The Nature of Sin

Sin as Self-Awareness

In Romans 7:7-8, Paul has some of his most sophisticated thinking about sin in all of his extant letters:

What shall we say then? Is the law sin? Absolutely not! Certainly, I would not have known sin except through the law. For indeed I would not have known what it means to desire something belonging to someone else if the law had not said, “Do not covet.” But sin, seizing the opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of wrong desires.

He clearly presents sin as a human condition and that the law makes us aware of sin through its commandments: the purpose of the commandments are to produce sin. Paul means two things here by produced in me all kinds of wrong desires. First, he means that the desire itself — coveting someone else's stuff — is produced by the commandment of the law. By prohibiting this desire, the law produces more of it. This is a well known effect if you are a parent. Tell your child not to do something, and you have automatically created the desire to do it. But you’ve also done something else at the same time, and this is the second meaning: you’ve named the desire and thereby created as awareness of it in the child. This attention is directed at ourselves through the specific sin — don’t covet your neighbor’s stuff. Sin thus creates a level of consciousness about our desires and behaviors that allows us to name them and question them. This is the self-reflexivity of sin. Paul writes a few verses later that “through the law, sin became utterly sinful” (7:13). What else could this circularity mean — sin becoming sinful — than the law making us aware of our behaviors by naming them and thus making them available for questioning. In order to question our behavior, we need some device that enables us to do this, which is what the law has done. But now its job is done, and a new age has emerged.

Sin Is Always a Particular Sin

We have to be careful about treating sin as an inherent evil at the heart of the human condition. This is not what Paul says, and it is not how the concept of sin evolved through the early centuries of Christianity. Sin and law in this passage (and in all of Paul’s extant letters) operate as parallel generalizations that set a larger context for a new relationship to the law, which is at the heart of Paul’s ministry. This relationship is encompassed in 7:7 (and repeated elsewhere in Romans, 1 Corinthians, and Galatians): the idea that the law has come to its end, but this end is simultaneously a fulfillment and an overcoming, not a pure negation or destruction. The law, in other words, was not a mistake but a stage in God’s constitution of time punctuated by a series of thresholds. In 7:7, the variation on this paradox has specifically to do with sin and the law, not necessarily the overcoming and fulfillment of the law. As such, 7:7 is referencing an early threshold before the the Messiah, and it is about the law’s special power of creating sin as self-awareness: “For indeed I would not have known what it means to desire something belonging to someone else if the law had not said, ‘Do not covet.’” Sin makes one aware of a desire that previously had gone unnoticed. But Sin as an abstraction does not do this as abstraction but as the naming of a particular sin. This is the only way the processs of self-awareness can work. Sin has no power to create self-awareness unless it is named and categorized as a particular sin. In other words, when Paul writes that “through the commandment sin would become utterly sinful,” we have to pay attention to the structure of the sentence where the abstraction of sin only becomes conscious as “utterly sinful” through the operation of a specific prohibition (“through the commandment”) that names the sin. The process can be described, as it is here, in generalities, but it can only be actualized as a particular practice tied to a named sin.

This is why we typically see this structure of general-to-particular in Paul’s discussions of sin. Take Galatians 6:1 for example: “Brothers and sisters, if a person is discovered in some sin, you who are spiritual restore such a person in a spirit of gentleness.” Paul does not say “discovered in sin” as this would make no sense. In so far as sin is general, no one can be discovered in sin. We’re already discovered. The discovery — the recognition — can only be of “some sin” meaning a particular transgression. From here, it is pretty easy to see how Christianity could create an open-ended classification of particular sins — envy, avarice, sadness, acedia, pride — in addition to the counter-acting virtues of faith, hope, charity.

Galatians 6:1 also references “you who are spiritual.” His reference is back to the previous discussion (Chapter 5) that has explicitly talked about how the law is fulfilled and overcome at the same time by the appearance of its Spirit. His use of Spirit is the fulfillment and overcoming of the law. It is that which sums up the law without destroying the law. The only thing about the law that is destroyed is the dogmatic need to follow the letter of the law and not the Spirit: “For the whole law can be summed up in a single commandment: ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself’” (Galatians 5:14). The summing up is the expression of the law at its essence. By paying attention to the Spirit as the essence, we don’t ignore the codified commandments: we stop treating them as dogma so as to find and enact the underlying intention.

