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2 THE S IN OF ORIGIN 57. What has happened to us on account of the sin of Adam? On account of the sin of Adam, we, his descendants, come into the world deprived of sanctifying grace and inherit his punishment, as we would have inherited his gifts had he been obedient to God. But, by the envy of the devil, death came into the world. (Wisdom 2:24) 58. What is this sin in us called? This sin in us is called original. —A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Revised Edition of the Baltimore Catechism, Part 1, Lesson 5 The Persistence of Separation [N]o one is responsible for an emergence; no one can glory in it, since it always occurs in the interstice. —Michel Foucault, ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’’ Glossing what he calls the ‘‘strange and wondrous’’ Leibnizian theory of damnation, Gilles Deleuze writes in The Fold, ‘‘the damned, Judas or Beelzebub, does not pay retribution for a past action but for the hate of God that constitutes the present amplitude of his soul and fills it in the present. He is not damned for a past action, but by a present action that he renews at every moment.’’1 Such damnation, then, partakes not only of an unexpected agency—one can only damn oneself, and that by an insistent (hateful) relational mode—but also of a peculiar temporality. It consists not of a singular event and subsequent reiteration of response (an indefinite continuation of punishment), but of a single moment amplified to an ever-renewed present, eternity as the staying now, the persistent-recurrent accomplishment of an act of fury and hatred. It is thus a direct contrast to vibrantly living eternity and so to 32 T H E S I N O F O R I G I N the (more positive) images of eternal life.2 Eternal damnation partakes of a deeply strange temporality, in which the moment is infinite, too, all of time ‘‘gathered’’ into an instant or the instant exploded into all of time: ‘‘For eternity must not be thought as those moments of time taken together, but rather as coexisting with each single moment so that eternity again sees only its (whole, immeasurable) self in each single one.’’3 So too, I will argue, does ‘‘original’’ sin. Most commonly, if we think of it at all, we think of damnation as a judgment, the working out of divine justice and thus in every case the rightful penalty for wrongful behavior (though perhaps, at the same time, this must read as a failure in divine mercy). Unlike grace, in many respects its contrary counterpart, damnation is presumed to follow the law—unless we believe in complete predestination, which is easier to render logically coherent than is a theory holding together free will and divine power, but affectively and phenomenologically remains a lot less satisfying. (In fact, under predestination a divine law is still followed, but its preestablishment makes it difficult for human beings to understand its workings: they are either too obscured or incomprehensibly simple.) Dogmatically, damnation occurs when a mortally sinful moment is not regretted in time to prevent a divine judgment of guilt requiring punishment .4 (This is the point of frequent sacramental penance and reconciliation : to lessen the odds of dying with unshriven sins on one’s soul by doing the necessary penance as promptly as possible. Of course, the next chapter will complicate this notion just a bit.) So, on this view, damnation is simply a legalistic penalty, something impersonal. It’s clear that the Leibnizian theory (as Deleuze reads it) is different from this relatively simple relation of cause and effect, different in ways that seem to me to render it more philosophically and theologically coherent than a straightforward reading of the dogmatic version. Leibniz ’s is not the withdrawal of the divine love for the human, nor even divine refusal to express that love by rescuing a given human person from damnation. Rather, it is the infinitely renewed human refusal of love for the divine, either a destruction or a perverse misdirection of the full force of the desire and the joy that we might turn toward divinity. (Indeed, by making of hate a focus that consumes the attention entirely, it is a refusal to love or delight in any aspect of what is.) Thus, there is nothing impersonal about it, nor anything like the necessity imposed by law; it is a wholly personal...

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