Falling at the First Instant

Part 3, Maximus on Sin at the First Instant

At the end of the last post I mentioned that I was borrowing from Maximus the Confessor concerning the nature of sin at the first instant.

The basic idea is linking sensation to desire. When sensation dawns in consciousness desire follows. That desire pulls our loves toward created things and away from God. This, I am arguing, is the primordial fall, recapitulated in every person. Our desires "immediately" tug our loves toward the sensible world, causing us to lose contact with the invisible.

This isn't an exact example, since it has to do with fear rather than desire, but think of Peter walking on the water. The "instant" Peter takes his eyes off Jesus he sinks. I'm arguing that something analogous happens at the first instant of consciousness. Our first "waking" pulls our eyes and desires toward the world and we sink.

All this is a speculative way to unpack the metaphysics of Eve's sin:

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.

First, sensation--"the woman saw"--followed by desire: "pleasing to the eye" and "desirable." In short, before creatures are even aware of what is happening, their senses and desires immediately pull them into the world where they become entangled by ignorance, desire, and fear.

I've basically taken this idea from Maximus. For example, from Ad Thalassium 61:

When God created human nature, he did not create sensible pleasure and pain along with it; rather, he furnished it with a certain spiritual capacity for pleasure, a pleasure whereby human beings would be able to enjoy God ineffably. But at the instant he was created, the first man, by use of his senses, squandered this spiritual capacity--the natural desire of the mind for God--on sensible things. In this, his very first movement, he activated an unnatural pleasure through the medium of his senses.

Beyond being a description of the first sin, the first desire directed away from God, this is also the template for all sin, the very definition of idolatry. At the heart of all sin is misdirected desire, directing our loves toward created things rather than the Creator. And there is a natural psychology at work here, as I describe in The Slavery of Death. In the grip of ignorance, desire, and fear, creatures try to secure their own lives through created realities. As finite creatures, we must to pay attention to food, clothing, and shelter. But as Jesus said, "Humanity does not live by bread alone." This ontological truth is eclipsed by ignorance, desire, and fear which lock into a reinforcing feedback loop. Driven by ignorance, desire, and fear, our appetite for material abundance and our longings for messianic technologies that will rescue us from our finitude grows exponentially. This also curdles into paranoia and hatred toward groups who we feel threaten our resources and survival. We build walls and bombs.

All this is triggered by a longing to escape our finitude, and it pulls us further and further away from God. In short, in describing the first instant of sin--desire directed away from God and toward the creation--I'm describing the whole pattern of sin.