Retrieving Your Concepts: Iris Murdoch on Original Sin

In The Sovereignty of Good , Iris Murdoch argues that our moral thinking will be impoverished until it possesses a secular conception of original sin. Such a notion would need to remove unacceptable Christian baggage while retaining a genuine claim to be a descendant of the original Christian concept. Unfortunately, Murdoch does not tell a story of how this secularization is supposed to go. This paper picks up where Murdoch left off by offering such a story. It begins by unpacking the Christian conception of original sin via a genealogy of how the concept arose in Western theological thinking. This genealogy shows that original sin captures a cluster of interacting concepts: primal sin, original guilt, and fallenness. I argue that the best candidate for secularization is fallenness, understood primarily as a state of distorted vision and disordered desire. The Christian tradition further maintains we can grasp the depth of fallenness only insofar as we understand our thorough need for grace. A natural question is whether a secular descendent of original sin can preserve some notion of grace. I argue that a notion of grace can be preserved through encounters with beauty.