Paul’s use of “commandment” in 6:1 is also instructive. To love your neighbor as yourself is not the same kind of commandment as “Thou shalt not kill.” It’s not even the same as “Thou shalt not covet.” It is a commandment to do something, but that something cannot be expressed in a codified statement. If this were one of Plato’s early dialogs, we’d expect the follow up from Socates, “What is love?” That doesn’t happen. We don’t know what love is other than some relationship we have to ourselves and our neighbors which is not clearly defined. What does it mean to love a neighbor as yourself? And what is the status of “neighbor,” which negotiates the recognition of the other through an undefined, uncodified love? Neighbor also negotiates the love I have for myself, which is not specified. I don’t want to use this meditation to seek an answer to these questions other than to say that Galatians 5:14 is a direct reuse of Leviticus 19:18, which puts this love of self and neighbor in direct opposition to vengeance: “You must not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you must love your neighbor as yourself.” If there is anything to be concretely said about love, it is about the same as we can say about sin — it is a general concept that has no definitive content other than in a particular, concrete situation where it is enacted. The concrete situation is being members of the same community or “people” as evidenced by the parallel of “your people” and “neighbor” between the first and second parts of Leviticus 19:18. This would mean that loving a “neighbor” is to enact love within the community. It is not a generalized love as most Christians would come to believe. I am under no obligation to love anyone who tried to overturn the 2020 election, just as I am under no obligation to love anyone who thinks that global warming is a hoax. Nor am I obligated to condemn or hate them. They are wrong, and they are not “of my people.” I do not and cannot feel love for them that is at all like my love of my wife and my child, both of which are different but equally powerful. Love can only be a general intent without definitive content. It becomes stronger and more definable within the same community, but that definability should never end up as dogmatic and inflexible.

Sin as Stepping Back from Ourselves

To conclude this meditation, I want to dwell a bit on sin as a mode of self-awareness that allows us to step back from accepted values and behaviors so as to gain enough time to see them as inheritances not as natural and unavoidable truths. Sin, in other words, is a practice of time. I will put these verses from Romans and Galatians next to some of Evagrius’ chapters from the Praktikos and Antirrhetikos. We’ll see that sin is a general force that can only be realized in particular categories. These categories are practical in that they function to make us aware of behaviors that we should question. As we’ll see, not all of these behaviors are essentially evil. We have to stop thinking about sin as only ever evil. This is our inherited Christianity, and it also wrong and based on the usual Reformation inflected misreadings of its canonical texts. What we’ll find is an intensification of what we found in Romans and Galatians: that generalized sin can only yield awareness when it is named and applied to concrete behaviors. This is why so much of the texts we have from early monastic Christianity dwell on particular sins and not the nature of sin. There is nothing in Evagrius’ Praktikos, for instance, that focuses on the nature of sin other than it operates through particular demons, of which there are eight: gluttony, fornication, greed, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride.

This catalog of sins is not meant to be an academic treatise on the nature of these sins. The only reason to make a list of them is so that they can be 1) recognized and 2) overcome. The first step — recognition — is often overlooked when we think about sin as simply a condition of human nature. When Evagrius, and the other monks of the Egyptian desert, withdrew from their ancestral villages to live with others of like dispositions, they were making a deliberate choice to live in combat with sin as specific demons. (The technical term for this withdrawal was anachoresis.) This is crucial to understand: there is no single demon called Sin; there are only specific demons that go by the name of the particular sins of gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride.

This is why David Brakke can point out, in his introduction to his translation of Evagrius’ Antirrhetikos, that the writings of the monks “were meant to be used, not just read” (14). The Praktikos and Antirrhetikos are explicitly instructions for 1) recognizing and 2) overcoming these named demons. The chapters of Antirrhetikos (which Brakke translates as Talking Back) are organized by the eight demons. It is important to note that this recognition is not of the human condition of sin that resides inside the psychologized subject. Sins are demons that come from outside and work at the level of thought. We are very far from Freudianism where psychosis emanates from the inside-out — internal psychological mechanisms manifest as external behavior. This is about as far away from Evagrius’ view as possible. In fact, Evagrius is closer to William James and Henri Bergson in that human feelings have no inherent content. The content comes from the outside — either the Holy Spirit or the demons.

“Cutting Off” as a Practice of Time

By placing the content of thought outside oneself, the monk gains a powerful heuristic device for self-control. Evagrius uses the technical term “cutting off” in his spiritual practice. Even a cursory look at “cutting off” shows that Evagrian spirituality is a practice of time. Cutting off is closely associated with the problem of thoughts that the monk allows to linger, which is another technical term for Evagrius. Antirrhetikos is a prolonged and very particular manual for how to use biblical passages to cut off the sinful thoughts of the demons. Brakke gives an excellent summary of this practice of time:

The first step in antirrhesis, then, is to identify an impression as a demonic thought, a task that requires the gift of discernment. Even if correctly identified, an evil thought can still function like a first movement, inciting us to sin. A demon presents an evil thought to us, and we have the power to put a stop to it. If we do not, but instead allow it to persist, it will lead us into evil action. Talking Back’s arsenal of biblical verses provides a means for preventing a demonically inspired first movement from developing into a full-fledged passion and thus into sin. (Antirrhetikos, 27)

