Sin and Covenant in Voegelin and Levinas

To sin is to make a wrong choice.  It’s not a mistake.  The enactor of a choice that is merely mistaken hasn’t chosen to make the mistake.  If there is such a thing as sin, it must minimally be the choice to choose wrongly.  But there is a second level to this choice.  Implicitly, it’s the choice to choose wrongly in the face of a Witness who fathoms this choice clearly and has the character of divinity.  Whatever its rationalizations, a sin is not an interlude of opacity in self-awareness.  It has another character.

In Eric Voegelin’s The Ecumenic Age, we find a discussion of Paul the apostle.  In Paul’s view of sin, Voegelin sees “a ‘historical’ problem, peculiar to the Judaism of his time; the law was not always a screen that separated man from God.”  After all, it’s Paul who cites Abraham as a character “to whom his faith … rather than any deeds in fulfillment of a law was counted as righteousness (Rom. 4:3, Gen. 15:6).”[1]  On this reading, even Paul was not invariably Pauline.  When Paul is not being Pauline, man is not defined as a sinner.  As it turns out, man is a sinner  only when he chooses to sin.

Thus, in Voegelin’s Israel and Revelation, Moses, the man who “hears” God’s voice, makes it feasible to live under a grid of directives (the Decalogue) as “the body of fundamental rules which constitute a people under God.”[2]  Let us look at how Voegelin thinks this feasibility occurs.  Can those happenings give us insight into the character of sin?

We’ve noted that sin involves a choice of a certain kind.  What kind of choice does Voegelin discern in the burning bush interaction between Moses and God?  And in the subsequent interaction between God and Israel at the foot of the mountain, where Moses acts as indispensable instrument?

The Voegelinian language oscillates between an enigma and a change in being.  “In an undefinable manner, the presence of God has become historical through Moses.”[3]  In this presence-become-historical, there is almost a disavowal of choice.  “The command could be rejected only by a man who could never hear it: the man who can hear cannot reject, because he has ontologically entered the will of God, as the will of God has entered him.”[4]  A little later in the same discussion, the God/Moses interaction is called “a mutual presence,” first experienced at the burning bush, then expanding into the covenant between God and Israel in history.  He calls the human side of this historic breakthrough into reciprocity, “the responsive trust of man in the presence of God.”[5]

About responsive trust, Emmanuel Levinas may be able to supply additional details.  In The Temptation of Temptation, Levinas attends to the sequence of the words by which this people accepts its side of the covenant: “We will do and we will hear.”

Israel’s acceptance reverses the commonsensical order.  Ordinarily, Levinas notes, “We want to know before we do.”  We give priority to knowledge —  the right of way to philosophy — allowing our consequential acts to “arise only after calculation, after a careful weighing of the pros and cons.”[6]

There is a further puzzle.  Was this acceptance of the gift of the covenant  free or coerced?  If refusal meant chaos (the death of meaning, or our release into a world where “time and chance happen to them all”) how freely did we enter into this agreement?

If ideal freedom were choice in a vacuum, doing prior to thought would comport a “blindness [which], even if it be that of trust, would lead to catastrophe.”  Levinas is, however, sure that we are dealing here with another kind of knowledge: “a lucidity without tentativeness, not preceded by a hypothesis-knowledge, or by an idea, or by a trial-knowledge.  But such a knowledge is one in which its messenger is simultaneously the very message.”

Which messenger is Levinas talking about, God or Moses?  The Biblical text oscillates between the two.  At first report, the elders hear God directly.  When that proves humanly unbearable, they implore Moses to act as intermediary — but an intermediary riddled with divine actuality.

And we, who get such a message, who are we?  Levinas here appropriates the Jewish reminder to treat oneself as also present at the foot of the mountain.  So situated, we know that we are not the authors of ourselves.  Rather, we are the kind of creature on whom the pressure of existence pre-exists us and weighs. The being that we are takes on the weight for which Levinas gives the name “responsibility.”  In our existence as ourselves, the ego is not the first thing.  Responsibility “establishes the ego.”  This means that there is no vacuum in which to make the kind of free choice that we imagined.  First, one has responsibility, which is “the impossibility of escaping from God.”[7]  Subsequently, one ought to consider how to parcel it out, how to weigh it, with regard to oneself and the countless others.

