”
It would seem that the medical model’s threat to human freedom and responsibility becomes particularly pronounced when Christians face psychological and pathological explanations of evil. We have become familiar with cover stories in both evangelical and mainline religious publications that pit Christian salvation against pharmacological intervention.3 They echo the widespread concern to avoid effacing the difference between psychological and spiritual disorders, safeguarding a place for the soul against the expansive jurisdiction of the brain’s synapses and receptors.4 I will return to this most recent threat toward the end of this essay, especially in terms of despair and depression. At this point, we might further testify to the widespread association of sin with moral failure by showing the oddity of thinking otherwise.
In Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin, Alistair McFadyen tests the interpretive value of Augustine’s original sin against several concrete pathologies. McFadyen pits Augustine’s “scandalous” doctrine against Enlightenment assumptions about moral culpability. Quite distinct from our everyday (read: “enlightened”) understandings of what it means to be free and responsible, Augustine understands sin to infect us prior to our becoming free. Augustine thereby understands sin not only as contingent (to this, most of us would agree) but also as radical (it names our condition as such), ascommunicable (it distorts us before we “choose”), and as universal (no one is excepted).5 The last three of these depict sin in terms of pathology, or what we might more specifically call psychosis. Psychoses—unlike the more commonplace insecurities, anxieties and depressions that fall under the category of “neuroses”—are illnesses of the mind that distort one’s relation to reality. MacFadyen speaks the same way of sin—it distorts our entire perception of reality. McFadyen’s overarching project, however, is not only to interpret sin in terms of pathology or what I am calling psychosis, but to understand the concrete pathologies of child sexual abuse and the Nazi Final Solution in terms of the Augustinian understanding of sin. The sickness of sin (as contingent, radical, communicable, and universal) better explains the way abused children and those complicit in the Holocaust come to find their perceptions of reality already infected by evil, and only then “chose” to reproduce evil. McFadyen frustrates our (Enlightenment) predilection to clearly divide victims from victimizers, individuals from their social locations, and human freedom from its pathological distortion.6
So far in this section, I have pointed to the prevalence and popularity of distinguishing sin and salvation from illness and cure (especially from mental illness and mental stability), as well as to the oddity of associating the Christian narrative with concrete pathologies. I think the above articles and essays reflect the temperament of America as a whole. That temperament, if I am right, is almost exclusively Pelagian. While we sometimes pay lip service to the sinful conditionof humanity as a whole—a condition that infects us, already limiting the “freedom” with which we respond to it—we Americans prefer to think of sin as misguided action. Getting tough on sin thereby becomes relatively straightforward, comparable to getting tough on crime or drugs or terrorists. A relatively innocent society roots out individual evil-doers and punishes them for their “sins.” Missing is the acknowledgement—the confession—of the systemic distortion of society which affects our perception of what is real and into which each of us is socialized. Also missing is the idea that salvation from sin, when understood completely, entails radical healing, re-creation, deep therapy.
When Christians confess sin, they confess sin of word, thought, and deed, the things that they have done and the things they have left undone. This comprehensiveness of sin already surpasses what we usually mean by taking responsibility for an immoral act. But the difference between courtroom testimony and the church’s confession is not just in degree. For Christians, sin is not an isolated deviation from the norm which needs to be recognized and then justified. Sin is the norm. It is what we sinners have become. To confess sin, therefore, does not primarily make manifest and amends for isolate peccadilloes. It is not a way of taking ownership or control. Rather, the confession of sin recognizes that we have no idea what innocence means; it proclaims that we are not what we are meant to be, even when we don’t know—or better, precisely because we don’t know—what being without sin would look like. Where contemporary culture would have us stand up and take responsibility, Christians fall on their knees and pray to be healed.
From Confessional to Couch to America’s Cultural Prophet
I suggested above that the confession of sin does not amount to a moment of clarity or self-presence, but to an indication of one’s self-estrangement. To confess sin is to avow that I am not who I should be and that I don’t know who I have become. Unlike the bolstering of moral power that is accomplished by “coming clean,” confession of sin undoes the moral self, making it vulnerable.
