Original Sin: A Cultural History

by Alan Jacobs

The divided self is our inheritance no matter what, and in the pain and disorientation of that experience we may not even care whether we were torn from the inside out or the outside in.

And so West comes, at last, after all her experiences and meditations in the land of the South Slavs, to one of the worst positions a person can occupy in thinking of her fellow human beings: an Augustinian anthropology without its accompanying theology. She sees with an absolute clarity our innate dividedness, the immovable and constant presence of an ever vigilant ugly head, always determined to expel nourishment and thereby to reject life and to choose death instead. But the Christian idea that the death of Christ somehow redeems our death wish, transforms it (by a kind of powerful spiritual magic that only the Bishop Nikolais of the world grasp), makes it the entry point to a heavenly kingdom—this idea she cannot accept. And so she cannot and does not become a Christian.