We have thus far covered the following on the concept of sin as it developed in Ancient Judaism and Christianity: first, that sin was metaphorically constructed, first as a metaphor of weight or miasma, and then as a metaphor of debt; second, that many Ancient Jews and Christians attributed sin’s origins and furtherance to the interventions of angelic and demonic beings in the universe. I should add one note not covered to this point: the metaphorical transition of sin’s character from weight to debt coexisted with the lingering metaphorical use of miasma to understand a different kind of unwanted circumstance, that of ritual impurity.
Ritual purity and impurity in Ancient Judaism were metrics of whether one was fit for participation in the cult on the basis of what one had come into contact with. Specifically, interaction with the forces of Death, through contact with corpses, blood (and therefore menstruation), and/or the emission of semen (the idea being that loss of a fluid threatened Death) all ritually defiled someone and made them incapable of participating in the cult until purity was restored.1 Importantly, ritual impurity is not sin: in fact, several things required for moral righteousness will render you ritually impure. It was considered a commandment in Ancient Judaism as in Modern to have children (Gen 1:28), and yet the sexual act that procreates renders one ritually impure according to the standards of the Torah; likewise, burying the dead (kevura) is traditionally taken to be a commandment in Judaism, and yet the contact this requires with the corpse will render one impure. This is why priests, especially the high priest, are commanded to have abstinence from sex during their time of service and why the high priest in particular is barred from certain ordinary activities required of ordinary Israelites.
Now, ritual impurity itself is not sinful, but the taboos that undergird ritual impurity are connected, as mentioned, to the cosmic themes of Chaoskampf that characterize Yhwh’s opponents, like Yamm (the Sea) and, especially, Mot (Death). Moreover, in Ancient Judaism, as Jonathan Klawans argues at some length, Jews often made the effort to sacralize their everyday activities by thinking of them as extensions of the cult into domestic and ordinary public space: it is the “sacrificialization” of such ordinary practices as meals that probably enabled, for example, the meal practices of Jesus to form an authentic basis for the early eucharistic banquets and fellowships of nascent Christianity. And both the Hebrew Bible and Early Jewish literature could speak of sin as producing a kind of “moral impurity”—that is, taking the language of ritual impurity and applying it metaphorically to the fact of one’s sins and the consequential effect these sins had on one’s self and the world around one. In the Second Temple period, this was especially typical of sectarians—particularly the sectarians that give us the bulk of our literature from this time period and those whose intellectual heirs were the architects of subsequent Jewish culture. “Thus,” as Klawans argues, “it is not really accurate to claim that impurity and sin were distinct concerns for all ancient Jews. For some, that was no doubt the case. For the Qumran sectarians, however, that was not at all the case; sin and impurity had a great deal to do with each other. What needs to be recognized is that the relationship between defilement and sin in ancient Judaism was the subject of sectarian debates.”2 In particular, Philo of Alexandria understood the relationship between ritual and moral impurity to be one of analogy or allegory (the movements of John the Baptist and Jesus appear to have made these connections: John’s was a baptism of repentance, providing moral purification through a rite ordinarily of ritual purification; Jesus appears to have believed that sin could and in fact was the principal thing that could defile (Mk 7:1-23); and Paul also seems to speak of sin as moral defilement analogous to ritual defilement.3 In other words, curiously, the view of sin as miasma endured in Ancient Judaism beyond the adoption of the debt metaphor, leading in fact to mixed metaphors and disputed metaphorical logic in Ancient Jewish hamartiology, with the mainstream bulk of Jews separating ritual impurity and moral impurity, some Jews (a minority, like the Qumranites) considering ritual impurity to be sinful, and increasing numbers of Jews using the language of ritual impurity and defilement to describe the effects of sin, recalling the weight metaphor for sin in Ancient Israel and Judah but in a new sociohistorical and intellectual context. Hence, the web of interconnections, often constructed more as a malaphor than a coherent, systematic theory, of sin, purity, holiness, God, angels, humans, and demons that was woven in the Second Temple period and inherited by postbiblical Jews and by Early Christians. It is this aboriginal diversity in the concept, too, that led to the adoption by Jews and Christians of numerous theologies of atonement in the aftermath of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple—whose cult was the ordinary way of managing moral impurity incurred through sin, not in the sense of attempting to pay off God in a penal substitutionary way, but perhaps in the sense of trying to expiate miasma, pay off the “debt” of sin, and make repair to broken relational dynamics—especially those that focused on prayer, repentance, and almsgiving.
