The Crack Runs Through Everyone

We have spent five essays building upward — from the existence of the world to the Mind behind it, from the moral law to the strange weight of being a person. This one goes the other way. It goes downward, into the thing we are most reluctant to look at, and it is the hinge on which the whole case turns. Because before anyone will want a rescue, they have to admit they are in trouble.

The one claim you can verify for yourself

There is a claim at the heart of the Christian account of the world that is often mocked and almost never actually examined: that something has gone wrong with us. Not with some of us — the criminals, the tyrants, the faces on the news — but with all of us, at the root. It has been said that this is the one Christian teaching you can confirm by reading the newspaper. Every other doctrine you may have to take partly on trust. This one you can check against five thousand years of recorded history and, more uncomfortably, against yourself.

Consider how strange our situation really is. In the last essays we saw that we know the moral law — that we carry within us a genuine sense of how we and others ought to behave. Here is the twist: we do not keep it. Not the worst of us; not any of us. The same person who is outraged by cruelty is capable of it. The same person who prizes honesty shades the truth to protect himself. We hold others to a standard we ourselves fail hourly. If you doubt it, try a simple experiment: for one week, live up to your own moral standards — not God's, just the ones you already hold and apply so freely to everyone else. No one has ever managed it. The gap between the is and the ought does not run only through the world out there. It runs through the middle of you.

Not mistakes — something we do

We keep a hundred softer words on hand. We speak of mistakes, of issues, of being only human, of everyone doing their best. And some wrongdoing really is weakness or ignorance. But be honest about the rest. Much of what is worst in us is not accidental at all. We knew, and did it anyway. We were not confused about whether the cruel word would wound; we chose it because it would. The problem is not merely that we are ignorant and need teaching, or wounded and need healing — though we are both. It is that there is something in the will itself that is bent, that prefers too often itself to others, its own comfort to what is right, the lie that flatters to the truth that costs. The old, unfashionable word for this is sin, and its very unfashionableness is part of why we keep colliding with it: we have talked ourselves out of the only word large enough to name the thing.

The witness of guilt

In the essay on the moral law I mentioned a sting — the way the same conscience that tells us the law is real also tells us we have broken it. That sting has a name: guilt. And guilt is a witness we spend enormous energy trying to silence.

Notice that we do not feel this way about our digestion or our reflexes. No one lies awake ashamed of how their liver handled dinner. But we do lie awake over what we said, what we failed to do, whom we betrayed. Guilt is not the sense of having malfunctioned; it is the sense of having offended — of having failed not merely a standard but, somehow, a Someone. Our age has poured a fortune into explaining guilt away as social conditioning or evolutionary residue, precisely because it is so persistent and so unwelcome. But the effort to bury it is itself a kind of confession. You do not work that hard to silence a witness who has nothing on you.

Why every other answer runs aground here

This is the reef on which the alternatives break, and it is worth seeing before we compare them in full. Any account of life must do something with this fracture. The comfortable spiritualities of our day mostly deny it — you are already whole, already enough, already divine; simply awaken to it. That is a lovely thing to be told and a hard thing to believe at three in the morning, when you know exactly what you are. The strict materialist has the opposite trouble: he cannot call it a fracture at all, because a fracture implies we were meant to be otherwise, and on his account there is no "meant to." Cruelty is just what certain molecules do; there is nothing to forgive, because nothing was ever owed. Each view, in its own way, has to look away from the plainest fact about the human heart.

Christianity does not look away. It says the very thing you already suspect in your most honest moments is true: you are not what you should be, the failure is real, and it is yours. This sounds like bad news, and it is — but it is the particular kind of bad news a doctor delivers before a cure, the kind you have to receive before anything can actually help. A diagnosis you refuse is a diagnosis that cannot heal you. And the strange mercy of the Christian claim is that it tells the truth about us not to crush us but to prepare us — because the whole of what follows in this series is the announcement that the God we have been tracing did not stay at a safe distance to condemn the fracture, but came, himself, to mend it. First, though, the crack has to be admitted. It runs through everyone. It runs through you. And no one else's confession will do in place of your own.