The Imp of the Perverse

You will think me mad, no doubt. How could it be otherwise? To have embarked on such a project is itself a sign of madness in the eyes of world. Yet see how I proceed, rationally, step by step. Can one who speaks thus be mad? Therefore, hearken when I tell you: the three most important expositors of original sin are Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther and Edgar Allan Poe.

See! Immediately you grasp my hand to restrain me. “You have left off Paul of Tarsus! How can you discuss original sin without Paul?” Why, it is a simple matter: Paul does not know the doctrine of original sin.

Feverishly you flip the gilt pages of your Bible. Your finger stabs at Romans, chapter seven:

14 For we know that the law is spiritual; but I am of the flesh, sold into slavery under sin. ¹⁵I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. ¹⁶Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. ¹⁸For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. ¹⁹For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. ²¹So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. ²²For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, ²³but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. ²⁴Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? ²⁵Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I am a slave to the law of God, but with my flesh I am a slave to the law of sin. (Romans 7:14-25, NRSV)

You tell me now, “Paul is saying that he cannot do the law because of original sin!” But watch how calmly I respond. “My friend,” I say (and do the mad have friends?), “Paul also says that he was blameless as to righteousness under the law (Philippians 3:6), and in Acts he is quoted as saying that he lived successfully as a Pharisee, the strictest sect of Judaism with respect to the law (Acts 26:5).”

How can both be true? Can Paul follow the law or not? Does he contradict himself? Perhaps he contradicts himself. We could accord him the same courtesy as we do to Mr. Whitman: let Paul be Legion, let him contain multitudes. But that is no basis on which to build a doctrine of the church. Surely that is a house built on sand.

Or we could say that Paul is not the “I” that speaks in Romans 7. Rather he is speaking to the members of the church at Rome, and when he asks, “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means!” He then goes on: “Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.” Here it is critical that there are no punctuation marks in ancient Greek manuscripts. Is Paul himself saying this? Or is he putting this, and all that follows through 7:25, in quotation marks? “‘Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin…’” Now Paul does not contradict himself—but neither does he speak of himself as being under original sin. He speaks with the voice of one who cannot be righteous as he is righteous, the voice of one whom we might call today an addictive personality.

No, my friend, we must go to Augustine, who takes the machine that comprises the epistles of Paul, and flips some switches on and other switches off. He has read Romans 7 very closely, but in his own way, and he unequivocally reads it as Paul’s true voice:

I was bound, not with another man’s chains, but with my own iron will. The enemy held my will, and, indeed, made a chain of it for me, and constrained me. Because of a perverse will, desire was made; and when I was enslaved to desire it became habit; and habit not restrained became necessity. By which links…a very hard bondage had me enthralled. (Confessions, 8.5; tr. William Watts)

Augustine undoes the radicalness of Paul and replaces it with a different radicalness. Paul’s point is that he did everything right, and it still doesn’t matter, because the only thing that matters is Christ. Augustine replaces this with original sin, the idea that every human is born perverse because of the damage done to Adam and Eve’s physical being, especially Adam’s semen. Thus no human can truly do good, and thus all stand condemned.

It is a strange doctrine, unknown to Eastern Christians, but not without its poignancy. In debating with Julian of Eclanum, Augustine objected that only original sin could explain the tragic deaths and deformities of infants, which were all too common in those days. Obviously an infant can’t have done anything to deserve to be punished, and obviously God cannot punish unjustly—and therefore original sin (Contra Julianum, 3.3-5). It is Augustine’s own, idiosyncratic solution to the old Sunday school problem: How can God be all powerful and all good at the same time?

Now see how Martin Luther reads Augustine, and takes his baton to the next stage. Original sin produces “the loathing of the good; the disdain for light and wisdom but fondness for error and darkness; the avoidance and contempt for good works but an eagerness for doing evil” (Luthers Werke 56, tr. L’Ubomír Batka). He denied that humans, unaided, could do any good at all. Only God, working through unearned grace, can turn the perverse human will to good. Even if a human, without faith, by themselves, did a good dead, it would still count as mortal sin, as does everything done without faith and grace. Luther’s God lacks even the poignancy of Augustine’s. All the emphasis is on God, and anything merely human must not be permitted to impinge on that utter transcendence. Humanity not only suffers by the comparison, but must suffer to the uttermost.

My friend, how can we understand such a radical turn of thought? Now we will see if I am mad, because I turn now to the poet of original sin, Edgar Allan Poe. “Pfaugh!” you say. “A mere scribbler of trifles. Besides, if you search his works you will find no reference to original sin.” But that is just how clever he was! He spoke of original sin under a different name, and that is PERVERSENESS. Hear him now!

And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature—to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only—that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. (“The Black Cat”)

What better expression of Paul’s cry of the “I”? This speaker has harmed a poor cat, not because he wanted to for some end, but only and entirely because he knew he must not do so. Yet will tell me that this is just some deranged criminal we hear, trying to justify his evil act, to tell us it is somehow not his fault. Ah, my friend, you do not understand how radical Poe’s PERVERSENESS is. Hear our author again!

Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong’s sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse—elementary. (“The Imp of the Perverse”)

Hear how reasonable our speaker is! How versed in recondite terminology! And how perfectly he expresses Luther’s thought. For this is the voice of one who has committed murder—but not out of PERVERSENESS! No, he committed murder sanely, rationally, carefully. No, what PERVERSENESS worked in him was the irresistible urge to stand in the public square and roar his confession until he was arrested, tried and condemned. That is the radicalness of Poe’s perversity, and the clearest example imaginable of Luther’s peculiar idea that for one unsaved, even the best acts are condemned. There is no redemption in our speaker’s confession, only double damnation.

Now surely you see, my dear friend, how Poe perfectly illustrates the doctrine of original sin, how utterly radical it is. And perhaps you will take some comfort in the fact that the perfect illustrations of original sin are not ordinary people like you and me, but insane criminals. The radicality of Augustine and Luther’s thought cannot be comprehended if it is averaged out over everyone’s experience, but only as it is expressed in the extreme, the incomprehensible—the very subjects of Poe’s “scribblings.”

I will leave you with these thoughts, my friend. I hope they will be of some comfort to you in the coming hours. Do not struggle against the bonds. They will only grow tighter. I would not want you to suffer unduly. Here, I will put the last brick in the wall—for the love of God. 

Works Consulted

L’Ubomír Batka, “Luther’s Teaching on Sin and Evil” in The Oxford Handbook of Martin Luther’s Theology (ed. Robert Kolb, Irene Dingel and L’Ubomír Batka) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Paula Fredriksen, Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).

Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988).