Full Darkness

Original Sin, Moral Injury, and Wartime Violence

Brian S. Powers

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780802876515
• eBook ISBN: 9781467452656
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

A theological treatment of war, trauma, and the fundamental character of human existence

 In  Full Darkness theologian and wartime veteran Brian Powers argues that the Augustinian concept of original sin can illuminate the nature of wartime violence, particularly through the lens of veteran trauma. He shows precisely how sin and war both cause human identity, agency, and hope to be lost.

Powers explores sin as a pathogenic disfigurement that shapes cultural values and ethical ideas, frequently resulting in moral injury. Combat veterans experience a humanity deprived of grace and are devoured by the forces of war, often suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. But Powers provides a ray of hope and a path towards healing.

Ideal for veterans, chaplains, and pastors,  Full Darkness offers a new perspective on the cultural understanding of military violence, provides theological help for those drowning in guilt and shame, and paves the way for reclaiming positive human agency and identity.

CHAPTER 1

Original Sin and the Trauma of Violence

Sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned.

—ROMANS 5:12

Perhaps the primary task of Christian theology is to continually translate its doctrines, concepts, and symbol systems into the linguistic and conceptual lingua franca of the contemporary world. What is at stake in this enterprise is the relevance of theology to speak to the problems that present themselves in ways that are both consistent with world history and challenging to society by their historical novelty. In light of the violent threats and conflicts that much of the world currently faces, the doctrine of sin can hold a great deal of explanatory power. Yet it is in dire need of fresh translation, because in its current colloquial usage it appears to have lost much of its capacity to speak to the largest threats to life in the modern world. Its meaning has been colonized by a consumer culture, and its primary usages seem to describe trivial indulgences (the “sinfulness” of giving in to the “temptation” to eat a piece of chocolate cake) or transgressions of a societal norm (often sexual, e.g., the “sinfulness” of those whose sexual practice does not conform to the standards of the community).¹ These definitions have a neutralizing effect on the term: they become unable to speak about the distorting forces that corrupt our desires, and unable to speak about sin’s most destructive and violent outcomes.

The deeply problematic aspect of this for Christian theology is that the notion of sin is deeply intertwined with and informed by the most powerful doctrines and symbols of Christianity: atonement and salvation—cross and resurrection.² Our understanding of sin thus shapes how we view the event of the cross and salvation itself. If sin is understood in a relatively trifling sense, then the potent images of crucifixion and empty tomb also become pale and colorless. Is our eating of chocolate or our failure to adhere to societal norms what we need the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross to save us from? Conversely—and even more to the point—are these indulgences and failures to conform the problems of the world that are revealed in the torturous violence of the cross? If sin is perceived as merely a trifling indulgence, then in a world of hunger, conflict, terrorism, torture, dehumanization, rape, oppression, and subjugation, certainly the message of the gospel seems absurd, and the brutal death of Jesus even more puzzling. Much of the power of the gospel rests on its insight about the force at the heart of the description of the world as it is: Does the notion of “sin” truly have the power to name what is wrong, what is functionally broken and awry? The gospel poses an answer to this question at the cross: the damage and danger of sin is laid bare in, among other things, our brutal capacity for violence against each other. Sin, then, must be redeemed from its stultifying cultural accretions in order to both faithfully convey the horror of the crucifixion’s testimony to sin’s reality and to adequately describe the wrongness of the world in a compelling way.

The deep irony of sin’s current inability as a term to describe the wrongness of the world is that our society seems open to new descriptions of this wrongness, as multiple threats to the stability of the world challenge governments and philosophical constructions to account for danger, violence, and radical evil. While it likely didn’t take airliners careening into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon to convince anyone that the world isn’t as it should be, it is safe to say that after 9/11, Americans have a heightened awareness of the “wrongness” of the world. Indeed, in a larger sense, after the violence that closed the twentieth century shattered the progressive optimism that opened it, this sense of “wrongness” has developed a particular acuteness in the West. The continued virulence and boldness of militant nationalism, xenophobia, and religious radicalism around the world have resulted in alarming displays of dehumanization and misery; the specter and threat of new and continued viral outbreaks bring out the worst of our own fears and demonstrate our own fragility; hunger, poverty, and economic disparity continually plague our world. Most critically, governments around the world seem powerless to right the proverbial ship, opting instead for solutions that seem to exacerbate the problem, and that often simply reinforce the notion that things are not as they should be. In Girard’s terms, it would appear that the very institutions we have established to control and curtail violence have often fanned its flames instead. Perhaps a deeper and more “mythic” conception of violence and wrongness may help us understand both the world and ourselves powerfully and authentically.

