Exploring the Concept of Guilt

About nine months ago the Episcopalian congregation I attend decided to begin a monthly Sunday-evening "Evensong." Well, since we began in summertime, it seemed that we didn't start in the "evening." In addition, there is no singing. Thus, it is precisely the kind of group I like--one that contradicts itself twice in its title. Each month we discuss a different topic, suggested by one of the members. For a few months we looked at some concepts from Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline, and asked the question of what the idea means to us today (such as abundance, simplicity, etc.). I suggested that next month's discussion deal with the issue of "guilt." People looked around at me sheepishly for a minute, and then, probably guiltily not wanting to offend, agreed. So, on March 9 we will have our "daytime-speaking" Evensong on guilt.

I. Why Talk About Guilt?

I suggested that we talk about guilt because everyone (or nearly everyone) feels it and is in fact guilty of something at times, but we rarely confront what we mean by guilt. In addition, the concept is central to Christian theology and, in my mind, needs to be reconceptualized in our day. Guilt and a sense of guilt is also central in the Western literary and psychological tradition. Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Steinbeck's East of Eden, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, as well as more recent movies such as Mystic River, deal copiously with the subject. Let's begin by defining the word, and then look at it in three dimensions: (1) Guilt as a Christian doctrine; (2) Guilt in its Collective Form; and (3) Our Individual "Sense of Guilt."

Most useful definitions of English words begin with the OED. In that connection, the dictionary has two classical ways of reading the word. First, guilt meant, long ago, a "failure of duty, delinquency; offense, crime, sin." This goes back more than 1000 years in English, and is captured by the Anglo-Saxon Gospel of Matt. 6:12 (ca. 1000): "Forgyf us ure gyltas.." Thus, this oldest sense of the word "guilt" in English emphasizes guilt as bad acts. The second meaning stresses guilt as the "fault" of some person. "I shall grow angry, and believe your pride Would put the guilt off on your modesty." Thus, the word guilt includes in it both the bad act and the fault accruing from that act.

I emphasize this because normally in Christian theology the words "sin" and "guilt" have different meanings. Sin, as one 1906 theological treatise tells us, "is the wrong act or state of the soul diverging from the law of duty or righteousness; guilt may be defined as the consequent ill-desert or demerit involved in the sin, its desert of punishment (reatus poenae)," Christian Theology, by Milton Valentine, p. 435.

But I don't accept Valentine's distinction, because the English language doesn't accept it. Guilt can mean either the act itself or the fault that arises from the act. In addition, guilt means, in a legal sense, "the state of having wilfully committed crime or heinous moral offense; criminality." Finally, guilt is to be distinguished from a "sense of guilt," which is the thing that most of the literature cited above explores--the feeling attendant upon committing an act where one thinks of oneself as justly liable to penalty.

II. Guilt and Christian Theology

According to Christian theology, derived in this instance mostly from Paul's Epistle to the Romans, we sinned "in Adam," were liable to the punishment attendant on that sin (exclusion from the presence of God and, ultimately, separation from God), and suffered death as a result of that sin. Christ is the means sent by God to repair our breach with God, but I don't want to get to Christ in this essay. As I said, we sin "in Adam." This either means that we sin "in imitation of Adam" (i.e., just as he did, so do we), that we in some weird way were "present" with Adam and sinned along with him, or that Adam, as it were, stood as a sort of representative for us and when he blew it, we went down with him. The latter concept has faded in significance ever since representative democracy came into vogue (we usually elect our representatives, and we didn't cast our votes in the the 'Edenic caucuses' of long ago). Though Christian theology will go through some contortions trying to explain how we sinned "in Adam" (all of which have major problems with them), I think it suffices for my purpose here just to quote the language of the New England Primer (1st Ed. 1690): "In Adam's Fall,/ We sinned all."

Forgiveness and grace in Christian theology are predicated on our sin/guilt. But the problem that I see with this concept in the 21st century is that even though people can readily accept the idea that they/we have screwed up in life, some in more major ways than others, we have a hard time with the notion that our sin/guilt can be or needs to be forgiven, especially by some mediatorial act of someone who lived 2000 years ago. To state it most baldly for myself: I have no trouble admitting my lack of perfection, my mistakes over the years, the ways I have screwed things up and have been, at times, mean to people. But I think of myself as a pretty good person. I play by the rules; I try to be content with what I have; I put a lot of effort into loving those close to me; I work hard; I consider others as very important; I see my work here (of giving free essays on thousands of important topics) as actually a good thing. Thus, I am not really convinced that the Christian understanding of my sin "in Adam" really has any resonance with me today. And, I am not so sure that whatever my daily peccadillos are, that I need a cosmic Savior to give his life up on a cross for me (all of those thoughts deserve closer scrutiny on some occasion). Thus, the Christian doctrine of sin/guilt is rather hollow for me.

III. Collective Guilt

We confront a different problem when we speak of the idea of collective guilt. Many people deny that collective guilt, a sort of responsibility of an entire people, nation, race, etc. for the oppression and dehumanization of others, ought to be a recognizable concept, either in psychology or law. The idea of reparations is based on the idea that we today bear a sort of collective guilt for actions taken against people long ago. This is a very tricky concept, for sometimes it just involves very select and small groups of people (i.e., insurance companies might be liable for life insurance policies held by Armenians during the Turkish wiping out of many Armenians in WWI, even though a statute of limitation for collection on the policy has expired, but no one other than the insurance company is liable) rather than entire nations or collections of people. But are we "responsible" or "guilty" in some way for the Japanese internment of WWII, for the Rwandan genocide of 1994, for so many evils that are going on in our world?

And then, if we bear some responsiblity as a collective for some collective, or even individual, evil in the world, what is the proper response to it? If it was a thing that happened in the deep past, what role to we play today in it? Was it just an expression "of the times" that we shouldn't get too worked up over today? I find it interesting that many people who deny any responsibility for their forebears' actions in some ways (e.g., in slavery) seemingly have no trouble accepting our complicity in Adam's sin (i.e., we are sinners "in Adam").

IV. Guilt on the Personal Level

Finally, the issue of guilt is a personal one, encompassing not only what we might call the "objective" dimension of guilt (have we done something wrong with respect to someone?) but the "sense of guilt" that often follows. The "sense of guilt" is stronger than a feeling of "regret;" it is a feeling that we ought to have done something different and we possibly could have done something different in the past--and the result would have been different and much better. So Jimmy Markum, in Mystic River (2003), is constantly dogged by the sense that if he had "been there" for his daughter as an infant she would not have been murdered at age 19.

I don't see how this level of guilt is related to the first one at all. Our supposed objective sin "in Adam" and our actions or inactions towards others for which we are very sorry, are two different things. Nor do I see how any kind of doctrine of forgiveness, which is able to cover the first category, can help us at all in this last category of errors/omissions. Often the best thing to assuage or remove the "sense of guilt" brought on by present-day or past offenses is the assurance from the person we thought we hurt that it really is "all right."

Conclusion

Can we get rid of guilt? Do we want to get rid of it? Those are tougher questions and are beyond where I can go now. But I think that if we tend to downplay the first kind of guilt, we can increasingly focus our efforts on the other two. At least 1/3 of the victory will be won.

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