The deadly sins/despair; The One Unpardonable Sin (released 1993) (2024)

What mysterious cruelty in the human soul, to have invented despair as a sin! Like the seven deadly sins, despair is a mythical condition. It has no quantifiable existence; it is merely part of an allegorical worldview, but no less deadly for that. Unlike other sins, despair is traditionally the only sin that cannot be forgiven; it is the belief that one is absolutely damned, and thus a denial of the Christian Savior and a challenge to God's infinite ability to forgive. The sins for which one can be forgiven – pride, anger, lust, sloth, greed, gluttony, envy – are all firmly tied to the objects of this world, but the despair seems to bleed beyond the boundaries of the immediate egocentric self and not relate have on a desire, on nothing. The so-called sinner has separated himself from the possibility of sin, and the Catholic Church, as God's self-appointed voice on earth, cannot allow that.

Religion is organized power in the apparently benevolent guise of the sacred, and power, as we know, is primarily concerned with its preservation. The structures, the elaborate rituals and customs, the scriptures, the commandments and the ethics, their very nature objectify the human experience and emphasize that what is out there in the world is of indisputable greater importance than what is here in the human mind . Despair, certainly the least aggressive sin, is dangerous to the totalitarian temperament because it is a state of intense passion, and therefore independence. The desperate soul is a rebel.

Likewise, suicide, the result of extreme despair, has long been a cardinal sin in the theology of the Catholic Church, for it is tantamount to murder. Suicide, the most deliberate and defiantly antisocial human act, has an element of the forbidden, the obscene, the taboo. While ancient thinkers tolerated suicide, at least under certain circ*mstances, Marcus Aurelius wrote in the 'Meditations': 'In everything you do, say or think, remember that the power to withdraw from life is always in your hands' – The Church has severely punished suicide in a way that was intended to warn others and posthumously confirm their despair. Beams were driven through hearts, bodies were mutilated and the dead were not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground. The Catholic Church could always confiscate property and land owned by suicides.

But how frustrating it must be, the attempt to forbid and punish despair! Isn't "despair" a disease we label people who seem to have decided that life doesn't interest them, just as "narcissism" is the accusation we level at people who aren't nearly as interested in us as we are? Did I hope that would be the case?

Despair as a sin is a political phenomenon in which it is extremely difficult to believe in our time. However, as a state of intense passion, despair seems to us a spiritual and moral experience that transcends the superficial boundaries of language, culture and history. No doubt true despair is as stupid and thoughtless as flesh without consciousness; but the poetics of despair, especially from the pen of Emily Dickinson, has been extraordinarily eloquent: the difference between despair and fear – is like that between temporarily a wreck – and when the wreck has been – The mind is smooth – no movement – - satisfied as the eye on the brow of a bust -- It knows -- it cannot see --

This condition, this arrest of the mind, in which the energies of life become paralyzed even as the physical processes of life continue, is the essence of literary despair. The world goes its own way, and the author's isolated consciousness splits off from it, as if separating itself from the body itself. This state of exalted interiority has always fascinated the author, whose subject is the imaginative reconstruction of language. The apparent matter outside is only the means or pretext for the discoveries that can be made here in the activity of creation.