Part of what Brakke is doing here is emphasizing how Evagrius adapts the Stoic moral psychology of movements — impressions lead to assents which lead to impulses and therefore actions. It is a sequence that the Stoics used to help them control the movement from impression into out-of-control passion. This is the substance of rationality for the Stoics, and it is a practice of time, as I have argued in an earlier essay. Evagrius adapts the temporality of the Stoic practice to the life of the monk. The flow of Brakke’s description is clearly temporal with the problem occurring when demonic thoughts are not cut off and allowed to “persist.” Antirrhetikos provides select biblical verses that must be memorized to help in the recognition and the cutting off.

For this reason, we can see why sin cannot be understood as a general condition, at least in a practical sense. Evagrius does think that humanity is fallen but not inherently evil. The fall is simply as any Neoplatonic Christian would have thought at the time — we need to orient ourselves to what we believe is good, and this orientation is to others in our community as our fellow collaborators in making a life that is stretched out in time as good as it can be while we are together. The mechanism of the demons becomes a way of abstracting our desires from ourselves by giving sins a name so that we can recognize, cut off, and make time to think differently about how we want to be in the world.

To bring this meditation to a close, I want to look closely at a passage from Evagrius’ On Thoughts that spells all this out quite clearly and lays out a practice of time in relation to thoughts and sin that is relevant today:

Supposed the thought of avarice is sent by him [the demon of avarice]; distinguish from within this thought [1] the mind that received it, [2] the mental representation of gold, [3] the gold itself, [4] and the passion of avarice; then ask which of these elements is a sin. Is it the mind? But how? It is the image of God. But can it be the mental representation of gold? And who in his right mind would ever say this? Does the gold itself constitute sin? Then for what purpose was it created? It follows therefore that the fourth element is the cause of the sin, namely, that which is not an object with substantial subsistence, nor the mental representation of the object, nor even the incorporeal mind, but a pleasure hostile to humanity, born of free will, and compelling the mind to make improper use of the creatures of God: it is the law of God that has been entrusted with circumcising this pleasure. As you engage in this careful examination, the thought will be destroyed and dissipate in its own consideration, and the demon will flee from you when your intellect has been raised to the heights by this knowledge. (On Thoughts, Chapter 19, Sinkewicz trans.)

It is important to note here that the demon of avarice is not itself the sin. Rather, sin is a temporal process that unfolds as we deal with the appearance of the demon in thought. As Brakke emphasized, Evagrius is using passion here in the technical sense of Stoicism — an impression that leads to an assent that is allowed to linger such that it becomes passion as an out-of-control motivation. Thus sin is a practice of time. If we allow the thoughts sent by the demon to linger such that the gold becomes the occasion for avarice, sin has occurred. But sin has not occurred if we effectively cut off the transitional moment from the thought of gold to the investing of that thought with another thought that is motivated by the presence of the demon. To put a point on this, Evagrius writes in Antirrhetikos 3.5:

Against the love of money that withheld compassion from a brother who asked out of his need and that advised us to store up for ourselves alone:

You shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord (Leviticus 19:18)

Is Evagrius taking this famous passage out of context? By no means! He is using it, as Paul used it, as a general Spirit of the law that is applied to a particular sin as it arises in the moment. That moment is structured across a temporal movement that starts from a situation (a brother asks for money) that leads to an impression (avarice initially withholds compassion) that can become an action (keep the money for ourselves). For Evagrius, each of these moments is a thought, and the ability to cut off the process at any moment is also done with thought — cutting off is itself a thought that cuts off another thought: “Among the thoughts some cut off, and others are cut off… (On Thoughts 7).

Cutting off is the interruption of thought by thought to redirect thought. In the early stages of praktike, this interruption does not occur at the beginning, but after the impression of avarice trying to work its way into an action. Antirrhesis is Evagrius’ technical term that adapts the Stoic moral psychology as a practice of time for the monk, especially in the early stages of development. (It should become more automatic in the later stages of apatheia and gnostike.) This practice doesn’t work if the demon of avarice is assumed to arise within the subject as its origin. If we are inherently sinful and our thoughts arise from our sinful selves, then this technique couldn’t be trusted. The Evagrian subject, by being able to abstract and dissect the process of thought as an unfolding of time, is able to overcome the conversion of thought into sin by intervening into thought as an act of interruption driven by discernment. The first step is cutting off the demon from lingering and persisting. In this way we need not see Evagrius as offering all of us a way of life. Becoming a monk is not a live option. However, as a set of techniques for dealing with sin and thought, the monk’s withdrawal to the desert to make this the sole focus of his struggle can provide instructive value to those of us in the world today.