Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Luther
The atheist Jean Paul Sartre in his 1943 play The Flies caricatures a Christian moaning in light of his sins.
"I stink…I am a mass of rottenness…I have sinned a thousand
times, I am a sink of ordure [obscenity, foulness], and I reek to
heaven." Jupiter/Zeus responds, "O worthy man!"
Sartre had an immediate political message for his people who were
grovelling under the jackboots of Hitler's forces and the Vichy French
who collaborated with the Nazis. A member of the French Resistance,
Sartre called his people to make a commitment and not to live like cows
to be herded and milked and slaughtered. He shared with Nietzsche before
him a hatred for this sickeningly passive view of life with its
"kick-me-again-it's-all-I-deserve" outlook.
The political nature of the play gave Sartre the chance also to express his existential philosophy (which
comes close to worshipping "choice"). The difference between a real
human and an animal is that the human has the capacity for choice, the
capacity to transcend pressures whether from culture or some other
outside source. To grovel and to allow others to tell you how to live
and what to think, Sartre insisted, is to reject the one thing that
makes humans different from animals. If you will not make a personal commitment where do you differ from a donkey?
For this reason and more Sartre was anti-religious and
believed that Christianity produced snivelling wimps whose life was
sucked out of them by religious authorities. They spoke for "God" and
told the people they were all sinners and could do nothing worthy so no
wonder all they ever talked about was their sinfulness; and what a pack
of crawlers they saw themselves to be, leaving a slimy trail behind them
anywhere they went. So the opening quotation speaks to Christians as
well as to the French people.
There is something sickening about the
way we go on and on about how sinful we are and there is a toxic kind of
teaching that would make us believe that when we pour unbridled scorn
and derision on ourselves that God responds, "O worthy man!"
T.E. Jessup had a similar point in mind when he repeats the doggerel that made the rounds a few generations ago:
Once in a saintly passion I cried in deepest grief
O God my heart is filled with guile
Of sinners I'm the chief.
Then came my guardian angel
And whispered from behind,
Vanity my little man
You're nothing of the kind.
O God my heart is filled with guile
Of sinners I'm the chief.
Then came my guardian angel
And whispered from behind,
Vanity my little man
You're nothing of the kind.
I'm thinking not of a healthy confession of our sinfulness but of
that pathological obsession with it that paralyses us and keeps us from
growth in holiness and vibrant righteousness. I'm including the belief
(promoted by the ignorant) that we're not taking our sins seriously if
we don't bleat and moan ceaselessly about the evil within us. The truth
is we take our sins most seriously when we reflect on the cross of Jesus
and truly commit to its meaning rather than inwardly and constantly
rehearsing our sins in all their gory details. It's only in the cross
that the world's great wrongs are taken with the seriousness with which
they deserve. But isn't it astonishing that He who takes our sins more
seriously than we can imagine doesn't go on and on and on about them,
but speaks forgiveness and then issues a call to vibrant righteousness,
to moving on and forgetting the past? This unending whining over our
sins, this culture of confessing how evil we are can become addictive, a
perverse pleasure.
Sartre has it right when he has a character say, "Clytemnestra is
indulging in our national pastime, the game of public confession. Here
everyone cries his sins on the housetops.... So you can imagine her
delight when she finds someone like you, someone raw and young, who
doesn't even know her name, to hear her tale of guilt. A marvellous
opportunity! It's as if she were confessing for the first time."
It's more than potentially addictive—it's potentially boring; even we
the confessors can find it boring and so we're tempted to embellish and
exaggerate to make it more interesting and easier to tell. A pox on it!
And a pox on all teaching that leads us to believe that we should be
obsessed with our sins. All our talk is wasted on those who care nothing
for holiness and all those who are sensitive to every little thing that
wounds the Master's heart don't need our religious nagging even if
we're throwing in verses here and there that disguise the truth that
we're nagging. There are poor souls who are ill and part of their
illness is that they can't stop acting as though they were God,
punishing themselves without ceasing. They sneer at every good and
wholesome thought that comes into their minds—"You have your nerve to
think such things—you, who only last week were…" They jeer at themselves
every time they purpose to be involved in a worthy cause or speak a
word for God. "Aren't you the perfect hypocrite? Do you think that will
make up for…?" These sad souls need lots of help but whatever else they
need they need to come to know that the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ is not the Jupiter/Zeus of The Flies. He has no pleasure in endless self-despising.
If you are able—get up and move on, passionately follow the
dream God has set in your heart of a glad-hearted righteousness
and on the way to it, as Luther has taught us: Sin boldly!
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, theabidingword.com.