ALIENATION IN
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY
Alienation, in theology, refers to the idea that
the
relation of the worshippers to God may be analogous
to the
alienation, or estrangement, between human
beings. The word implies that a
close relationship of
affection, family, friendship, or another close tie
has
been broken, often with detrimental effects on the
psyche. The
disorganization of the self, worries about
guilt, and loss of identity
which the breaking of a
long and very close bond between people may
bring
are all familiar. The idea that man, by his sin and
indifference, may similarly alienate himself from a
loving Father is a
distinguishing feature of the Judaic
and Christian religious traditions.
The Judaic conception of God and his people came
increasingly to be of a
familial situation. The story of
the creation and fall of man stresses the
point that
Adam and Eve were both disobedient and potentially
dangerous to the high God, since they were ambitious
of raising themselves
to divine status and might find
the means of doing so (Genesis 1:22).
Jehovah appears
as a jealous ruler. But there is a critical change
when
the Lord adopts Abram as a son, as a child is adopted,
giving him
the new name Abraham (Genesis 17), just
as later, Jacob is renamed Israel.
God is thought of
not merely as the familiar protector of a nation, but,
uniquely
among ancient cults, as the Father of a human
family—the tribes
of Israel. The paradigm of the fam-
ily, with its
tensions of affection, hate, loyalties, and
fears, permeates the Old
Testament. Again and again
the children are disobedient and become
estranged
from their Father: again and again, there is recon-
ciliation between a sorrowing,
merciful but divine
parent and his loved, but wayward, family. As in a
human family, there is a separation between faithful,
appreciative siblings
and willful, rebellious ones. Some-
times the
children wander off to other gods in place
of their own Father.
The prophets are the agents through whom God
communicates his love for his
children, his repeated
disappointment and anger over their behavior, and
his
plans for effecting a final reconciliation. The prophets
do not
merely warn of terrible punishments if the
chosen people continue to
disobey the Lord: they
constantly use figures from the patriarchal family
to
embody their message. In one of the most poignant
passages of the
Old Testament, Hosea represents the
Lord yearning over his people Israel
just as a patriarch
might speak of his sons:
When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt
I called my
son. The more I called them, the more they
went from me; they kept
sacrificing to the Baals, and burn-
ing
incense to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to
walk, I took
them up in my arms; but they did not know
that I healed them. I led
them with cords of compassion,
with the bands of love;... and I
bent down to them and
fed them.... How can I give you up, O
Ephraim!...
My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows
warm
and tender
(Hosea 11:1-8, Revised Standard Version).
Elsewhere, the relationship is that of husband and wife:
“And in
that day, says the Lord, you will call me, 'My
husband,' and no longer will
you call me, 'My baal'”
(Hosea 2:16).
It is hard to find anything in other world-religions
to compare with this
moving, divine domestic drama.
Even in Islam, Allah appears as judge and
sustainer
of order only; man is created to fulfill the amr, the
divine commandment. In Neo-Platonism, it has been
asserted, there is a form of alienation, for man is seen
as separated from
his true divine source and home. The
soul has been corrupted by matter, the
lowest stage
of the emanations from the One, and so has turned
away
from its higher origin, the Intellect. The very
metaphysical structure and
impersonality of this sys-
tem, however,
precludes anything like the relationships
and dynamic tensions among
different psyches which
are implied in alienation as we have defined it.
The
process of return to the Intellect, which certainly never
yearns
over a lost soul, in fact implies something like
de-personalization. Love, for example, must be univer-
salized and purified from being
directed to any one
person or object. Similarly, in Manicheism, two
powers,
neither of which is a true personality, fight for domina-
tion. Mankind, like the hero of a fairy
tale, is held by
enchantment in a dark prison—this world. He can
be
rescued only by being taught the secret of his true
nature as a
child of light, and through learning thau-
maturgic formulas which will enable him to escape to
his
heavenly home.
Alienation-reconciliation is the central pattern of
Saint Paul's
interpretation of salvation. In adjusting the
Hebraic tradition of a chosen
people to a universal
religion, however, he necessarily had to make
some
extremely important changes. The later prophets had
begun to
think of ultimate redemption in terms of all
mankind, not just Israel. Paul
completed the trans-
formation: all of
the human race are members of God's
family, and so all human beings
necessarily have be-
come alienated from their
Father. Obviously, there
must have sprung up serious faults in basic
human
nature which have estranged all men, not merely some,
from God.
There is a generalized malaise in the human
experience, alienated as all
men are from the source
of all truth and values. Paul implies that for the
Jewish
people the alienation was at least partially cured;
addressing
the Gentiles, he recalls their desperate situ-
ation before Christ:
... remember that you were at that time separated from
Christ,
alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and
strangers to the
covenants of promise having no hope and
without God in the
world
(Ephesians 2:12).
