- Mar 28, 2023
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We must try to understand the self-destruction of Western civilization in psychological and spiritual terms, not only in political and ideological ones. I believe that the phenomenon essentially concerns a "narcissism of goodness" that manifests itself as a collective psychology. Traditionally, Christianity has instilled the insight into the divided nature of human beings: that no one is capable of being completely good. "No one is good," said Jesus. But today, people believe they can be good and perfect.
According to Christian anthropology, the human being has two wills, and these wills often stand in conflict within the divided self. Paul depicts this as the contrast between the old self and the new self, anchored in Adam and Christ respectively. Paul experiences a painful inner conflict between the old self, which he cannot free himself from, and the new self that is in Christ (Rom 7:19, 24). But Paul seems overly optimistic when he says that we can put off the old self and put on the new self as a new way of being (Ephesians 4:22-24). In reality, we must continue to live with both.
Augustine teaches that the self is divided: the will contains two opposing impulses, one towards God and one towards the world (Confessions VIII). This division is not pathological but a metaphysical condition that follows from our fallen nature. Achieving wholeness of the self is not possible, as perfect integration belongs only to the eschaton. The inner person grows, but the outer person is not destroyed in this life. Our duality cannot be eliminated, even if its tyranny can be broken. This is central to the Christian understanding of the false and the true self: we must remain divided, but we must also remain aware of our divided nature.
According to Luther, the Christian is "simul iustus et peccator," at once righteous and a sinner, which is the permanent state of the Christian. The old Adam never disappears. Luther sharply criticizes the striving to achieve "saintliness," which he sees as an attempt to purify the will and achieve wholeness of the self. The more a person strives to be holy, the more he becomes a sinner. In his commentary on Galatians, Luther writes: "The saints are sinners, and they are holy not in themselves but in Christ." He therefore adds in the Table Talk: "God hates the saints that man creates."
For Luther, psychological and spiritual health depends on awareness of our dividedness, which leads to confession and forgiveness. The self is healed by being forgiven, not by becoming unified. The believer does not become less sinful, but becomes more aware of sin and more dependent on grace. In comparison, psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott reverses this structure: psychological health requires that our dividedness be removed, producing a unified self and perfect spontaneity. His theory aims at amalgamation, a fusion of inner and outer worlds into a single field of experience, the so-called transitional space. In doing so, he rejects the anthropology of Christianity.
Thus it is a distinctly modern idea that we should strive to become a unified self that is truly good and perfect, an aspiration Christian theology rejects as a sinful pursuit of self‑salvation. For Augustine, this is equivalent to pride (*superbia*). But Paul also speaks in 1 Timothy 6:17 about enjoying life, and this can be understood as a reference to the Adam within us who seeks earthly joy and satisfaction. Augustine arrives at a similar conclusion. We should not abandon the world but remain in it as pilgrims. In Luther's terms, avoiding saintliness means admitting that the sinner within us must sometimes make use of the world's goods. He wrote to Melanchthon: "Sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly."
Luther did not encourage moral laxity. He told Melanchthon to stop trying to achieve purity or saintliness, and instead to trust in Christ's righteousness rather than his own. He urged him to stop trying to unify the self and to stop obsessing over inner moral perfection. In modern Luther research, "sin boldly" is understood as Luther's rejection of moral perfectionism and the futility of striving for inner wholeness. Instead, we should give priority to the external righteousness given to us by Christ and reject mystical self-healing. Luther does not encourage sin, but he forbids attempts to eradicate sin, make the self unified, or purify the will.
We must still keep our dark side in check, or society will fall apart. And we can do this precisely because we recognize our divided nature and our imperfection. People who lack this awareness and see themselves as ideal or spotless often fall into destructive patterns of falseness and moralism, and then they become truly evil. We harm ourselves if we are too sinful, but we also harm ourselves if we are too righteous. Ecclesiastes 7:16 expresses this clearly: "Do not be overly righteous... Why should you destroy yourself?" Today, many institutions in the Western world, including parts of the Christian church, are marked by a kind of moral absolutism that denies the divided nature of the human being. Thus, they risk repeating the very pattern that Ecclesiastes warns against. The goodness-narcissists dominate the Western world today, and their influence is driving its self-destruction.
The traditional awareness of original sin, and the corresponding need for continual self-recognition of one's sinful nature, has largely disappeared. The consequence is that people are afflicted by goodness-narcissism, which is the worst form of sinfulness. This fuels the urge to tear down civilization, since civilization is judged evil for surviving through power: prisons, repression, borders, labour systems, resource extraction, and even war. All of this is today interpreted as evil and oppression, in accordance with postcolonial theory, critical race theory, identity politics, and all kinds of radicalism and antimilitarism.
Quite simply, if we are to be holy, civilization cannot be sustained. When identity politics was established, "Western civilization" became a symbol of power, dominance, and privilege. This creates a situation where criticism of the West is not merely historical or political, but moral and existential. Civilization becomes an obstacle to "liberation," understood as the realization of Rousseau's ideal of the perfectly good natural human being. Without a living insight into original sin and the permanently divided nature of the human being, we lose the only antidote to moral absolutism.
