When we hear words like ‘sin’ and ‘possession’ we might think they don’t really apply to us anymore. Maybe they are great to use as a kind of language game with our fellow Christians, a way of building community or a kind of secret handshake, but out there? In the real world? If we are honest with ourselves, it feels like the words have no basis in reality.
We might think that Christian language is a bit ‘out of touch’ with the concrete realities of life in the 21st century, but I want to say as humbly as possible that it is not that Christian language is ‘out of touch’ with reality but instead we that are out of touch with ourselves.
In our failure to use words like ‘sin’ and ‘possession’ in modern dialogue, especially dialogue with friends who might not want to ‘play’ the ‘Christian language game,’ we allow the phenomena these words aim at to have an unspoken, formless, and chaotic, control over us. After all it is to order the chaos of his soul in speech that Augustine asks for from God throughout Confessions. “I am dust and ashes, but let me speak!”[1]
So first, sin.
There are two popular images used for sin throughout church history. The first is the medical metaphor (i.e. we are sick and need a physician). The second is debt bondage (i.e. we owe a debt and have sold ourselves into slavery to pay off that debt). In the first image we need God’s healing grace for our sin and in the second we need his atoning death.
To this day the two images plague how we think about addiction in general. Are addicts sick and in need of a doctor or are they debtors in need of punishment?[2] The first image is at the expense of individual responsibility while the second errs on the side of too much individual responsibility (although it is very convenient for the Roman Empire whose strength came from legal clarity).
So, what do we do? What does someone like St. Augustine do?
Although Augustine is not explicit, the way he describes sin is the way we might describe trauma today.
While there is a conservative impulse to push back on the narrative that ‘everyone’s traumatized’ viewing it as mere ‘pop psychology’ or ‘victim mentality,’ what we should do instead is follow Augustine and lean into it. Yes! You finally get it. Everyone is traumatized. Everyone carries the mark of Adam’s sin. While we’ve inherited this trauma as a victim, we also actively participate in it whenever we are triggered. The anger or violence we’ve experienced, whether physical or emotional, we pass on in a hard-wired mimetic generational contagion.
If you’ve ever found yourself wondering why the heck did I just have that thought? Why did I imagine violence against one of my own children? And now am I trying to bury that thought so no one finds out about it! Yes, this is trauma, but in it’s true (spiritual) register this is sin. An ancient and rich concept that we are slowly recovering as we long for more meaningful existence in a digital age. Even just ten years ago we would have laughed at Augustine’s idea that we could transmit sin through sperm.[3] Today research in epigenetics is proving exactly this point: sin, or ‘trauma,’ is transferred ‘physiologically.’[4]
As Christians we should do our part to speak it – to say ‘sin.’
Second, possession.
Many of us are possessed.
In the ancient philosophy the soul is the ‘anima’ – the animating force of our body. In Augustine’s account in On Music the soul animates the body and though we speak of the body and soul separately, they are one since the soul always moves in and through the body. When the soul doesn’t ‘animate’ the body with ease, we are ‘interrupted’ and our attention turns towards away from its project. A broken doorknob for example. When it works, we don’t notice it. When it’s broken, we do. When there is brokenness, the soul does not move ‘in-and-through’ the body with ease. So, when the soul struggles to animate the body, it causes pain (i.e. attention to the body). Augustine even goes so far as to say that when we don’t experience the ‘smooth functioning’ of our own bodies, we try to control others.[5] He describes psychological projection perfectly nearly 1,500 years before Freud.
Because I work around the video game industry in my professional life, I have a lot of parents talk to me about their experiences with their kids’ playing video games. Recently a parent said, “He says ‘what do you want!’ as if he were possessed when we try to talk to him… it’s like he’s a different kid.” To which I replied, he probably is. Something besides his soul is animating his body and speech.
Whenever we ‘outsource’ the animating force of our bodies or give it up and over to some other ‘power and principality’ (for me this is Instagram) we are quite literally possessed in the classical sense of the word. When we wake up and look at our phones to ‘boot up’ or when we, without thinking, grab our phones when they buzz with an alert. Possession! Again, in the most literal sense. We are no longer the animating force of our bodies – somebody, some other ‘power’ is.
In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard talks about the kind of demonic activity that results from our inability and unwillingness to speak these things (here sin and possession), but he also talks about what saves us from them. For Kierkegaard, “Inclosing reserve is precisely muteness. Language, the word, is precisely what saves, what saves the individual from the empty abstraction of inclosing reserve.”[6]
So, what can we do?
We should start by saying ‘sin.’
We should say, ‘possessed’ (literally). We should pray, “Lord Jesus Christ son of God have mercy on me a sinner.”
[1] Augustine, Confessiones I.6.7
[2] See the work of Luke McCracken (UC Santa Barbara) on the Latin concept of addictus for a rich genealogy of these two images in church history.
[3] See Augustine’s debates with Julian of Aeclenum in De nuptis et concupiscentia.
[4] See for example a summary of these findings throughout Gabor Mate’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture (especially pp. 7, 11-20).
[5] See De Musica VI.13.41 and Cf. Confessiones I.8 “When my demands were not fulfilled […] I became furious with my elders who disobeyed me, and with those who were independent and who did not bow to my will: I got my revenge on them by crying.”
[6] Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety 123.