Now, we could refer to this cultic, apocalyptic, and cosmic set of etiologies for sin as sin’s mythos: that is, the narrative metaphor that Jewish and Christian Scripture and Tradition employ to try and explain sin’s why, sin’s how, and sin’s what in the form of a story that makes some degee of sense. In calling it mythos, my point is not to say that it is false: mythos does not mean false.4 As the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the Middle Platonists, and the Late Platonists like Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus knew, there are some truths that philosophers cannot express in syllogism alone, but can only express by recourse to the narrative story of mythology. There are two ways, in fact, in which that is true: first, in the sense that there are some truths so complex that they are actually more correctly represented in their essence by the superficial falsehood of myth’s accidence, and second, that there are some facts about physical and metaphysical reality that are in some way revealed by myth (and cult, and oracle) that no philosopher could reason towards alone. But it is to say that the mythos of sin does not offer us a logos, a rational account, of sin’s why, how, and what. That is, insofar as the apostolic kerygma of Christ crucified engages with sin, grappling with it as a problem that Christ has somehow solved and that we can achieve our own freedom from through Christ, it does not offer us an actual philosophy or theology of sin, only the good news of sin’s defeat.
Can there be a logos of sin? Technically, the answer to that question is no from within the Middle and Late Platonic metaphysics that Christians adopted in the second, third, fourth, and fifth centuries CE, as they were formulating the classical expressions of their dogmatic theology: insofar as sin is evil, and God, who is transcendent Being, is himself also the Good, sin which is evil is also therefore non-being, insofar as evil can only metaphysically be the absence of the Good. Sin has no independent existence, and insofar as a mainline of the Platonic tradition generally is that to be is to be intelligible, that being and intelligibility are reciprocal, and therefore that that which is not is also unintelligible, sin is therefore alogos, without a rational explanation, without an account of its being.5 But even if sin’s existence is thereby deemed parasitic or even illusory to some degree, it is no less necessary to be able to explain how it could be that a reality that is fundamentally good because it is an emanation of the Good, that is fundamentally intelligible because the Good is That Which Is and is also therefore That Which Can Be Thought, could possibly be host to evil in the first place. Even if sin, properly speaking, has no logos because it is by definition the privation of being, we still have to be able to provide a coherent explanation of why it is possible for sin to happen at all; and in doing so, we will discover the logos of the cross and the logos of the resurrection, about which St. Maximos speaks, which Christian theology must take to be that which is ultimately encoded in an allegorical manner within all the metaphors of sin which Scripture and Tradition (Jewish and Christian) together assert.
And the bulk of that explanation has already been offered simply in describing the problem. God is, with respect to essence, Beyond Being, Beyond Intelligibility, and Beyond Life, but is, therefore, Being, Intelligibility, and Life itself. God is, qua God, the transcendent, formal, and final Oneness and Goodness beyond all things. And so, created being is and can be nothing other than God’s own infinite essence overflowing into finite beings, each with their own intelligibilities (and therefore noetic capacity), and their own erotic drive to reach out for that which they cognize through intellection and perceive through sensation to unite it with themselves, which movement we call life. God is thus the true Being of all beings, the true Intelligibility of all intellects, and the true Life of all life, in the hypostatic modes of Father, Son, and Spirit, respectively.
All of this we have said before. But as we have seen, there are different senses in which God is said to create. That which he creates primarily are rational spirits in his own image and likeness: that is, beings of which he is the true Being, whose intelligible rationales are the one Logos, and which are vivified by the one Spirit. The prefiguration of beings and their intelligibilities in the one Logos Christian theology calls God’s poiesis; their creation as rational spirits fully alive in God’s Spirit it calls the ktisis, and associates with the eschaton, the time when God is “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28) and the noetic fire of God fills and transfigures all creation into a single burning bush.
The question is whether God’s act of creation proceeds immediately from poiesis to ktisis, with no intermediary gradualism. At least in Christian Scripture and Tradition, the answer is No: creation has a way by which it comes-to-be that which is it preexistently is in the Logos, coming from nothing into being by the common Trinitarian intention and activity of creation, but coming to be in corporeal form. These corpora range from the very noetic, aethereal, and subtle to the most grossly opaque and material, each in their own taxis, as the essentially infinite being that God is assumes the numerically infinite forms prefigured in the Logos and the Spirit gives infinite life to them all; and they also evolve over time, each of them, both in themselves and in their relationships.