What I want to ask in this section is whether Christians can confess their sin without parroting a second voice that is equally alien—the therapeutic language that imbues our culture. The danger of confusing what happens in the confessional (or during the liturgy) and what happens in therapy (or on Oprah or late night radio or in any number of self-help best sellers) is real and pressing. Upper middle class Americans have entered what I want to call a second Constantinianism, an era of cultured Christianity, as opposed to the politicized Christianity of the first Constantinianism. In this time of cultured Christianity, the good and prosperous Christian becomes nearly indistinguishable from another identifiable personality type: America’s psychological, artistic, cultural prophet.
Over thirty years ago, Philip Rieff wrote his groundbreaking The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud.7 Rieff’s book offers a genealogy of the psychological human, or what I will call the prophet-artist, as well as an analysis of this figure’s new religion, called the “therapy of release” or his “psychotherapeutic faith.” I want to rehearse some of the salient features of that study in order to compare Christianity as religious therapy to this new religion and its cultural delegate. I will also suggest that the two religions have become so indistinguishable and interdependent that trying to give a Christian critique of the triumph of the therapeutic might simply bolster its cultural capital. Given this state of affairs, becoming a Christian in Christendom—to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard—becomes a paradoxical religious venture.
Rieff describes all Western cultures and religions up until our own as entailing different “therapies of commitment.” Cultures and religions traditionally integrate individuals into the collective by coordinating their personal desires in light of a common telos or purpose. Early and medieval Christianity, in particular, aimed at making humans happy by controlling or spiritualizing their instincts. Although the monastic movement or ascetic practices in general represent one clear strand of this discipline, Christianity itself, like all successful cultures, succeeded by “therapeutic deprivation.” By limiting the range of possibilities available to a person, the religious community weaves individuals into its fabric. Classical Christianity aimed at making people happy and well no less than our own, of course. But it measured happiness and well-being against one’s level of commitment to the schooling of desire. The secret to happiness was to have as few needs as possible. The overarching goal of religion was to socialize individual passions so that persons might develop passion for God. At best, the desires of the Church or of society become my desires and I fulfill these desires only by wanting what the Church wants of me. Such is my consolation, the meaning and purpose of salvation.8
Freud will have none of this. For starters, Freud thinks that the battle between a person’s instincts and the culture or religion that would reform them entails a rather unfair fight. The superego (our internalization of the demands of religion and culture) compels such conformity that the id (that cluster of uncoordinated desires) are left with little to say for itself. Freud notes just how demanding conscience is, and how its demands are made regardless of the actual psychological capacities of the individual. In the interest of a fairer fight between culture and the instinct, Freud would help us knock back our religious/cultural/moral ideals by manufacturing outlets, a “therapy of release.” In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud writes of this new sense of therapy that would help resist religion, making more room for the ego, or the “I,” to choose its own path:
[W]e are very often obliged, for therapeutic purposes, to oppose the super-ego, and we welcome the endeavor to lower its demands. Exactly the same objections can be made against the ethical demands of the cultural super-ego. It, too, does not trouble itself enough about the facts of the mental constitution of human beings. It issues a command and does not ask whether it is possible for people to obey it. On the contrary, it assumes that man’s ego is psychologically capable of anything that is required of it, that his ego has unlimited mastery over his id. This is a mistake; and even in what are known as normal people the id cannot be controlled beyond certain limits. If more is demanded of a man, a revolt will be produced in him or a neurosis, or he will be made unhappy.9
Like Nietzsche before him, Freud suspects that when culture and religion speak of “the self” and its obligations they simplify what should remain complex. Each “individual” is rather a legion of needs that can be mastered only through undo repression. Freud wants freedom in a plain negative sense: freedom to choose and to refuse, freedom to go one’s own way.10 Against all religions and cultures that would have us limit and coordinate our desires with the collective ideal, Freud gives us permission to be at odds with our consciences. Civilization and its Discontents makes clear that such permission, his therapy of release, is to prevent the individual from becoming unhappy. When cultural super-egos such as Christianity ask too much of us, it is asking for unnatural revolt. Witness, says Freud, the near ubiquity of anxiety, depression, phobias and other neuroses in the late modern world.