By analogy, we might compare the argument Socrates presents in The Crito.  He too is not the author of himself.  All that has gone into the composition of him is due to the polis: his family, their protection in the raising of him, the education he acquired, the purposes he can entertain, including his decision to test the Delphic oracle.  To turn his back on the debt he has carried from birth would be inexcusable bad faith.

So also for Levinas, we find ourselves in a thick coexistence with God and other people.  We must negotiate that coexistence.  The real question is not, Do we freely accept the covenant?  Rather it’s, Do we freely accept the option of acting in good faith?

For our purposes, which have to do with understanding the nature of sin, this may be as close as we need come to an understanding of how and why someone may decide not to sin.

Now where, in this terrain, can we locate the decision to sin?  Things seemed clear while we stood at the foot of the mountain.  Our contemporary landscape is anything but.

What is a sinful life?  To trace the pathway of any human life through its space and time, we might scan the direction taken by the predominant desires within that life.  Desires don’t preclude choice.  Normally we choose between options more or less desirable.  Choice is socially consequential, since desires are, in different degrees, contagious.  Also, desire and desirability have to do with one another.  One needs to persuade oneself.  One needs to be persuasive to others.  If I am to succeed in the projects of my life, I will need others to sign on, to one degree or another.  In the medium of human reciprocity, what can sin do?

In Elie Wiesel’s Night[8], his record of a boyhood lived in the thick of the Holocaust, condemned victims refuse to believe that anything so horrible as putting people into ovens would be possible in our civilized age.  Their stubborn optimism-of-the-sane persists as, with each stage, another layer of human dignity is peeled away.  Privacy, any ability to put a good face on anything about oneself, most of the strength for emotional continuing — all that is peeled away, layer by layer.  A person in that condition is completely unpersuasive.

When you reduce and exfoliate, layer by layer, maliciously and gratuitously, every last skin that invites or harbors erotic power – so that nothing is left but the after-trace of a human being to whom the worst has been done – what meaning can we assign to such a reduction?

The cynics and those who take the absurdist view will answer at once: There is no meaning left.  The sky goes dark.

In pursuit of an answer, I decided to try empathically to coincide with an individual who has been reduced to the sub-erotic level in that particular context.[9]  Here’s what I saw.

The individual victim, reduced to the point where every desirable element has been stripped away, is discovered below the level of the mutual persuasiveness that is social life.  As such, he or she has been the victim of the most unqualified evil perpetrated in recorded history.

There was something else I saw.  The Holocaust was a gift of the Jewish people to humankind.  I report this part of my vision as I saw it – all too aware that such a report is instantly open to accusations of bad taste, competitive victimology, bad theology, and so on.

In everyday terms, what do I have in mind?  As we know, the Holocaust is routinely invoked as a metric for evil.  Because of it, utilitarians and other moral philosophers have been taxed for explaining misdeeds in morally neutral terms.  In the political arena, reports of other atrocities get compared to the Holocaust.

By suffering consequences of deliberate malice so terrible that even its deniers acknowledge it by their denial, this targeted six million have made our otherwise opaque and unreadable time morally legible.  In a relativizing world, these sufferers, by the very abyss of their suffering, gave contemporary moral discussion its own absolute.

So, despite themselves and without wishing to, the people of the covenant, in whom (Gen. 12:3) God promised Abraham that “all the families of the earth [will] be blessed,” have after all — and not for the first time — rendered a great service to “all the families of the earth.”

 

Notes

[1] Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, Edited with an Introduction by Michael Franz (University of Missouri Press, 2000), p. 323.  I am grateful to Paul Caringella for guiding me to relevant discussions of sin in Voegelin.

[2] Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, (Louisiana State University Press, 1958), p. 415.

[3]Ibid., p. 399.

[4] Ibid., p. 407.

[5] Ibid., 417.

[6] Emmanuel Levinas, “The Temptation of Temptation” in Nine Talmudic Readings, Translated and with an Introduction by Annette Aronowicz (Indiana University Press, 1994) pp. 34f.

[7] Ibid., pp. 48ff.

[8] Elie Wiesel, Night (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, N.Y., 1960).

[9] Where the victims were pious Eastern European Jews, whose mental terrain was already inhabited by saints, angelic beings and devils, another view of their situation was possible.  See Yaffa Eliach’s remarkable collection, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust (Avon Books, New York, NY, 1982).