Because they come to be from nothing, then, rational spirits do not begin their existence purified—for they have not yet been stained—nor illumined concerning their natures nor concerning God’s, and therefore do not begin in a state of conscious unification with God. They are morally innocent but undeveloped from the start, and must progressively learn and acquire virtue by their choices, progressing from ignorance to wisdom thereby. And it is that ignorance which is logically commensurate with non-being that is therefore the origin and substance, if one can call it a substance, of sin.
Now, I have suggested that this is the condition of every rational being: ignorant by condition of coming to be from nothing concerning their fundamental nature and that of God. Yet there are clearly some beings that are wise, some that are of high station, and some whose clarity of vision prevents them from sin. So where does this hierarchy of beings emerge from? How can it be that seraphim do not think of sinning, but Watchers and daimonia and humans do? And can this explanation also account for their difference itself—why some creatures are more glorious, intelligent, and powerful than others?
The Christian Tradition has hatched basically two accounts for this. Both are rooted in the will of rational beings, angels, humans, and demons, and both require particular conceptions of time and the world that help make sense of their claims. The first view, which I will call the mainstream position of Latinate Christianity, is that God is effectively a hierarchicalist by nature: God simply created some beings higher and others lower, bestowing greater dignity on some and not on others, making some vessels of honor and dishonor, etc. for admittedly arbitrary reasons. The advantage of being created lower is that opportunities for repentance from sin exist, while demons, on this read, are forever incapable of turning back to God in penitence for their actions. So while sinners are responsible (kind of, mostly) for their sin in this system, there would be certain ontological boundaries for creatures even if they did not sin: Thomas Aquinas, for instance, thinks that God predestines all to their fates regardless of their merits, and when assessing why this is so, openly declares that God simply doesn’t love everyone equally; it is neither ontologically possible for them by nature to become divine nor does God extend the helping hand to all in this task (ST I.24). So, as it is God who gives the sanctifying grace to know and trust in God and be saved, it is presumably God who withholds that grace not only from humans but also from demons. And so it is God who has created not only an unequal but an inequitable world, in which rational beings enjoy different circumstances, including providence and grace, that undergird their ability and actual decision to choose God. This is also the position, then, comfortable with the late Augustinian idea of Original Guilt, that sin is something of a genetic disease contracted by Adam and Eve and passed down by sexual intercourse from parents to children (later the grounds for the argument in the West as to the “why of the virginal birth of Christ), and therefore that Adam’s children are all personally guilty of Adam’s sin. While there are real differences between the late Augustine, Aquinas, and John Calvin on this point, their position is inherently one of double predestinarian character, whether explicitly or implicitly. The other main position I would call the Platonist/Origenist position, or the rationalist position. This is the idea that rational beings are all of the same nature; that they assume embodiment and status commensurate with their degree of illumination; that they either reach satiety (koros) which requires their providential fall in order to enable their return to God, or that they begin ignorant and progress towards wisdom; and therefore, that the nothingness of evil, of which sin is the moral participation, is a consequence of their ignorance of the Good that God is, a state that every rational creature finds themselves in to some degree or another and to all of whom divine grace is extended to receive saving illumination commensurate with repentance. This is the Platonist position insofar as, like Plato says, it is impossible that any creature should willingly choose what it perceives to be evil, since even in choosing that which is designated evil the rational will by its nature seeks out that which it deems good for itself; all moral evil is a misperceived good.
