The Dialectics of Sin
From my upcoming book on the philosophy of Slavoj Zizek
When viewed in light of God and His revelation in the person of Jesus Christ, one cannot escape the conclusion that sin is both temporal and finite, for its very “mode of being” is self-undermining through rejecting the conditions of its possibility—the kenotic presence of God. Sin can only manifest within an ontological order that contradicts its most fundamental self-assertion, that is, self-assertion as such. Sin, at its zero level, is simply the empty, meaningless, and self-negating assertion of selfhood against all others, the “I=I.”
The truth of being is the mutual indwelling and “giving space” of self and other: I →← You. The “place” wherein the two converge is the “third,” rendering our communal ontology fundamentally and necessarily triune. The third is the “space” wherein self and other touch, the copula which unites subject and predicate, the Holy Spirit in Whom the relationship of Father and Son overflows in the generosity of love. A “mono-hypostatic” reality is impossible, as being is always-already a “being-in-relation” (to an other). But a “dual-hypostatic” reality is equally incoherent, since the relation of two alone does not allow for the revelation or actualization of relation/communion. Consider, for example, two corporeal objects in relation to one another and how they must always meet within some “space.” If two objects are moving towards one another in space, they will eventually collapse into each other, and they do so at the precise moment when the “space” between them disappears. However, if they are brought together and subsequently move outwards into three-dimensional space, they can, theoretically, continue to fill this space infinitely.
Sin is simply the rejection of and rebellion against triunity. It is the self who seeks to negate the “space” wherein the other manifests in its otherness through subsuming the other within itself:
Sin lies in the disinclination to leave the state of self-identity, the identity “I=I,” or more precisely, “I!” The root sin or the root of all sin is the assertion of oneself as oneself, without relation to that which is other, i.e., to God and to all creation. It is self-immersion without self-transcendence. All particular sins are only variants or manifestations of the stubborn self-immersion of selfhood. In other words, sin is the power of the protection of oneself as oneself that makes the person a “self-idol.” It is the power that “explains” I through I, not through God, and grounds I in I, not in God. Sin is the fundamental striving of I by which I becomes firm in its isolation and makes of itself the unique point of reality. Sin is what closes off all reality from I, for to see reality is precisely to go out of oneself and to transfer one’s I into not-I, into what is other, into what is visible, i.e., it is to love.1
Florensky contends that the Fichtean formula I = I, understood as the primordial act of self-positing, ultimately empties into the formal tautology “I!” While Fichte intends this identity to ground both the I and the not-I and thus the totality of experience, Florensky insists that it remains an abstract self-relation incapable of yielding real being. Rather than constituting reality, the self-positing I discloses an internal rift: identity appears only as opposition, as negation and, ultimately, self-negation.
