The Patient Who Cannot Be Guilty

Kierkegaard, when he wished to say the most severe things he knew about the self, did not say them in his own name. He invented a Christian of a higher rank than himself, called him Anti-Climacus, and let him speak, and the first thing Anti-Climacus says in his book is that the physician who knows his business does not believe in perfect health. There is no one, he says, who is not in despair, at least a little, and the fact that a man feels perfectly well is no evidence at all, since the most dangerous form of the sickness is precisely the one that does not know it is sick. I begin with him because the age has produced a new physician, who also does not believe in perfect health, and who also says that everyone is at least a little unwell, and who has built, on this same foundation, a system whose whole purpose is to make the diagnosis Anti-Climacus gave impossible to receive.

Let me describe the system without rancour, since rancour is cheap and the thing is subtle. It is the steady replacement of the confessional by the clinic. The movement is not from religion to irreligion; that would be an honest collision and the age avoids collisions. It is a translation. Every term of the old vocabulary is carried across into a new one, in which it keeps its shape and loses its sting. The soul becomes the ego. Sin becomes trauma. Temptation becomes a trigger. The examination of conscience becomes processing. Penance becomes self-care. Absolution, which was the one thing a man could not give himself, becomes self-acceptance, which is the one thing he can. And at the end of the translation stands a human being who has been told everything about himself except the single fact that would have made him a self at all, which is that he is guilty, before God, of something, and could be forgiven.

The dignity of sin. I want first to say what the clinic has taken from him, because it has been taken so gently that he thinks he has been given something. It has taken his guilt. He came in with it; he was, perhaps, nearly ready to say that he had done a wrong thing to a person who did not deserve it, and that he knew it was wrong when he did it, and that he was the one who did it. And he was told, kindly and with excellent credentials, that what he was experiencing was an unintegrated wound. That the behaviour was a response. That he was dysregulated. That the thing he was calling guilt was shame, and shame was a symptom, and symptoms are to be alleviated.

Now consider what has happened. A dog cannot sin. An engine cannot sin; it can only fail. A river that floods a village has done nothing wrong. To sin is the one act of which only a spirit is capable, because it requires that the agent stand, in the moment of the act, before an eternal claim, and know it, and choose against it. Anti-Climacus is exact about this: the pagans had no concept of sin, he says, because they had no concept of standing before God; they had faults, errors, flaws, excesses, everything but the one thing. Sin is not a defect in the mechanism. It is a position taken by a self. And therefore to tell a man that he has not sinned but is merely wounded is not to comfort him. It is to demote him. It is to inform a creature who was made to stand upright before the living God that he is in fact an animal with faulty wiring, and that the wiring can be managed. The clinic believes this is mercy. It is the most contemptuous thing one human being has ever said to another, and it is said forty times an hour in every city in the West, and paid for.

Understand me. There are wounds. There is a physician of the body, and Anti-Climacus himself distinguishes the sickness of the spirit from the illnesses the body can suffer, and a man whose mind is broken by what was done to him in childhood needs the physician as surely as a man with a broken leg. I say nothing against him. I say something against the translation, in which every guilt becomes a wound and no wound is ever anyone’s guilt, so that the category of the responsible self is quietly closed, and the patient is left in a world where things happen to him and nothing is done by him, and he calls this healing. The same clinic that rightly tells the scrupulous man that he has not sinned now tells every man that he has not sinned, and the second sentence is not the first one made general. It is its opposite.

The boundary. From the abolition of guilt follows, with a logic the age does not notice, the abolition of the neighbour; and the instrument of the abolition has a name, and the name is “boundary.” Observe the word. It is a word from surveying. It describes a line on a map that marks where one property ends and another begins, and the doctrine built upon it is that each self is a property, with a fence, and that the chief work of maturity is to know where one’s fence runs and to keep others on the far side of it. A parent who is difficult is “outside my boundary.” A friend who needs more than is convenient has “violated a boundary.” A brother who has wronged one is “cut off,” and the cutting is called health.