When humanity forgets its own dark nature, it becomes dangerous, precisely because it believes itself to be good. Ecclesiastes warns precisely against this self-destructive pursuit of over-righteousness. A civilization that denies its own inner ambivalence inevitably repeats the same pattern: it tries to become purer than any human society can bear, and collapses under the weight of its own supposed goodness.
According to Christian anthropology, the human being has two wills, and these wills often stand in conflict within the divided self. Paul depicts this as the contrast between the old self and the new self, anchored in Adam and Christ respectively. Paul experiences a painful inner conflict between the old self, which he cannot free himself from, and the new self that is in Christ (Rom 7:19, 24). But Paul seems overly optimistic when he says that we can put off the old self and put on the new self as a new way of being (Ephesians 4:22-24). In reality, we must continue to live with both.
Augustine teaches that the self is divided: the will contains two opposing impulses, one towards God and one towards the world (Confessions VIII). This division is not pathological but a metaphysical condition that follows from our fallen nature. Achieving wholeness of the self is not possible, as perfect integration belongs only to the eschaton. The inner person grows, but the outer person is not destroyed in this life. Our duality cannot be eliminated, even if its tyranny can be broken. This is central to the Christian understanding of the false and the true self: we must remain divided, but we must also remain aware of our divided nature.
According to Luther, the Christian is "simul iustus et peccator," at once righteous and a sinner, which is the permanent state of the Christian. The old Adam never disappears. Luther sharply criticizes the striving to achieve "saintliness," which he sees as an attempt to purify the will and achieve wholeness of the self. The more a person strives to be holy, the more he becomes a sinner. In his commentary on Galatians, Luther writes: "The saints are sinners, and they are holy not in themselves but in Christ." He therefore adds in the Table Talk: "God hates the saints that man creates."
For Luther, psychological and spiritual health depends on awareness of our dividedness, which leads to confession and forgiveness. The self is healed by being forgiven, not by becoming unified. The believer does not become less sinful, but becomes more aware of sin and more dependent on grace. In comparison, psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott reverses this structure: psychological health requires that our dividedness be removed, producing a unified self and perfect spontaneity. His theory aims at amalgamation, a fusion of inner and outer worlds into a single field of experience, the so-called transitional space. In doing so, he rejects the anthropology of Christianity.
Thus it is a distinctly modern idea that we should strive to become a unified self that is truly good and perfect, an aspiration Christian theology rejects as a sinful pursuit of self‑salvation. For Augustine, this is equivalent to pride (*superbia*). But Paul also speaks in 1 Timothy 6:17 about enjoying life, and this can be understood as a reference to the Adam within us who seeks earthly joy and satisfaction. Augustine arrives at a similar conclusion. We should not abandon the world but remain in it as pilgrims. In Luther's terms, avoiding saintliness means admitting that the sinner within us must sometimes make use of the world's goods. He wrote to Melanchthon: "Sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly."
Luther did not encourage moral laxity. He told Melanchthon to stop trying to achieve purity or saintliness, and instead to trust in Christ's righteousness rather than his own. He urged him to stop trying to unify the self and to stop obsessing over inner moral perfection. In modern Luther research, "sin boldly" is understood as Luther's rejection of moral perfectionism and the futility of striving for inner wholeness. Instead, we should give priority to the external righteousness given to us by Christ and reject mystical self-healing. Luther does not encourage sin, but he forbids attempts to eradicate sin, make the self unified, or purify the will.
We must still keep our dark side in check, or society will fall apart. And we can do this precisely because we recognize our divided nature and our imperfection. People who lack this awareness and see themselves as ideal or spotless often fall into destructive patterns of falseness and moralism, and then they become truly evil. We harm ourselves if we are too sinful, but we also harm ourselves if we are too righteous. Ecclesiastes 7:16 expresses this clearly: "Do not be overly righteous... Why should you destroy yourself?" Today, many institutions in the Western world, including parts of the Christian church, are marked by a kind of moral absolutism that denies the divided nature of the human being. Thus, they risk repeating the very pattern that Ecclesiastes warns against. The goodness-narcissists dominate the Western world today, and their influence is driving its self-destruction.
The traditional awareness of original sin, and the corresponding need for continual self-recognition of one's sinful nature, has largely disappeared. The consequence is that people are afflicted by goodness-narcissism, which is the worst form of sinfulness. This fuels the urge to tear down civilization, since civilization is judged evil for surviving through power: prisons, repression, borders, labour systems, resource extraction, and even war. All of this is today interpreted as evil and oppression, in accordance with postcolonial theory, critical race theory, identity politics, and all kinds of radicalism and antimilitarism.
Quite simply, if we are to be holy, civilization cannot be sustained. When identity politics was established, "Western civilization" became a symbol of power, dominance, and privilege. This creates a situation where criticism of the West is not merely historical or political, but moral and existential. Civilization becomes an obstacle to "liberation," understood as the realization of Rousseau's ideal of the perfectly good natural human being. Without a living insight into original sin and the permanently divided nature of the human being, we lose the only antidote to moral absolutism.
When humanity forgets its own dark nature, it becomes dangerous, precisely because it believes itself to be good. Ecclesiastes warns precisely against this self-destructive pursuit of over-righteousness. A civilization that denies its own inner ambivalence inevitably repeats the same pattern: it tries to become purer than any human society can bear, and collapses under the weight of its own supposed goodness.
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