It is only the second position that ends up genuinely maintaining the identity of God with the Good and with Being itself and that therefore preserves creation as a emanation of God who is Good and therefore fundamentally good in its derivative nature; it is only this second position which does not ultimately attribute evil to God and require a theodicy, a “trial” of God, to exonerate him as just in the face of the world’s evil. It is also exclusively this position that makes room for the recognition of natural evil as a real category. Now, representatives of both positions in Christian and pagan philosophy end up on occasion succumbing to the temptation to believe that natural evil is in some sense “for the greater good,” such that hurricanes, dying stars, plagues, and cities claimed by the sea, etc. all only appear to be evil to those creatures for whom they are inconvenient while really being for the greater good. While I think it permissible to believe that God providentially permits evil in order to work good from it, it does not seem to me possible to hold that natural evil is not really a species of evil, not only because it offends against moral sensibility (tell the victims of climate change that the deaths of their loved ones in flood and famine may appear evil to them because inconvenient but is really an essential element of cosmic good) but also because it disagrees with the scriptural and traditional narrative which does, at least providentially, allow for a dualistic bifurcation of the universe in which the forces of chaos and darkness war with the forces of order and light for supremacy. In some sense, God is beyond this dualism, as the Light in whom there is no darkness who nevertheless wraps himself in thick darkness; in another sense, God’s providential energeia takes a clear side.
In other words, the cultic and covenantal mythos of sin, as a human and divine drama of good and evil, remains intelligible only if we take the philosophical position that evil is fundamentally possible only as a misfire of being in the failure to actively participate in one’s nature by choosing the true Good, a choice any creature would make only because they misperceived the Good, not due to any voluntaristic account of liberty (which falls in on itself). It is only possible to hold that there are errant angels and mischievous demons if we hold that all rational beings come into being ignorant and that their illumination by God concerning the truth is also the substance of their moral capacity to choose the good, even as, vice-versa, their moral receptivity to pedagogical instruction by God concerning the Good constitutes the contours of their willingness to receive instruction. Truth and Goodness are, insofar as God is both, coterminous and identical; in the finite order of beings and intelligibility, they remain entangled even as they do not appear together to consciousness always as the selfsame reality. Evil, insofar as it is a misperceived Good, is also a misfired act of Being; that is why it is not its own substance, is not a thing, and why the privatio boni is inherently the privatio essendi.
It is here that I find we do better, actually, to return to the cultic metaphors and taboos that governed the life and religion of Ancient Israel and Judah and Early Jews, because from this Dionysian perspective ritual and moral purity appear to us with a new sensibility. The ritual impurity that contact with Death inspires is an almost guttural response to the outrage that any creature should disobey God’s command that it come to be from nothing and refuse to shout “Amen!” in response to the divine fiat; moral impurity is a sensible extension of the concept specifically to the realm of human affairs, as humans refuse to conform themselves to the vision of human flourishing that Wisdom affords to reason or God reveals in law. From one angle, the cosmic and moral parasitism of evil create a crisis of the divine presence in the created order at large and in the human community specifically: Yhwh, as God of Life, consumes Death as though fire swallowing up chaff, but God will not contradict his own command that creatures come to be by reducing them to nothingness forever, and so withdraws from sin as it occurs in the plastic creation. This contradicts the express purpose of the created order as it is eternally sketched in the divine mind: to be a place where God may rest and take up residence (Gen 2:1-3), as the cosmic theophany and temple. But this is a vision that God will only realize by the cooperation and consent of the rational creatures he creates, both angelic and human: God will only deign to descend and dwell in the plastic world, making it his poiema or ktisis, to the degree that he is invited and welcomed. The real paradox of sin and evil is that God is able to turn what is the creaturely abuse of freedom into the opportunity not for a divinely just episode of wrath against creatures but into the very terms of his own vulnerability in the universe: in a world that is inherently transient by nature compared to his own eternity, God agrees to consult the gods, to be a stranger and a beggar among humans, a guest-friend, petitioning hospitality from Abraham, wrestling Jacob in the night, meeting Moses at the way-station, leading the Israelites as wanderers out of Egypt, dwelling in the mobile Tabernacle, to live in a house near his son the Davidide king, to go into exile with the Judahites in Babylon. The entire saga of Israel and Judah as remembered by the Hebrew Bible is fundamentally a story about God trying to find the home in the world that he envisions in the Priestly creation story.
I am hardly the first person to point this out. The late Orthodox Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod acknowledged that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation is not hardly as unintelligible to traditional Judaism as Jews often pretend in conversation with Christians: it simply applies to a human being what Judaism already believes God has done in the people of Israel, in the kedushah of their ritual and moral lives of halakha.6 Gary Anderson (the scholar, lector recolligat, with whom we began our meditations on sin by thinking through the transition from the metaphor of weight to that of debt) has argued in his forthcoming volume that the Tabernacle narrative in the Torah posits the source and summit of atonement for Israel’s sin as God’s indwelling or even incarnation as the Tabernacle and its liturgical service.7 Sin is the barrier to God’s realization of God’s plan for creation, which is that God should fully indwell creation and become all in all (1 Cor 15:28); to rectify sin and to accomplish God’s will for creation are one and the same.