Kierkegaard wrote a whole book to show that this is the death of love, and he wrote it before the word was invented, which tells you how old the thing is under its new name. Works of Love begins from a sentence the age cannot hear: you shall love the neighbour. Shall. It is a duty, and it is a duty precisely so that it cannot be revoked when the neighbour becomes inconvenient, because a love that can be revoked on those terms was never love but preference, and preference is simply self-love with a second person added as an ornament. And the neighbour, he says, is not the person one chooses. The neighbour is the first person one sees. He is the one who is there, with his difficulty, on the near side of the fence. The doctrine of boundaries is a method for ensuring that there is never a neighbour, only a series of people who have been assessed and found to lie outside the line. It calls this self-respect. Anti-Climacus has a shorter word for the state of a self that has withdrawn behind its own walls and sealed the door and calls the sealing maturity. He calls it inclosing reserve, and he says it is the form despair takes when it has become demonic, because it would rather keep its wound than be touched.

I do not say there are no cases in which a man must put distance between himself and another. The prophets fled kings. But notice the difference between flight and the boundary. The man who flees knows he is fleeing, and grieves, and prays for the one he fled from. The man with a boundary has been told that he has done nothing at all, that he has merely maintained a line, and that the person on the other side of it is now, by the terms of the survey, not his concern. He has been given cowardice with a certificate.

Working on oneself. And now the third thing, which is the most pitiable, because it afflicts the sincere. There is a kind of person in this age who is not evading anything. He wants to love. He wants to be a self. And he has been told that before he can do either, he must first “work on himself,” and he has been doing so for ten years. He has processed his origins and identified his patterns and named his attachment style and learned to sit with his feelings, and he is, by every measure the clinic possesses, much improved, and he has not yet performed one act of concrete self-giving toward a single human being, because he is not ready, because the work is not finished, because to love before one is healed would be to love from the wound.

Kierkegaard knew this man intimately, because he invented him. He is the aesthete of the first volume of Either/Or, who has discovered the secret of never being disappointed, which is never to begin. The aesthete rotates his interests as a farmer rotates crops; he keeps everything in the mode of possibility, where it is infinitely rich and costs nothing, and he never once lets it harden into the actual, where it would be one thing and not another and could fail. The modern patient has achieved the same deferral by a different route. He keeps his love in the mode of preparation. He is always almost ready. And the terrible thing, which Anti-Climacus would have seen at once, is that the preparation is not a stage on the way to the self. It is a substitute for it. A self is not something one gets ready to be. It is constituted, Anti-Climacus says, in the relating, in the act, in the moment when the relation that relates itself to itself takes a stand. The man who waits until he is whole before he loves has chosen, without knowing it, never to love, because wholeness is not the precondition of love but its result. The wound does not close before the giving. It closes, if it closes at all, in it.

The cure. So what is the cure, since the clinic offers two and Anti-Climacus says that neither is one? The first is acceptance: the self is told to accept itself as it is, wound and all, and to stop demanding more. The second is the chemical balance: the self is adjusted until it no longer feels the discrepancy. Both of these, in his terms, are forms of despair, and he names them. The first is the despair of weakness, which in despair does not will to be itself, and so settles for a lesser self that can be accepted. The second is not a cure at all but an anaesthetic laid over the place where the cure would hurt. Neither touches the sickness, because the sickness is not a feeling. It is a misrelation, in the self, to the power that made it.

Here is the formula, and I give it as he gave it, because the age has forgotten that it exists. Despair is removed when the self, in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, rests transparently in the power that established it. Every word is weighed. Relating itself to itself: the self must be present to itself, which the clinic also wants, but the clinic stops here. Willing to be itself: not accepting itself, which is passive, but willing, which is an act, and which includes willing to be the self that did the wrong thing and is guilty of it, since a self that disowns its guilt has disowned part of itself and is not yet willing to be itself at all. And then the clause the clinic cannot say and the whole of the difference lies in it: resting transparently in the power that established it. Not in itself. Not in its balance, nor its acceptance, nor its boundaries, nor its ten years of work. In God. Transparently, which means with nothing hidden and nothing defended, which is to say in the one posture the boundary was built to prevent.

This is why the confessional cannot be replaced by the clinic, whatever the clinic knows, and it knows a great deal. The confessional is the one room in the world in which a man is required to be guilty, allowed to say so, and told that he is forgiven by someone who is not himself. It presupposes everything the translation has removed: a self, a sin, a God before whom the sin was committed, and a forgiveness that comes from outside. The clinic can only hand him back to himself, improved, and a self handed back to itself is exactly what Anti-Climacus means by despair. The old severity was the only mercy. To be told you have sinned is to be told you are a spirit. To be told you can be forgiven is to be told you are loved by something that is not you. And to be told, instead, that you are dysregulated and have good boundaries and are doing the work, is to be left, comfortable and incurable, exactly where you were, with the sickness that cannot die and the door sealed from the inside.