He describes the plight of fallen man in terms of what
the psychiatrist
would immediately recognize as “al-
ienation”:
And you, who once were estranged and hostile in mind,
doing evil
deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh
by his
death,...
(Colossians 1:21).
This statement demonstrates that alienation and rec-
onciliation are always combined in Paul's teaching,
for
salvation is reconciliation with God. The Father has
reunited and
gathered his estranged human family, not
by revealing the law through
prophets, not by sending
a teacher to reveal the secret way out of this
evil world,
but by curing human nature through joining the divine
with
the human. In the union of the two in Christ's
unified personality,
alienation has ended. The Christian
message, Paul stresses again and again,
is that “God
through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave
us
the ministry of reconciliation” (II Corinthians 5:18).
The Christian is “reconciled to God.” Thus it would
be illuminating to speak of the “alienating sin”
instead
of “original sin” and of redemption as “reconciliation.”
Whether this emphasis would survive in Christianity
became the
great issue of the first and second centuries.
Opposed to such a view of salvation was the move-
ment known as “Gnosticism.” Although it took a
vast
number of forms, this sect essentially continued
Manicheism with
Christian coloration. The good God,
it taught, is not the creator and ruler
of the irre-
deemably evil world in which
man lives and suffers.
Men, however, have a spark of
“light” which can
enable them to escape. Christ was a
heavenly spirit,
child of a heavenly spirit; both he and his mother
were
human only in appearance, having no real bodies.
Christ's mission
was to reveal the gnosis, the secret
wisdom. The
whole thrust is that Christ did not join
divine and
human personalities. There is no recon-
ciliation, here, nor any analogy with human experience.
Man is
saved by totally rejecting material nature,
by heroic denial of one side of
his being. It is inter-
esting to speculate
as to what kind of world we
should have if, say, the Albigensians of the
Middle
Ages, who apparently carried on this kind of belief,
had
triumphed.
In the late second century, Saint Irenaeus, in a clas-
sical attack on Gnosticism, stated the essence of the
great
division in Christianity:
... if we devise another substance of our Lord's Flesh, then
will
his statement about Reconciliation no longer hang
together. For
that only is reconciled, which at one time
was in enmity. But if
our Lord brought with Him flesh of
another substance, then no
longer was the same thing rec-
onciled to God, which by transgression has become hostile.
But now by Man's participation of Himself our Lord hath
reconciled
him to God the Father
(Against the Heresies,
trans. John Keble,
V:14:3).
Irenaeus adds an important idea: that under the Mosaic
law, Israel was never
truly reconciled with God, but
was only in a
“servile” state; now God has truly
adopted all
mankind, without favoritism, and men once
more are his
“sons.” Hence they should have both more
fear and
love of God; “for sons ought to fear more
than slaves, and to
have greater love towards their
Father” (ibid., IV:16:5). This
paradoxical combination
underlies the conception of Christian liberty, and
it
could exist only in a relationship of alienation-
reconciliation.
Saint Augustine in the course of his spiritual wan-
derings became a Manichean, and he left that sect
precisely
because it offered no hope of real recon-
ciliation with the Father. He says, in a sermon for
Christmas,
that God, “... remaining God, was made
man, so that even as the
Son of man he is rightly called
God with us, not 'God in the one case, man in the
other.'” How could Christ, if we believe, with the
Gnostics, in
the “crucifixion of a phantasm,” abolish
the “enmity” which man's sins have created
between
him and God? (
Confessions 5:19).
Augustine's spiritual quest was for a faith that would
combine a return to a
reconciliation with God, and
to a strong sense that the Deity is truly
transcendent
and omnipotent; hence his struggles to formulate free
will in accordance with divine power. So he vehe-
mently opposed the Pelagians, who denied that man's
nature is
intrinsically alienated by sin, and that anyone
may, like the prodigal son,
decide on his own volition
to arise and return to his Father.
Augustine—and the
mainstream of Christianity after his
time—emphasized
the one-sidedness of the reconciliation. Only as
om-
nipotent God reaches out to the
individual soul can
reconciliation begin. Augustine's Confessions
elo-
quently expresses the idea that natural
man suffers from
naturally incurable psychical unrest and distress,
and
therefore yearns for something to save him; and it
expresses the
joy, the sense of repose and contentment
when his estrangement from his
Father is ended.
Augustine, following a concept implied in the
prophets, describes another
kind of alienation. The
human family itself, which should live in
harmony
under the Fatherhood of its God, continues in an in-
curable state of estrangement within itself.
