Seven Deadly Sins

7

DEADLY

SINS A

V E R Y

PA R T I A L

L I S T

Aviad Kleinberg Translated by Susan Emanuel in collaboration with the author

The Belknap Press of HARVARD

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2008

Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org. This book was originally published as Péchés Capitaux, copyright © 2008 by Editions du Seuil, Paris. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kleinberg, Aviad M. [Péchés capitaux. English] Seven deadly sins : a very partial list / Aviad Kleinberg : translated by Susan Emanuel in collaboration with the author. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-674-03141-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Deadly sins. 2. Sin. 3. Sins. I. Title. BV4626.K5313 2008 241′.3—dc22 2008016574

Contents

1

The Lizard’s Tail

2

Sin for Beginners

3

Sloth: Acedia

32

4

Envy: Invidia

44

5

Lust: Luxuria

62

6

Gluttony: Gula

81

7

Greed: Avaritia

97

8

Anger: Ira

9

Pride: Superbia

1 10

113 132

10

Self-Righteousness

11

Advanced Sin

Notes

167

Index

185

163

150

1 THE LIZARD’S TAIL

There is no sin without context. There is no sin in itself. The very notion of sin is always the result of a comparison, explicit or implicit, between a specific ideal and a specific reality. Without this comparison, in which an act is weighed in the moral balance and found wanting, there is no sin—there are only actions and passions. Human actions and passions become sins only in a given moral and cultural context. As contexts and rules shift, so does the definition of sin. What once constituted a sin (masturbation, for example) ceases to be wrong; what once did not constitute a sin (beating up young children or selling human beings) ceases to be right. Right and wrong are continually defined and redefined by society. The moral balance tilts toward one direction, then toward the other. Morality expresses itself in absolute terms: “Never” and “Always.” It presents itself as a seamless, timeless garment. A closer look reveals the seams of time and place. Sin is a cultural construct. Strata of ideas, beliefs, and preconceived notions are features of every culture. We observe the world, and ourselves, from the uppermost stratum: the present. But the lower strata, saturated with the past, have not disappeared. The present is nothing but the latest aggregation from past events and processes. Our roots traverse all the layers of our sedimented culture. In pushing up toward the present, contemporary

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notions are imbued with the stains of our fathers—with someone else’s recollections, someone else’s guilt. Worse still, we are not a chorus singing in cultural unison; we are would-be soloists stubbornly singing offkey. Ethical imperatives are addressed to collectives, but ethical choices are always individual. In the realm of right and wrong, everything is personal. Every person is an accident, a collision between individual impulses and cultural options. Before attaining the age of reason, we absorb, without real examination or scrutiny, the internal contradictions of our environment. The irresponsible judgments, the arbitrary assessments, the passing remarks of adults are filtered through our immature minds, then mixed with a powerful blend of emotional likes and dislikes, and little by little our moral fiber makes its hesitant appearance. Reaching maturity, we try to impose order on the affective and moral chaos of our childhood, the impossible compromises and contradictory urges, the personal aches and general anxieties. We try to be reasonable. It is not easy to be reasonable. The ground seems to slip away beneath our feet. The custodians of public morality try to mandate their own balance, to decree absolute values where everything is relative, to proclaim clarity where everything is obscure, to declare objectivity where everything is subjective. They brandish their moral timetables, promising that those who arrive on time at the station will safely reach their moral destination. We always arrive too early or too late. We are too quick to forgive ourselves the unforgivable, and too willing to let the sour grapes of our fathers set our teeth on edge.1 We sin in our own individual fashion, breaking rules made especially for us. Succeeding or failing, we do it our way. There is no sin without context. And there is no impersonal writing on sin. All writing on sin is autobiographical, even when the writer analyzes abstract ideas or discusses the sins of others. This book is not a confession. To a certain extent, it is a way to avoid confession. Yet

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the book does deal with me, especially when I am not speaking about myself. When does the awareness of sin arise in us? When does infantile narcissism—the conviction that everything belongs to us, that any pleasure and satisfaction denied us constitutes a moral scandal—transform itself into a feeling of guilt, into a sensation that we have done evil in the eyes of the Lord and of men? Freud thought that this awareness emerges together with the Ego, with the realization that the child is not the flesh of its mother, that the separation between mother and child is definitive and irreparable. Feelings of insufficiency constitute a basic element of human personality. We understand that we are not all-powerful. We recognize the primary mortal failings—weakness, solitude, and despair—for it is those (not pride, envy, and anger) that constitute the prototypes of sin. We measure ourselves against our impossible dreams of perfection, and the paradise of wishful thinking (to be always whole, to be always without fear or pain, to be always satisfied) and we find ourselves wanting. We suffer. We realize that we have been punished. All suffering is punishment. We search for the reasons for this punishment. “God of Mercy, we have sinned before You. Have pity on us.” But is it right to begin like that, with universal reflections—not with this particular man, Aviad Kleinberg, but with Everyman? Is it honest to start with generalities, beyond the embarrassing particulars of memory, beyond the body, beyond the body of evidence? Surely this is wrong. There is no sin without context, no writing on sin that is not autobiographical. In primary school I had a classmate called Micky. He was lonelier than me and much weaker. I was endowed with considerable physical strength and with a talent for sarcasm. This did not win me many friends, but it was usually enough to paralyze my adversaries. While we were all trying to become (each according to his possibilities and inclinations) caricatures of the typical Israeli macho, Micky remained a