A central aim of this book is to demonstrate that the concept of sin has the gravitas and force to describe the wrongness of the world in a compelling way: it is to argue, building on Alistair McFadyen’s work in Bound to Sin, that the doctrine of sin itself holds descriptive and explanatory power in naming a pathological force in our world that lies behind its violence and wrongness. I argue here that the specific concept of original sin provides a conceptual vocabulary that holds together the power of violence, respects its almost mythic nature, and provides a moral framework that resonates with the forces encountered on the modern battlefield. I argue in later chapters that, as a means of public theology, sin can be understood to describe violence and its metastasizing effects in a profound way that directly challenges ideologies that conceive of violence as domesticable and controllable. I argue that, further, because of the explanatory power of this understanding of sin as seen through the lens of violence, it can be used to illuminate the psychological wounds suffered by those who have experienced trauma as a result of participation in conflict. Ultimately, it sheds light on the pervasive, infectious, and insidious nature of violence itself. In light of these larger aims, I describe in the first half of this chapter an essentially Augustinian concept of original sin, highlighting Augustine’s understanding of the constraints of human willing; then I discuss how this idea can be traced through specific pathologies, drawing a conceptual vocabulary from McFadyen’s contemporary translation of Augustine’s doctrine in Bound to Sin. In the second half of the chapter, I argue that this conceptual vocabulary resonates deeply with the forces that govern the modern battlefield and act on the psyche of its combatants to affect the horizons of their willing.

Augustine and Sin, Originally

Prior to Augustine, the discussion of sin revolved around two confessional foci: first, the conviction that the world is not as it should be, that things have somehow gone deeply wrong; and second, that humanity is implicated in this wrongness. In addition, early reflections on sin were further bounded by several theological claims that came to serve as “relative absolutes” in theological reflection; theologians navigate these in differing ways. The first of these bounding claims is that the world, including humanity and nature, was “good” as created by God. As Irenaeus demonstrates, this may not mean that the world, or humanity, was perfect; but it means that the world was not created in a defective state by God, thus protecting God from the charge of explicitly authoring evil.³ Irenaeus distinguishes sharply between what is created—good and rational—and what is uncreated and perfect. What is created is good and can ascend “towards the perfect,” but this perfecting is a process of growth by which the good creation asymptotically approaches God.⁴

The second of these claims is that the world as it is now is burdened and broken in a state of sin—that is, not how it was meant to be. Athanasius expressed this distortion as an existential threat in terms of being and nonbeing, arguing that while the world was created from nothing—and given the gift of life and being—sin, violence, and death have so powerfully twisted the world that it now risks utterly perishing and returning to nonexistence. In terms of humanity, Gregory of Nyssa says that our nature, composed of both spirit and flesh, has developed a “bias towards evil.”⁵ Rather than adhere to our higher, spiritual nature, which exhibits the image of God, we are weighed down by our lower, fleshly nature and have become deeply corrupted by our baser desires and instincts. According to Gregory, the darkness of evil has interposed itself between the light of God and the world and eclipsed God’s goodness such that evil’s shadow hangs heavy upon the earth.⁶

Third, whatever the state of distortion of the world, one of the basic tenets of humanity is the power of self-determination, more commonly understood as free will. Irenaeus understood that autonomy was simply a fundamental ground of moral existence, arguing that creatures could either be morally free and sometimes sinful or irrational and determined by an outside force toward good. He argues that if any being is created with an evil nature, it cannot be held morally accountable for its evil deeds, because “for such were they created.”⁷ Since all people are of the same (primordially) good nature, he argues, and since they all have the free will to either cling to this good or to reject it, the condemnation of those who do ill is just. What is crucial is that all persons have the power to act as they will, either heeding the good counsel of prophets and wise and godly individuals, or abandoning such goodness and acting against it. Similary, Gregory of Nyssa argues that, without free will, there is no morality, for “virtue must be a voluntary thing,” neither forced nor compelled.⁸

These boundaries color early theologians’ discussions of the Fall—the primordial event by which the world has gone deeply wrong—in widely varying ways. For Irenaeus, for example, it was not possible for creatures to be rational and morally free but unable to commit sin. Humanity as created by God was to develop from its created state (which was good, but not perfect) into perfection through a long progression of maturity. The sin of Adam was a failure of obedience: the rejection of the divine plan of development and a reaching for “godliness” while still in a state of moral immaturity; it was a denial of God’s ability to perfect humanity and grant flesh incorruptibility.⁹ Irenaeus views the Fall as a serious rupture in the divine plan, but also as an outworking of the infantile exercise of humanity’s capacity to freely will. Origen, using a more classically Greek conceptual vocabulary, posits that the creation of intelligences (noes) preceded the creation of the material world and that these intelligences originally contemplated God in the full warmth of divine love. Each intelligence (save that of Christ) became “satiated” and, from the resulting sense of ennui, fell away from this original state of intimacy, cooling (psychesthai ) into souls (psychai ).¹⁰ The degree to which each fell away from God is revealed by the materiality of their being. Accordingly, angels fell the least, demons the most, and humanity fell to a position somewhere between them. The goodness of God and the free will of the creature are preserved in the postlapsarian state: the will mediates the soul’s continual position in the material world between spirit and flesh.

