Sin and non-being

 

Sin and non-being

Let me start with two quotations of two early Christians. The first is of Irenaeus of Lyons (fl. 2nd century):

“Therefore the Son of the Father declares [Him] from the beginning, inasmuch as He was with the Father from the beginning, who did also show to the human race prophetic visions, and diversities of gifts, and His own ministrations, and the glory of the Father, in regular order and connection, at the fitting time for the benefit [of mankind]. For where there is a regular succession, there is also fixedness; and where fixedness, there suitability to the period; and where suitability, there also utility. And for this reason did the Word become the dispenser of the paternal grace for the benefit of men, for whom He made such great dispensations, revealing God indeed to men, but presenting man to God, and preserving at the same time the invisibility of the Father, lest man should at any time become a despiser of God, and that he should always possess something towards which he might advance; but, on the other hand, revealing God to men through many dispensations, lest man, falling away from God altogether, should cease to exist. For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God. For if the manifestation of God which is made by means of the creation, affords life to all living in the earth, much more does that revelation of the Father which comes through the Word, give life to those who see God." (Against Heresies, 4.20.7; source: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103420.htm )

The second one is of Athanasius of Alexandria (fl. 4th century):

“For transgression of the commandment was turning them back to their natural state, so that just as they have had their being out of nothing, so also, as might be expected, they might look for corruption into nothing in the course of time.  For if, out of a former normal state of non-existence, they were called into being by the Presence and loving-kindness of the Word, it followed naturally that when men were bereft of the knowledge of God and were turned back to what was not (for what is evil is not, but what is good is), they should, since they derive their being from God who IS, be everlastingly bereft even of being; in other words, that they should be disintegrated and abide in death and corruption.” (On the Incarnation, chapter 4, source: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2802.htm )

In this post, my objective isn’t to discuss the eschatological beliefs of Irenaeus or Athanasius but, rather, to discuss the implication of the argument above.

According to both thinkers, God is, of course, the source of Being. And sin, being a deed against God, is directed t what is opposite of God, i.e. non-being. Hence, sin is, in a sense, a self-destructive impulse: its ‘last end’ is non-existence.

Hence, the logical consequence of all this argument seems to be that the irremediably ‘lost’ must cease to exist. And this makes, in my opinion, metaphysical sense. If God is Good, a state of irremediable sin would be a state in which the participation in the Good is completely lost. This would imply that sin leads to non-existence.

Paul Griffiths, while commenting some passages from Augustine of Hyppo’s (fl. 4th-5th centuries), writes in his book ‘Decreation’:

“The central analogy that Augustine uses to link the first death with the second in this passage is that of desertion or abandonment. When the body is abandoned by the soul, it is left behind completely and irreversibly. That is what abandonment means. When the body is left in this way, death is the result, as Augustine explicitly says. This death is the death of the body; it is also, in the terms of this study, the annihilation or bringing to nothing of the body. The body’s lifelessness just is its annihilation. All that is left of a soulless body is the physical trace. The dead human body is no longer a corpus humanum, a human body, at all; neither is it a corporeal substance. It is detritus, to be scattered, pulverized, buried, or burned. By analogy, one might expect Augustine to say, when the LORD has completely or irreversibly abandoned the anima humana, the human soul, it too is brought to nothing, annihilated. Augustine does say that the soul dies, and he gives no reason in the quoted passage not to read the LORD’s desertion of the human soul in the same way as the soul’s abandonment of the human body. The language is strong: the mors of the whole human creature (totius hominis) occurs upon the desertion of the body by a soul deserted by God—cum anima Deo deserta deserit corpus. If the soul’s desertion by the LORD is read in the same way as the flesh’s desertion by the soul, the conclusion is that the soul bereft of the LORD no longer exists as such. On this interpretation, the second death would be the bringing of the soul to nothing, its annihilation. And the plausibility of this reading is deepened by recalling the pervasiveness in Augustine of emphasis upon the idea that the anima humana is brought into being out of nothing and has a constant tendency to damage itself by losing being, by tending toward the nothing from which it came. A soul bereft of the LORD would necessarily be nothing, for only the LORD’s graceful act brought it into being, and only the LORD’s graceful act sustains it in being. Without these, it comes to nothing. The second death does to the soul what the first death does to the body: brings it to nothing.

But Augustine resists this conclusion, in the passage quoted and consistently elsewhere. And he does so in spite of the fact that the grammar of his thought strongly supports it. “The human soul is truly said to be immortal,” he says, which is to say that it never ceases to live (vivere) and to experience (sentire). But why is this so? Why is it necessary to say that an anima humana related to the LORD as a dead body is to a soul separated from it continues to be a subject of experience, and does so without end? What sustains, in Augustine and in the later tradition, the view that the human soul is necessarily immortal, no matter what damage it does to itself?

Sin, on a broadly Augustinian understanding, reduces sinners by moving them toward what they seek, which is the nothing from which they came. Repeated sin, as it approaches the necrophiliac purity of invidia or acedia, may bring sinners to the point where they lack the energy—the very being—to turn their gaze toward the LORD who is the only possibility of re-creation, of setting sinners on a path of remaking, away from the nihil and toward the LORD.” (Paul Girffiths, Decreation, chapter 23)

 

 

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