What kind of happiness, then, does Freud offer in place of religion’s consolations? None at all—at least no happiness with a determinate form. Freud is emphatic about this point. He refuses to see psychoanalysis as offering a new form of consolation and therefore as a substitute for religion. He writes:
I have not the courage to rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach that I can offer them no consolation: for at bottom that is what they are all demanding-the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most virtuous believers.11
Psychoanalysis as originally conceived was not an alternative culture but an anti-culture, not a new cult but the inversion and end of religion as we know it. Whereas the traditional therapies of commitment measured human happiness against commitment, Freud would measure all commitments against an infinitely malleable sense of well-being. Freud thus turns upside down what Christians traditionally mean by therapy. The new goal is only to become more prudential, to better detach oneself from all determinate goals and commitments.12
Freud’s anti-religion sounds like bad news for Christians. But, according to Rieff, the situation gets worse, or at least more difficult to sort through. As the last quotation conveys, Freud never meant his scientific method to become popular, much less a quasi-religious movement. Freud wanted to remain an analyst by refusing to become a prophet. Much like Derrida’s method of deconstruction, which breaks apart privileged interpretative hierarchies so that the innocent play of meaning-making might again be possible, Freud’s analysis wants to fissure our simplistic moral pedagogies, making space for a revaluation of values, without placing any religious, cultural, or moral value on analysis itself. Freud’s wayward disciples, by contrast, sacralized his therapy of release. No longer were the remissive permissions of psychoanalysis an analytic method of securing some freedom from the imperatives of religion. In the hands of C.G. Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and D.H. Lawrence and a host of existentialist analysts, Freud’s therapy of release itself became worthy of devotion. Despite Freud’s intentions, new consolations were given and new religions were formed, all of which are properly termed “psychotherapeutic faiths.”13
The majority of The Triumph of the Therapeutic traces this cultural shift from Freud’s analytic attitude to therapy as perhaps the central religious myth of contemporary society. We can best summarize this shift in terms of the relation between a person’s interior and exterior lives. Traditionally, the outer demands of culture, such as the regulative doctrines and practices of Christianity, become internalized by the individual. The outer becomes the inner, and so the good citizen or devout Christian is also the healthiest individual. Freud resists the process of socialization by carving some space for a person’s instincts. He wants some incommensurability between inner and outer, a bit of resistance to the enculturation and repression of our desires. In the time since Freud, a new synthesis of inner and outer has been achieved, though in the opposite direction. Now it is the innate passions of a person, unfettered by society’s dictums, that marks one as truly religious, especially when they are externalized through creative expression. The prophet of our age is the artist who expresses herself, a new mediator between the impersonal strictures of society and the inward source of vitality itself.
Western society’s embrace of this new synthesis of the inner and the outer accounts for the popularity of a prominent pop culture hero, the prophet-artist. This character is hard to describe but easy to identify: in touch with his feelings, intuitive, creative, interesting, unrepressed, spiritual, sometimes troubled but full of life, and most of all—authentic. He or she is perhaps most idolized by those of us who grew up on grunge bands and movies like Say Anything, The Breakfast Club, and Reality Bites. Like Rousseau’s noble savage, the prophet-artist remains true to herself despite a certain sense of brooding loneliness or even melancholy. She is an expressivist,14 meaning that she pours her insides out, despite the inevitability of being misunderstood. But most of all she’s authentic, deeply in touch with the true source of life.