Augustine’s innovation is to affirm the essential goodness of the prelapsarian creation, while carving out a particularly nuanced understanding of free will that deeply colors his understanding of the Fall and the broken condition of the world. For Augustine, Adam and Eve (but primarily Adam) possessed the ability to freely will: that is, to be human is to possess a created will and to act rationally in the world by exercising one’s own volition. The issue in the Garden concerns the proper exercise of the free will that is granted to Adam, who is unique among all nonangelic creatures as a personal agent. Augustine argues that, if Adam had kept the commandments of God “with pious obedience,” then he would have passed from his mortal form into something far greater, obtaining, “without suffering death, a blessed immortality without end.”¹¹ However, along with his capacity to exercise the will “properly” in faithfulness comes the necessary capacity that Adam may use his “free will proudly and disobediently,” in which case he would be subject to death, and to live “as the beasts do,” as a “slave of his own lust, destined to suffer eternal punishment after death” (12.22).

The true Fall, Augustine argues, takes place at the level of the will. He argues that the will follows desire: it inclines by its nature toward that which it perceives as good. In the Garden, Adam is presented with a close connection with God, who, as Augustine repeatedly says, “supremely is” the ultimate and true good, “by which is bestowed upon [the will] the light by which it can see and the fire by which it can love” (14.13). Consequently, the will’s ability to see truly and to love purely comes from its orientation toward God, and its obedience to the divine command. What precedes Adam’s physical act of disobedience is the true moment in which evil enters humanity: the turning of Adam’s perception of the ultimate good, and thus of his will, from God, the source of all true goodness, to himself. This turning itself is, for Augustine, the beginning of an evil will and the way that what was created good and rationally free becomes corrupted by evil and falls away from the one who is the very ground of being. It is not, Augustine is careful to note, that the will has turned toward something that is itself evil, but that it turns to itself and therefore, instead of desiring the ultimate good, which is God, it desires what is inferior—its own gratification. The disobedient act of eating the forbidden fruit is the act of a will that is following a corrupted desire to satiate itself rather than the naturally ordered higher desire to remain in communion with God.

For Augustine, since all of humanity and human society were united and held together in the person of Adam, the consequences of the turning of his will are catastrophic—not only for Adam and Eve, but for all subsequent generations. The most severe consequence, of course, is the loss of the path from mortality to immortality. After failing to exercise his will with piety and obedience, Adam—and subsequently all of humanity—is subject to death, both the death of the physical body and the death of the soul via eternal condemnation. Yet the Fall entails a particular distortion of human nature itself that binds humanity in separating from God congenitally. First, there is a disintegration of the connection between one’s volition, the will to do something, and one’s ability to carry out what one wishes to do. Augustine exhibits this primarily as a loss of control over one’s own body, and that rebellion parallels Adam and Eve’s disobedience toward God (13.14).¹² But there is also the notion within this formulation that a disconnect exists between willing (as agency) and desire itself. Even while the will follows desire, one of the consequences of original sin is the severing of the close connection between the two, most primally exhibited by Augustine as a loss of sexual control, wherein one often acts as one may not will to act. Second, and far more distorting, however, is the alienation of the will from what is truly good. Having turned inward to the lesser goods, our desires are disordered and, instead of being oriented toward what is the highest good, we are oriented toward and driven by pursuit of lesser goods. Without divine grace, we cannot reorient our disordered and confused desires, and our wills are bound in patterns of distorted willing. Augustine argues that, since in both a mythical and a “seminal” sense “we all were that one man who fell into sin,” these effects and distortions are propagated to all of humanity congenitally; the broken nature is propagated because “nothing could be born of them which was not what they themselves had been” (13.3). We are all born into this sinful condition in which our wills are bound and our nature “vitiated” by sin; humanity’s “corrupt root” thus brings forth an entire situation of sin, whose tendrils reach into all parts of human life.

The radicality of Augustine’s understanding of the Fall revolves primarily around this notion that, as a result of Adam’s sin—when divine grace is absent—the will is hopelessly alienated from the true good. According to Augustine, the power of the evil unleashed is so great that it corrupts every facet of human nature, such that we can no longer choose to act rightly: our desires are too bent in pursuit of the lesser goods that we perceive to be ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by John Swinton
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Original Sin and the Trauma of Violence
• Chapter 2: External Forces and the Contemporary Military Experience
• Chapter 3: The Dichotomous American Experience of Violence
• Chapter 4: Privation of Goodness and the Injured Soul
• Chapter 5: The Enslavement of Agency and Betrayal of Identity
• Chapter 6: Sin as Poisoned Memory and Hopeless Future
• Bibliography
• Index