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withdrawn infant, living somewhat autistically in his own world. He neither tried to be like the others, nor blatantly challenged conventions, as I did from time to time when I was fed up with my own efforts to make myself accepted. Micky was quite simply himself. He sketched odd, delicate drawings in his notebooks and built miniature cities in the sand. His cities were a tangle of roads among twigs and bits of wood, minuscule electrical poles made from popsicle sticks, vaguely defined buildings of matchboxes, and tiny bridges over Lilliputian rivers of sand. Without complaint, he bore the endless ridicule and contempt heaped upon him from all sides. He would laugh his strange laugh and go his own way. Micky built his towns in all sorts of places. The ones he constructed in the schoolyard were systematically destroyed by the other children. To give free reign to his urban creativity, Micky built another town in a wadi (a small ravine) near his neighborhood, far from the barbarians’ eyes. In those days I often roamed the wastelands that extended between the neighborhoods of my hometown, Beer Sheva. In school you had to be either “north” or “south.” I was neither. My family lived between neighborhoods, and I felt at home only in geographic and social No-Man’s-Land. For hours I would walk by myself, desperately trying to make sense of my loneliness, dreaming of vindication. Every day I hoped that something would happen and I would be saved, that I would stumble upon something good, that the pain would stop, that the circle of solitude would break. Micky’s miniature city was located far from the usual circuits of the hevre, the guys. But it was on my path. It was much bigger than his other urban creations, and one could see that he had put a great deal of time and effort into it. I remember studying that magnificent construction for a while, and then destroying it. I knocked down everything—roads, bridges, trees. I don’t think I enjoyed the destruction. I’m quite sure I was immediately invaded by a strong feeling of shame. I understood that I had become just like the barbarians, the classmates I both detested and en-

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vied. For Immanuel Kant, awareness of the wickedness of one’s act transforms it into “radical evil”—a wrong stemming neither from oversight nor from thoughtlessness, but committed with full understanding of the moral fault it embodies.2 I cannot pretend to have surrendered to social pressure. That act of destruction was not a means for gaining acceptance by a gang. Later in life, I was occasionally pressured to harm other people—women, Arabs, weak individuals—in order to prove my toughness, my manhood, my solidarity to the group. I always refused to do so. But in school, I did not belong to any group. Indeed, not-belonging was my main attribute. Besides, nobody knew I had destroyed the little city—not even Micky—and I find it hard to believe that my feat of senseless vandalism would have impressed boys. I was not performing a social rite of passage. This was solitary trespassing. Years later, I came upon the famous passage in Saint Augustine’s Confessions where he recounts an episode of stealing pears in his native town of Thagaste (in present-day Algeria). Some years ago I even translated the Confessions from Latin into Hebrew.3 Here is the description from Book 2: There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though attractive in neither color nor taste. To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night after (in our pestilential way) we had continued our game in the streets. We carried off a huge load of pears. But they were not for our feasts but merely to throw to the pigs. Even if we ate a few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss. Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I

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loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. It was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.4 Setting aside, for the moment, the psychological and ethical questions raised by Augustine’s description, I would like to focus on the basic assumption underlying this text. Augustine is certain that the rules of the ethical game are clear and that a man who is honest with himself always knows the specific weight of each of his acts. For him, there is no Freudian denial; there are only lies. What is more, evil is never banal; it is always radical.5 Misdemeanors, like stealing worthless pears, may be insignificant so far as their consequences are concerned, but the motivation that underlies them is not really different from that which pushes us to horrible crimes. We love evil for its own sake. And our faults are never really hidden. God walks in our gardens and His spirit hovers over our abysses. He sees, remembers, and exacts accounts. The intrusive presence of God in the Augustinian world paradoxically transforms intentional evil into a heroic act, tragic in that it is essentially without hope. It is impossible to contest the tyranny of divine justice, impossible to escape punishment. The sinner brings about his own ruin in the name of an impossible and absurd desire for freedom.6 “Therefore in that act of theft what was the object of my love, and in what way did I viciously and perversely imitate my Lord?” wonders Saint Augustine. Was my pleasure to break your law by deceit since I had not the power to do that by force? Was I acting like a prisoner with restricted liberty who does without punishment what is not permitted, thereby making an assertion of possessing a dim resemblance to omnipotence? Here is a runaway

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