Communion with God governed our first parents’ relationship to each other. Being endowed with the life of God, through the Spirit of God, their natural inclination was, “I don’t matter, you do.”
Dr. Jean-Claude Larchet traces the pathologies of the fall and the remedies in his trilogy, Therapy of Spiritual Illnesses. Spiritual illnesses take root when man trades the contemplation of God for meeting bodily needs. Man forfeits communion with God in order to maintain sensible realities, pleasures, and personal comfort. He turns away from God for easy ‘goods’.
The Fathers say that this turn away from God toward the sensible world, sought in itself, constitutes a perversion of all human faculties.1 It is “against reason.” That’s not only because it is unreasonable to forfeit the riches of communion with God for trifles. It is. But the Fathers are also concerned with the fact that reason, when rightly used, sees the origin and telos of a person or thing in Christ. That means that the rational husband delights to see Christ formed in his wife as in himself. He uses his faculties to nourish her. The rational person delights to lead his neighbor and creation into finding its true selfhood in the life of God. The rational person loves his neighbor as himself.
In The New Man, Thomas Merton talks about an “absolute subjectivity” that is triggered and sustained by pride.2 This builds on the anti- or un-reasoning element of the fall. Fallen man, “sees all things from the viewpoint of a limited, individual self that is constituted as the center of the universe.” Merton tells us how the internal logic of absolute subjectivity plays out:
“If I am the center of the universe, then everything belongs to me. I can claim, as my due, all the good things of the earth. I can rob and cheat and bully other people. I can help myself to anything I like, and no one can resist me. Yet at the same time all must respect and love me as a benefactor, a sage, a leader, a king. They must let me bully them and take away all that they have and on top of it all they must bow down, kiss my feet and treat me as god.”3
With a normal subjective viewpoint, we look out from ourselves onto the world. We see a world created by God, imbued with the presence of God, finding its consummation in God. At the fall, this becomes looking out for ourselves onto objects of desire or obstacles to our desires. Every thought comes through the filter of self—my needs, my wants, my desires, my comfort. In our interpersonal relations, this creates the need to control outcomes. It results in manipulation and coercion, because other people’s wills become obstacles to self-actualization. We may not want to use brute force because of how that will make us look or because it will cause us trouble. Instead, we attempt to appear like we are honoring the will of another by using words, vehicles of rational thought. But we use words to obscure truth, to twist arms, to manipulate people into doing our will. At heart, we believe we own them. They exist for our desires.
The possibility of resistance creates anxiety and fear. The apostle tells us that perfect love casts out all fear—because it casts out self. But as long as self rules, the possibility of not having what one wants, not being what one wants, not being seen in the way one wants becomes an agonizing prospect. So I have to use my persona to control your will in order to get my heart’s desire. Or I must seclude myself, still trapped in a web of unmet desires which turn me in on myself.
I’ve seen too much of this. I’ve lived and breathed it. It’s what I don’t want to be. It is a piteous state. It’s the path to oblivion. I want to learn how to love others. I want to come into the church, to be anointed with the Holy Spirit, to come under the care of a spiritual father. I’m ready to let go of outcomes that I can foresee, and in foreseeing, seek to grasp—for myself, from others, at the cost of others. I’m ready to put myself in Christ’s hands and learn from him.
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