She’s also a Christian, or at least the Church wants her to be. While I’m not sure how to support this claim, I think that the majority of what is considered vital in Church’s today is a form of therapeutic faith, with the introspective artist as the new Messiah. Such romantic religion imbues Christian theology as well, especially that of classical liberals (beginning already with Schleiermacher’s divinization of immediate feeling and crystallizing in Tillich’s existential psychology). It is as if Christians, like Freud’s disciples, embraced psychoanalysis’s strong critique of religious repression, deciding now that the vitality of religion should be found in the unrepressed instincts, feelings and passions that Christianity once wanted to shape. Many would argue that embracing this form of romantic religion is preferable to fighting against Freud’s cold critique. Rieff, however, is not among them. Using Jung as a representative of the triumph (and sanctification) of the therapeutic, he urges Christians to reconsider “who is more dangerous: Freud or Jung.” Rieff suggests his own answer: “Better a forthright enemy than an untrustworthy friend.”15
From Prophet to Prozac, and Back Again
Why is Christianity’s embrace of this psychotherapeutic faith and its cultural prophet so dangerous? Among other reasons, this cult of authenticity is perilous because it provides such a close simulacra of traditional Christianity, even while turning it inside-out. During the first Christendom, the outer vestiges of religion—the performance of its liturgy and the recitation of its creed—gave shape and direction to an individual’s freedom. Now, it is the free outpouring of an individual’s spirit that wins him a place among the communion of saints. If this trend continues, the church could really become a “negative community” where the only thing that is shared between communicants is the fact that each is unique and true to himself—where the only shared script would be that life is utterly unscripted. Despite these inversions, therapeutic faith shares something important with traditional Christianity. Both agree that the inner and the outer finally synthesize, either by enculturation or expressiveness. To both, then, Freud’s suspicion of all immediacy, his cold analytic attitude, and his refusal to transfigure science into religion will remain unfashionable.
But it is not, of course, Freud who provides the foil to prophet-artists and the religion of authenticity. With the rise of the psychopharmacology industry, especially since the early 1990’s, when selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI’s) gained widespread popularity, the chief alternative to our “be yourself” spirituality became Prozac, not analysis. The use of SSRI’s has become controversial, especially as “treatment” for what most of us take to be the psychological equivalent of the common cold: shyness, anxiety, and low self-esteem. While there are good reasons to be nervous about the over-diagnosis and over-medication of illnesses of character and mind, one side effect of the culture war over neurobiology is the further authentification that it grants to the cult of authenticity. It seems as though options have become limited to the choice between becoming unnaturally happy and remaining true to oneself, no matter how depressive.
Since the first antidepressants were marketed in the 1950’s, scientists have known that the neurotransmitter serotonin profoundly affects one’s mood. It wasn’t until the 1990’s, when the newly developed SSRI’s (Prozac is the most popular brand) made antidepressant drugs less dangerous and costly, that a war between neurobiologists and the prophet-artists began. The former understand symptoms such as depression, panic attacks, eating disorders, and attention-deficit disorders to result from certain imbalances in the physiology of the brain. The latter fear that treatment of the mind (not to mention the soul) as if it were only brain, an intricate cluster of neurochemicals, effectively reduces the human spirit to an animal, or worse, to a machine. They argue on humanistic and religious grounds (which are often now the same) that psychiatrists and their pills prevent one from coming into contact with one’s true spirit. Religious types add that access to this spirit amounts to access to the Holy Spirit. In their eyes, innovations in psychopharmacology join old religious doctrines and rituals in trying to mediate the otherwise immediate life of the spirit.
The psychiatrists have fought back. In his latest book, Against Depression, Peter D. Kramer, clinical psychiatrist at Brown University, blames the misguided resistance to medicating the mentally ill on our culture’s veneration of what he calls “heroic melancholy.”16 According to Kramer, the medical treatment of depression has been a hard pill for some to swallow primarily because of a consistent fascination with the soulfulness and creativity of melancholic geniuses. However solipsistic and unproductive, the inner struggle of the heroic melancholic has won the hearts of Americans (think of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Nietzsche, or any character played by Johnny Depp). And Americans are not about to have them medicated. Kramer paints essentially the same picture as the prophet-artist that I have portrayed here, although perhaps in darker tones. He counters the nobility that we have given to melancholic sensitivity with the sobering assertion that depression is the most devastating disease known to humankind.
