The problem with the Medieval, for us ordinary souls, is the problem of sin. Or rather not the problem of sin, in the theological sense, but the problem of sin in the psychological sense – in our sense or belief in our lack of sin, whether from legitimate amorality or mere denial. Denial seems more likely. But the denial arises from a legitimate moment, a sense of sinlessness which is neither amoral nor necessarily addictive in its true nature.
            Objectivity is precisely beyond sin. Which should have told us, from the first, that the experience of objectivity is in essence also an emotional experience, since guilt is an emotional function. And the fact that we have a pivot which stands beyond guilt while turning on emotion – no matter whether we can actually live out of it – gives us the righteous sense that we stand beyond evil, however much it may have its teeth in our heels.
            The problem with the question of evil is that it tallies with something in our own consciousness, a sense of disjunction and disunity in our own awareness. Something that not only seems like is should be integral, but should be absolutely integral – my own awareness, since it consists of the only singularity of myself that stands against all of the deflective and dissolving multiplicity of the world – is nevertheless not quite a unity, much less an integrity.
            This question of the double self is probably the most categorical definition of the modern world. But it was mediated through the Medieval. Undoubtedly psychology begins with the Greeks, since they had the word. But the poverty of the classical Greek, from our perspective, is precisely the lack of psychology. Psychology appears as allegory in the Greek drama. Somehow, they had the family down perfectly. But that ‘somehow’ is clearly prophetic, not a direct expression of philosophy, much less of psychology in any formal sense.

             But in the perspective of modern and Medieval, the problem of sin is the experience of guilt. I have guilt. I have something which seems to obviate, or at least stand beyond guilt. Which do I choose? No contest. But a path leads from the beginning of Medieval thought directly up to our doorstep. And the path begins with our old nemesis, Augustine. Harold Bloom speaks of ‘Shakespeare and the invention of the human’, in his book of that title. Perhaps we should speak of Augustine and the invention of guilt.
            Augustine, prior to his conversion an outland cosmopolite in the Roman Empire, living a fairly integral and basically moral, if slightly irregular and highly ambitious life, in terms of that context, manages to convince us, for more than fifteen hundred years, that he was among the greatest sinners that ever lived. And why? Because he had a mistress and a son, with no intention of marrying her? Not really. It was totally within the moral zeitgeist of the times. But ultimately he dismisses her, not for his specious elevation into a successful worldly marriage, but apparently toward his marriage with the church. Which is more ‘moral’ from our perspective, a monogamous if unsanctioned relationship, or a sanctioned abandonment? A quibbling point, no doubt. But the real issue for Augustine is sexuality itself. His overwhelming sin was apparently his godgiven sexuality.
            And, of course, if we want to look at the single continuity from the 5^th century to the modern era in terms of the religious – and therefore of the dominating cultural center – the key would probably be Augustine and guilt. When the reformers dumped the catholicity of the church, while they spoke of returning to the ‘primitive’ church, they retained their Augustine, although his work, a century after Constantine, could hardly be called primitive. And one hardly needs to point out that our dear friend, Calvin, based his soul-twisting koan for ‘native’ Christianity on the raw guilt function first established by Augustine as the ultimate métier of dominance over individuals in the name of the church. As a result of the fall, nature itself is guilty. The little ants and snails are guilty, so how much more are we, sentient and putatively rational beings.
            But of course it is precisely in the arena of the ‘rational’ that objectivity emerges to challenge the millennial dominance of guilt.

             The double self begins to free us from guilt. We have to honor guilt historically insofar as it points unremittingly to the divided nature of the self, thus establishing the precedent for the modern. But while the double self produces the sense of doubt and the source of the moral consciousness, in itself it is neither an inherently guilty consciousness nor the source of evil. The certification of the separation is the certification of sin or evil, no doubt, but that is not on us. The fall is not first of all ‘lapsarian’, although it is apparently grounded in the desire for power over one’s own actions, that is, in power itself, which of course is the basis of addiction – or ‘possession’, according to the older worldview.
            But addressing ‘the fall’ from a contemporary perspective, the first consideration is the metaphysics of self-awareness, a study or analysis which is essentially outside the frame of morality. The ultimate impulse, the impulse which will carry us to the core of the issue probably begins with the singular and exclusive desire for justice, since the search for the moral ideal is the golden key to the deepest abyss in consciousness, which is where ‘the divine’ resides. But as we have argued here, objectivity, the key to science, is itself the natural corollary, in the modern world, for the central experience of self-separation that allows us to view not only our ‘selves’, but also to stand outside our ‘experience’ and view it as experience. That is, objectivity itself is the contemporary obverse of reflective awareness.

             We will not obviate the moral. Just the reverse, we will begin to understand where the moral actually comes from, not in terms of some putative stones handed down from God, but in terms of the implanted conditions of our own awareness. But of course such is the law of the prophets and not of the priests.