LIVING WATERS
For the proclamation of the Gospel and the edification of the Body of Christ
The Basic Sin
How did man come to be essentially evil? The Christian answer to this question -as posed by C.S. Lewis- is to be found in the doctrine of the fall. According to such a doctrine, man today is a horror to God and to himself, a creature ill-adapted to the universe, not because God made him so, but because he himself made him so by abusing his free will.
God is good, and made all things good, and one of the good things he made is the free will of rational creatures. But, by the very nature of free will, it included the possibility of evil. And creatures, availing themselves of that possibility, became evil.
Now, the first sin was essentially the sin of disobedience. Not a social sin, but a personal sin; not against one's neighbor, but against God. And that disobedience came from pride. St. Augustine has described it as the creature's attempt to establish itself, to exist by itself.
When the creature became conscious of its self, as someone distinct from God, the alternative of choosing between God and self arose. Daily this sin is committed by little children and ignorant men, as well as by the most sophisticated people: it is the fall in every individual life, and every fall of every individual life; the basic sin behind all individual sins. All through the day, and every day of our lives, we slip, we slip, we fall from God to us.
But God could not have made us this way. This gravitating away from God, always returning to the self, must be a product of the fall. This desire for independence, to have something of my own, as different from His; this "to be master of one's own life"; this desire to be a noun, when one is only an adjective; this great striving of the creature who wants to be god, is the sin of the fall. The very existence of a self includes from the beginning the danger of self-idolatry.
This sin was very horrendous, since the consequences were so terrible. The human spirit ceased to have full control of its organism, because it rebelled against the source of its power. From there the deterioration extended to his whole being, and to the whole species. Far from God, man became his own idol. Hence pride and ambition, the desire to be adorable in his own eyes and to put down and humiliate all rivals, envy, the tireless search for more and more security, were now the attitudes that came most easily to him. A new kind of man, never created by God, had made his way into existence through sin.
Thus, our present condition is explained by the fact that we are members of a spoiled species. The greatest good for us in our present state, therefore, must mean primarily a reparative or corrective good. And it is in this context of reparation or correction that pain plays its part.