It is here that I wish to return to a theme raised in the discussion of creation and Christ in earlier posts in this particular series, on whether the Incarnation is God’s Plan “A” for the created world, prior to its fall, or whether it is God’s Plan “B” for the created world, a response to sin. Earlier I answered the former: the incarnation represents God’s eternal will for the world, as well as the appropriate nadir of God’s act of creation itself, from which creation by the Spirit in and through the Son ascends back to the Father in deification. I stand by that answer. But the first answer logically includes the second: the only response to sin, the accidental and ultimately inexplicable privation of being and goodness in the created order, can be God following through on God’s plan to be incarnate, with the help of those beings, angelic and human, that will agree to the plan, from the patriarchs, to the prophets, to the people of Israel and Judah, the exiles and returnees of Judah’s fallen kingdom, Second Temple Jews and Samaritans, and on down the line through the hallowed lineage of biblical Israel until one arrives, at least from the Christian point of view, at the person of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary, as the Virgin Daughter of Zion and Mother of the Church, is also the Mother of God in being the Mother of Christ: she is the human face of creation’s receptivity to its maker’s intention, of the Creaturely Wisdom reverting back to its Divine counterpart. Any conversation about Incarnation and Atonement must, as did God, go through her.
It’s important to observe here that there’s a debate in the scholarly literature over whether the forces associated with ritual impurity ought to be enumerated as one—Death—or two, Death and Sex. Jacob Milgrom argued the first position in his magisterial, and still basically normative, commentary on Leviticus; Jonathan Klawans has contended the second position as a slight modification of Milgrom. Here, I think the answer depends on the time period of Ancient Judaism one is considering and therefore also when one thinks Leviticus was written. In Ancient Israel and Judah, Yhwh was a sexual deity, so to think of sex as rendering one impure potentially makes little sense in that context; in Second Temple Judaism, though, Yhwh was celibate, the angels were (ideally) celibate, and so a priesthood practicing temporary abstinence was required to draw near to the divine presence. It may be that sex as agent of impurity is a later transformation of the tradition. See Milgrom, Leviticus (rep. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2004); Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); idem, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, 138.
See Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism, 136-157, but also Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2020), 1-42.
See, e.g., Luc Brisson, How Philosophers Saved Myths: Allegorical Interpretation and Classical Mythology, trans. Catherine Tihanyi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
For the layout of this tradition, a good guide is Eric Perl, Theophany: The Neoplatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (New York: SUNY Press, 2007), 5-16, 53-64; idem, Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
See Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations, ed. Kendall Soulén (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), especially the essay “Incarnation and God’s Indwelling in Israel.” While insisting that “to point to a human being and say of him that he is God can only arouse terror in the Jewish soul,” Wyschogrod no less acknowledges that the Tabernacle and Temple afford “a certain diluted incarnation…that will narrow, though not eliminate, the gap between [Judaism and Christianity] on the issue of incarnation.”
See Gary Anderson, That I May Dwell Among Them: Incarnation and Atonement in the Tabernacle Narrative (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2023). On the face of it, it would seem that a consciousness of the spatial place where the divine presence was thought to dwell as a manifestation or even body of the deity endured for a very long time from Ancient Judah throughout Second Temple Judaism; see Mark S. Smith, Where the Gods Are: Spatial Dimensions of Anthropomorphism in the Biblical World (AYBRL; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 31-46, 71-108.
A discussion by David Hart on this matter for the curious: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/2021/01/20/if-god-is-going-to-deify-everyone-anyway-why-not-deify-everyone-immediately/
The ‘Origenist’ position seems to be much better than the ‘majority Latinate’ position, but I still have questions—why do you think some are born with certain advantages over others if we all start with the same clean slate? One is born intelligent, with a predisposition to humility, and wealthy—another is born with opposing qualities etc; if “God is no respecter of persons,” as the Apostle says, how does this work out?
The brilliance of Origen’s thought has been hitting me from all sides lately. I do wonder how the mother of God fits into his conception of rational souls. What is the distinction between Christ’s eternal perfection and her perfect fiat?