But even by Kramer’s own terms, the pharmacist’s insistence that depression is really painful only seems to raise its cultural capital. The prophet-artist is bound to express whatever is authentic. If the real is also painful, so much the better for contrasting with bourgeois contentment.
A number of recent films portray this antagonism between artificial happiness and heroic melancholy, and—as art—predictably side with the latter. Among them is Garden State, the story of Andrew, the young protagonist who returns to his New Jersey home for the funeral of his mother, where he meets a spontaneous, non-conforming girl, Sam. Over the course of the film, Andrew exchanges his life-long dependence on Lithium and on his psychiatrist, who is also his father, for a life that is less medicated, predictable, and numb. Sam becomes for him the prophet of authenticity. In their first meeting she urges him to do at least one spontaneous, unique, unrepeatable act, no matter how small. It isn’t until the end of the film that Andrew becomes free enough (from duty to his father, from medication, and from other “prescribed” norms) that he expresses himself with a flurry of raw emotion while standing over a cliff. While that scene suggests the exhilaration of life, especially so close to death, Andrew learns as well that with the possibility of raw joy comes real grief and suffering as well. The following exchange takes place as Andrew and Sam lie in the tub in which his mother died, where Andrew is facing reality for perhaps the first time:
Andrew: Fuck, this hurts so much.
Sam: I know, but that is life. If nothing else, that’s life, ya know? It’s real.
Andrew eventually pleads with his father/psychiatrist to let him “feel something again—even if it’s pain.”17 In Garden State as with most popular culture, real sorrow trumps induced happiness again and again. While the pharmacology industry has won the patronage of many Americans, it has not yet won their hearts.
My point in rehearsing this culture war is not to side with the psychiatrists over the artists, or vice-versa. My point is to claim that when psychopharmacology is pitted against even the darkest versions of experiential expressivism in this way, the result is a certain reification of both sides and the elimination of any third option. And to which side would we predictably place religion in this subject-object split? With the authentic artist, of course, and comfortably so. The problem with imagining it otherwise testifies well to the predicament in which Christians find themselves in light of therapeutic religion and pharmacology’s false alternative.
Conclusion
In this essay, I have wanted to indicate certain cultural predicaments that make traditional Christian understandings of sin and salvation difficult to reconstruct. The widespread western association of sin with individual failure leads us to all but forget that sin is contagious and that salvation entails healing. If we do remember that, we are then faced with having to disentangle an older form of therapy, which entails the collective schooling of desires, from its counterfeit double, which entails the celebration of unrepressed passion. And if we do disentangle those two different kinds of therapy, we are perhaps left wondering what alternative to passionate authenticity is (still) available, besides that which can only look like chemically induced happiness. Do these various predicaments mean that Christian worship will look more and more like self-worship—worship of our own authentic and passionate spirits? To quote Luther in a very different context, have we swallowed the Holy Spirit, feathers and all?
A half century before Freud, Søren Kierkegaard doubted the philosophical maxim, so vogue in his day, that the inner is the outer and the outer is the inner. He, like Freud, wanted us to become a problem to ourselves, to be more suspicious of all claims for immediacy and authenticity. But if Freud worked to make things a bit easier, Kierkegaard wanted to make them tough. Becoming a Christian in Christendom has to be difficult, precisely because everyone thinks it’s so easy. In one place, Kierkegaard compares his quest to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom to the predicament of having to feed a person who is choking on food. Inducing vomiting is the only way forward, and so Kierkegaard tries to take back what Christians think they know. Perhaps something like that is needed today. Then again, what are we to do if, in our second Christendom, the choking victim turns out to be choking on his own tongue, but refuses to spit it out because it tastes so authentic?
