The Church Fathers have always claimed that the primal human sin is the desire to become “God-like.” We often think about this desire as some sort of “pride.” This is true, but it is a conceit of a particular sort. Specifically, we posit a self-contained God, a God that needs nothing. And with this as the Imago Dei, we then seek to become like this God, self-contained and self-sufficient, needing nothing to sustain ourselves. In short, a denial of the Incarnation is an attempt to flee from our need and, as we will see, this undermines our capacity to love.