Believers
(the adopted people) and unbelievers, even though
living and
working side by side, are really in deep
enmity. This alienation, moreover,
is deceptive. The
eye of worldly wisdom regards the City of God as
composed simply of malcontents, since it is out of
sympathy with the ideals
and convictions of the
“world,” which often professes
good ideals and inten-
tions. But, of course,
it really is the “world” that is
alienated from the
source of all goodness. Thus there
has been a continuing impression that
alienation within
society is inevitable, and that the righteous are perma-
nently estranged from the
“establishment,” the domi-
nant powers of the world.
Medieval scholasticism attempted to bring into a
syncretic harmony the many
strains of thought that
had gone into Christianity. The pattern of alienation-
reconciliation was
not dropped, but the desire to find
precise metaphysical formulation for
the experience
of salvation greatly reduced it in importance. Saint
Thomas Aquinas, for example, defining the end in life
as—in
Aristotelian terms—pure contemplation, envi-
sioned something quite different from the recon-
ciliation of personalities Paul
described. The meta-
physical definitions
inevitably reduced the impression
of immediate relationships between God
and man. On
the other side, the medieval mystical tradition, with
its
goal of absorption of the individual soul into the
divine, worked against
the conception of recon-
ciliation, which
implies the continuation of the indi
vidual self in all its integrity. Augustine certainly would
have
wished for a mind at one with God's, but not
to cease to be Augustine.
Finally, the obsession in
popular religion with a crudely thaumaturgic
salva-
tion—sin being purged by
rituals, relics, pardons,
etc.—reduced the sense of alienation
and recon-
ciliation.
Essential to Martin Luther's reform was a return to
Irenaeus' point: that
man is redeemed when he returns
to become again, literally, a child of God.
Luther puts
the point in homely, deliberately nontheological terms,
like speeches in a domestic drama:
Christ says: formerly you were my enemies; but now you
are friends
because I regard you as friends, not because you
do many good
things to Me.... I die for the sort of friends
who have done Me no
good. I have just loved them and
made them my friends...
(Commentary on John 15).
God, like a (medieval) father, plays and sports with
his children,
pretending to be enraged with them to
test their loyalty. Christ, unlike
angels, lived with us,
“ate, drank, became angry, prayed, became
sad, cried.”
And in Luther, as commonly in Christianity, there
is
an implication, very strong if seldom clearly defined,
that it is
better for the human soul to have undergone
alienation with subsequent
reconciliation than it would
have been never to have been estranged from
God.
The joy over the return of the prodigal son was greater
than that
over the continued faithfulness of his brother.
In any event, the relation
of a husband and wife, or
of friends who have been seriously estranged and
then
reconciled, is very different from what it was at first.
The fall
of man was a felix culpa, then, in the sense
that a new and perhaps deeper relation of God to man
has been established,
symbolized by the cross. A mys-
tique of
alienation has been evident throughout the
history of Christianity.
Thus in Western civilization the condition of aliena-
tion has, so to speak, been institutionalized in religion.
The
expectation that alienation is part of the human
condition has endured even
when specific Christian
belief has gone. Romanticism viewed man as
“alien-
ated” from
nature. Wordsworth's The Prelude, for ex-
ample, tells the story of a boy, nurtured by the
divine
Spirit of nature, subsequently alienated from it by the
temptations and corruptions of civilization, and finally
reconciled. In one
very important respect, however,
the tradition has changed it. The
Judeo-Christian reli-
gions, as we have seen,
closely connected alienation
and reconciliation. The gloom of the Christian
doctrine
of “original sin” is greatly lightened by
the idea that
this condition is a kind of nightmare from which those
who receive grace have awakened. It is the dark before
the light. Modern
views of man as alienated, however,
have no such solution of the dilemma. Man appears
to be
afflicted by this state, but its cause and cure are
uncertain. Hence we
have lost the paradoxical sense
of optimism that accompanied the idea of
alienation
in Christianity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The main bibliographical items for this subject are men-
tioned in the text. In addition, the following may be
cited:
J. M. Ward, Hosea: A Theological
Commentary (New York,
1966); Saint Augustine, Sermons for Christmas and Epiph-
any, trans. T. C. Lawler (Westminster, Md., 1952); Martin
Luther, Lectures on Romans, trans. W. Pauck
(Philadelphia,
1961); G. B. Hammond, Man in
Estrangement (Nashville,
1965); and G. Sykes, Alienation: The Cultural Climate of
Our Times
(New York, 1964).
ERNEST TUVESON
[See also
Alienation; Christianity; Dualism; Free
Will;
Gnosticism;
God; Heresy; Romanticism;
Sin and Salvation.]