Concilium

2004 / 1

Original Sin: A Code of Faillibility

Introduction

Christophe Boureux and Christoph Theobald

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur has devoted an important part of his work to reflections on the question of evil. From his 1960 book La Symbolique du mal (1960)¹, through Le Mal. Un défi à la philosophie et à la theologie (1986),² to his Penser la Bible,³ written in collaboration with the exegete André LaCocque in 1998, the first chapter of which is about Genesis 2-3, Ricoeur as a philosopher has constantly questioned theologians about the coherence of their understanding of the doctrine of orignal sin formulated by St Augustine. It is perhaps in the chapter which he devoted to it in Le conflict des interprétations that we find the nub of his critical argument. He writes: `‘The concept of original sin is false knowledge, and it must be broken as knowledge ... Fundamentally anti-Gnostic, the theology of evil has allowed itself to be dragged into the territory of Gnosticism and has thus developed a conceptualization comparable to that of Gnosticism. Anti-gnosis has become a quasi-gnosis.’⁴

Ricoeur thus distinguishes between the content of original sin, which is anti-Gnostic, i.e. which refutes a dualism that juxtaposes a good creation with an evil creation, and its form which, by rationalizing itself under the impact of Gnostic thought, has brought about the transition from myth to mythology. He adds: ‘One can never speak often enough of the evil which the literal interpretation, one should really say the "historicist" interpretation, of the myth of Adam has done to Christianity; it has forced it into presenting an absurd history and into pseudo-rational speculations which are quasi-biological, about the transmission of a quasi-juridical culpability of the fault of another man, way back in the mists of time, somewhere between Pithecanthropus and Neanderthal man. In the same way the treasure hidden in the symbol of Adam has been squandered: the strong spirit, the rational man, from Pelagius to Kant, Feuerbach, Marx or Nietzsche, is said always to have been right over against mythology, whereas the symbol always stimulates thought over and above any reductionist criticism.’⁵

This criticism might serve as a framework for all the contributions which [8] follow. It is stimulating to note that Ricoeur makes the object of theological discussion a subject of accusation and hurls it back at them: ‘One can never speak often enough of the evil which literal interpretation has done to Christianity ...’ It is as if evil, the object of theological discussion, had infected those who produced this discussion. So it is important to distance oneself from this tendency and to try to redraw a trajectory of the reception of the doctrine of original sin in order to preserve for the present day its significant scope, over and above the travesties of it.

To this end, the aim of this issue is to show how the doctrine of original sin has deeply marked the Christian attitude to evil and error. As a code (like the genetic code or the great code which Northrop Frye sees in the Bible, it informs a priori the Christian construction of human reality and it makes it possible a posteriori to decipher the way in which it functions. We have suggested the expression ‘code of fallibility’ to show that in opposition to the constant Gnostic temptation which gives a purity that is in fact unattainable, the essential aim of original sin is to give a meaning to human existence, both personal and collective, and to mark out its limits and its finitude.

The first part retraces briefly three stages in this development. The second offers contemporary exegetical treatments of the biblical story, setting it in its religious context. The third part shows how the doctrine of original sin today is taken up critically in different facets of human reality. The issue ends with a survey of all the articles to show how they hold together.

Translated by John Bowden

Notes

1. 1. P. Ricoeur, ET The Symbolism of Evil, Boston 1986.

2. Id., ‘Evil, A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology’ in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination, Minneapolis 1995.

3. Id., Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies, Chicago 1998.

4. "Le ‘péché originel’: étude de signification" inLe conflit des interprétations: essais d’herméneutique, Paris 1969, pp. 266-67 (ET The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, Evanston, IL 1974).

5. Ibid., p. 280.