Essays on Eastern Orthodoxy
In Defense of Gossip
Essay on the Orthodox Understanding of Sin, pt 1 of 2
June 7, 2006
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I always found the old saw problematic: “If you can’t say something good about someone, don’t say anything at all.” It was a bit of folk wisdom designed to counteract gossip. But it seemed to me that people who actually followed this advice had nothing interesting to say. Given the human state, not saying anything but good about people leads us to only talk about the weather and empty platitudes. Or consider the same question from a different angle: Since humans, in their sinful state, aren’t good, if all we talk about is the good in people, we really have nothing to say about most of humanity other than hopes and dreams. I suppose that’s well and good as far as it goes, but it seems about as exciting as playing a harp on my private cloud for all eternity. In other words, it’s a rather dull and unrealistic view of things.
But this begs the question about the nature and potential of goodness in human beings. The fathers teach that the seat of being, the essence of the person, that part that lies at the center of divine transformation is—and here many English language writers resort to the Greek because there is no adequate English equivalent—the nous. In the West, nous is typically translated with the word “mind.” Rom. 12:2 is the classic text: “Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind (nous), that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
From a purely linguistic context this translation is fine, but in the West, with its heritage of Rationalism and Empiricism, “the mind” is viewed as a “mental” thing, and by extension, an “intellectual” thing. And here is the rub, because the nous is not the intellect. In terms of contemporary English usage, the Greek term nous is much more closely related to the term “heart” than intellect. But “heart” is equally problematic, because in contemporary Western usage the “heart” is also the seat or residence of evil, and this is absolutely not the case of the nous. The nous can be darkened and blinded, but it is not the residence of evil.
And at this point the fathers are not clear to us today because terminology is slippery and changeable over time making precise meanings hard to discern, but the modern Orthodox consensus is that the seat of evil is in the mind. Evil is an intellectual thing; it is a matter of perception. Humans can take that insubstantial sense of evil and incarnate it, but this incarnational evil, this evil made manifest, is not an inevitable consequence of sin, it is rather the result of humans at war with God embodying that which stands opposed to God. Embodied sin is humans using their God-given creative ability to create something substantial (that was previously unsubstantial) that stands diametrically opposed to God
I've alluded to the fact that the Western and Orthodox views of sin and its role are very different. The primary culprit is Augustine and his doctrine of original sin. He believed that sin was a thing in and of itself, that it had an objective existence. Once Adam released it into the world it oozed about everywhere and infected everything. That was far different than the historic understanding of sin. Sin, in this Orthodox view, is a relational problem. Sin doesn't have an independent and objective existence. It is not an entity unto itself but rather a darkening of our nous or a breaking and disfiguring of our relationships. Karl Barth shared the Orthodox distrust of Augustine and, like the Orthodox theologians, considered Augustine’s doctrine of original sin to be wrong. He was also the first Western theologian to figure out how to avoid the pitfalls of the Augustinian consensus in his theology and incorporate the ancient (and contemporary Orthodox) view of sin described above. Because he is a twentieth century Western theologian, his description is possibly (although not necessarily) easier to understand for modern Westerners.
Barth said that evil is “nothingness.” This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Evil and sin are very real for Barth, but their reality is not substantial (ie, a created substance). In Barth’s and Eduard Thurneysen’s sermon collection entitled, Come Holy Spirit, the reality of this evil-as-nothingness and its truly frightening character is made abundantly clear. (To provide some context, these sermons were preached in Germany prior to World War II but during the rise of the political philosophy that led to the Nazi Party.) But Barth and Thurneysen, along the same line as the Orthodox fathers from which this theology no doubt came, refused to give sin and evil an ontological existence (to use a term favored by Barthian theologians). Sin, for all its evilness, didn’t have an independent reality, but was rather derivative in nature.
By this time we have wandered into exceedingly deep waters. Whether one considers sin and evil from the classical Orthodox perspective or the more contemporary perspective of Barth, this idea that sin is not precisely a thing or an object in the same sense that the glory of God is a thing or that I am an objet, this idea of the nonsubstantialness of sin is difficult to grasp.
And this is precisely what our mind grabs hold of. Since sin (and here I am thinking of my sin in particular, the sin that darkens my heart) is insubstantial, my mind can explain it away. It can convince me that it’s no big deal because it’s . . . well . . . insubstantial. The mind can therefore make a case that I’m a pretty good guy, that I am pretty acceptable the way I am right now because there’s nothing really wrong with me.
And this brings us full circle back to gossip. From the perspective of what was said above, gossip is the act of giving sin substance. That which has no life in and of itself, but is only darkness and shadow, is given substance by my tongue, so that it can go forth from me and cause mischief elsewhere.
And as that insubstantial sin now in the form of substantial gossip goes forth from my mouth, I can objectively examine it in a way that I was unable to examine my own heart, so full of shadows, darkness, and deceit. And upon examination of this now-substantial gossip, I can recognize how exceedingly sinful I am. And with this hard evidence in hand that proves my mind wrong about my own inherent goodness, I can go to both my mind and my God and say, “See, this is what I truly am,” and repent. This is the first step toward enlightenment and the establishment of true goodness in my very being.
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