It is noteworthy to remember that around the same moment in mid-twentieth century, two dissertations on the notion of sin were written by two emblematic representatives of late liberal political thought: John Rawls’ undergraduate thesis A Brief Inquiry Into The Meaning of Sin and Faith written at Princeton University in 1942; and only a few months later Torcuato Fernández-Miranda’s El pecado como concepto fundamental del problema filosófico, a través del pensamiento agustiniano (1943), a doctoral dissertation written at the Law School of the Universidad de Madrid. Both scholars would soon become exemplary figures of Atlantic liberalism in their own ways; the first developing the most consequential and systematic work of normative political thought since Kant; and, his Spanish counterpart, becoming the leading constitutional reformist in the Spanish transition to democracy and architect of the “Ley para la Reforma Política” of 1976 enacted that year in parliament. 

Leaving aside major conceptual difference between the two programmatic works, what is symptomatic of them is precisely that a fundamental theological concept is transplanted and weaved for the needs of a political vocabulary that aims at the reinvention of a tradition that could not longer sustained its own secular commitments to individual autonomy and the rational control of state authority. And if we are to follow Eric Nelson’s reading, the intrusion of the doctrine of sin in late modern political thought was the last nail in the coffin of a secularized Pelagianism that dominated the basis of the different normative projects of modern political theory. 

In the new administered world the ground of mediation and legitimacy is wobbly and precarious, thus the notion of sin will infuse an exoteric desecularizing anthropology that ironically attempts to “save” politics through its impolitical other that deploys an instrumental conception of original in order to redeem human collective action through divine grace and mercy (clearly a benevolent inversion of Calvinist damnation). This is why in Rawls’ dissertation levels a critique of individual egotism and moral arbitrariness through the operative efficacy of sin. Rawls traced this morphology from Philip Leon who had already articulated it in his Ethics of Power (1935): “What is the nature of this delight in sin itself? It is, Augustine suggests , a delight in at least a factional opposition to the right, in doing unpunished what one ought not to do, in an imitation of godliness, in a shadowy symbol of omnipotence in the search for a shadow – in sort, in the romantic adventurous for the absoluteness” [1]. What political thought in its reduction of civil society – now distinct from the source of authority and concerted legislation – will craft is the regulatory and counterbalancing mechanisms of social ordering without exception. Precisely, one could say that in the wake of the introduction of sin into late political philosophy the new heresy becomes the shadow or the conspiracy against the social domain that will amount to absolute infraction, a plain crime. 

If the primal scene of sin originally emerged in the context of a fratricide – and thus, in relation to the dead and to the burial and wandering, which will lead to the justification of territorial settlement – it is altogether symptomatic that this snapshot of the slowpaced instance of desecularization appears as a force that only makes living possible within the social bond, fusing Kingdom and justice, compensation and salvation, punishment and rewards, retribution and distribution in an endless cycle that, because it has lost any mediation to redemption, it can only outlive itself by the coordinating services of social force (and there is no surprise that post-rawlsian thinkers precisely developed a theory of exclusive positive law from the conception of service).

One of the consequences is this mutation is that it allows us to think how the end of secularization is not just the usurpation of the theological sphere, but also the realization of the subsumption of human deficiency and stratification as social leveling (a central operative notion that will later enter Rawls’ A Theory of Justice with decisive consequences) will offer legitimation through the total administration of social life even when done in heuristic ideal of a “classless society” dependent on the enforce of a “priestly service” (hierourgounta) that deifies itself as an indivisible administrative temple. At this point, one can recall Erik Peterson’s humorous exposition of this closure that speaks to the ‘social progressive politics’ that still dominates well into our days: “There is perhaps no better symptom of this than the construction of roads between China and Tibet with the purpose to destroy the places in which there are still ascetic practices outside society…our capacity for leveling, as least theologically understood, will ultimately generate the collapse of Heaven and Hell” [2]. For Peterson, the inaccessibility of exteriority [of the desert of the Fathers, and the ‘desert of deserts’ that opens a place] leaves us with the unbreathable and darkening atmosphere of the Social. 

.

.

Notes 

1. Philip Leon. The Ethics of Power or the Problem of Evil (George Allen&Unwin, 1935), 240-241.

2. Erik Peterson. “Fragmentos”, in Tratados Teológicos (Ediciones Cristiandad, 1966), 251.