Notes
1. Augustine thereby first incorporates moral/legal language in moving away from the medical model, and then later returns to hospital talk as he separates himself from the moralists. Some claim that Augustine contradicts himself, or at least that we should distinguish an early and a late Augustine. Others argue that his dialectical shuttling comprises his most insightful description of the human condition.
2. Karl Menninger, Whatever Became of Sin? (New York: Hawthorn, 1973), 19.
3. See, for example, “The Gospel According to Prozac: Can a pill do what the Holy Spirit could not?” Christianity Today, August 14, 1995.
4. Betty Smartt Carter, “Taming the Beast: My Life on Antidepressants” Christian Century, August 9, 2003. From a more academic perspective, see in Gordon Marino, “Making the Darkness Visible: On the Distinction between Despair and Depression in Kierkegaard’s Journals,” in Kierkegaard in the Present Age (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2001).
5. Alistair McFadyen, Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 14-25.
6. An article by Quentin Schultze is odd as well, perhaps more odd than its author believes. Schultz, like McFadyen, understands Christian sin as a state of existence rather than as isolated failed action. Like a physical disorder, sin is a “perversity of human nature, or a condition of human alienation from God.” Schultz claims that the “civil sin” portrayed in the media amounts to a “moralistic belief in evil.” American popular culture essentially “reduces evil to morally wrong or bad actions causing harm or pain to other human beings, perhaps resulting from misfortune.” Given his rare resistance to the reduction of Christian sin to moral wrongdoing, it is then odd that Schultz goes on to unequivocally lament the psychological and pathological explanations for sin that he understands the media to proffer as well. It turns out that our “over reliance on medical and scientific experts” also helps explain sin’s missing presence in American media, with its tendency to focus on sinners as victims. It is unclear to me how Schultze can affirm that sin in biblical perspective exists in concrete social institutions, how it infects us like a disease, while dismissing so completely the idea that sinners might be victims. It is one thing to say sin is neither like a disease nor like a crime (Schultze); it is another thing to say that sin is like both (Augustine). See Quentin J. Schultze, “Civil Sin: Evil and Purgation in the Media,” Theology Today 50 (July 1993), especially 234-236.
7. Philip Reiff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
8. Ibid., 15-19, 66-78, 201.
9. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 90. See Gordon Marino, “Kierkegaard contra Freud: On the Proper Scope of Our Moral Aspirations,” in Kierkegaard in the Present Age (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press), 2001, who cites the same passage from Freud and whose work helps me to frame the issues in this way.
10. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 87-90.
11. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 92.
12. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 1-27.
13. Ibid., 89. Rieff’s critique of post-Freudian culture might also implicate some of those who have found in the method of deconstruction an immanent religion. I am thinking in particular of the work of John Caputo, who retrieves a “religion beyond religion” in the shape of deconstruction’s turns. While I cannot here describe the problems related to using deconstruction to reconstruct an indeterminate faith in an indeterminate God, suffice it to say that the critique that Rieff poses to those who would make psychoanalysis into a religion applies to those who do the same with deconstruction. Both kinds of “spiritualizers” “appear engaged in a desperate strategy of acceptance, in the hope that by embracing doctrinal expressions of therapeutic [or deconstructionist] aims they will be embraced by the therapeutics [or deconstructionists]…” (Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 18). See especially John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
14. For historical and theological contexts, see Charles Taylor, Sources of Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) and George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984).
15. Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 91.
16. Peter D. Kramer, Against Depression (New York: Viking, 2005). A critical review of this work, which first alerted me to Kramer, is included in Algis Valiunas, “Sadness, Gladness—and Serotonin,” American Jewish Committee, January 2006, 59-63.
17. Garden State, written and dir. Zach Braff (DVD, Miramax / Fox Searchlight, 2004).