Rewilding Yourself

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“The Ghent Altarpiece,” completed in 1432 by brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, is considered the first if not finest Renaissance masterpiece. Standing before it, the eye is drawn to the painting’s focal point: a mystical lamb at the center symbolizing Jesus Christ. After a team of international experts discovered that a substantial part of the painting had been reworked in the 16th century, $2.4 million was spent to restore the piece to its original state. The results were stunning. 

Hidden behind layers of paint, conservationists uncovered the lamb’s original face, which looks far more wild than sheepish. “This is the original sheep of van Eyck, which was painted over by someone else to make it look like a passive animal,” said head conservationist Helen Dubois. She believes that at some point in the 1500s, another painter tamed the piece for theological reasons, opting to subdue the “humanoid” face on the lamb for a more domesticated version. 

It struck us. Is it possible that our souls are suffering a similar fate? 

In this series on rewilding, we are exploring opportunities to restore our souls, to free ourselves from a counterfeit, domesticated faith. If rewilding the environment starts with returning the land to its natural state, rewilding the soul seeks the same end: a return to our original essence as human beings. And what we find hidden under centuries of sin might be surprising. 

If you grew up in the Western church, odds are you were told from an early age and in not so uncertain terms that you were born bad, conceived in sin, and separated from God due to your inherent deviant nature. The simple act of entering the world in human form meant God was already angry with you. Did your church overemphasize the idea of “original sin”? If so, how did it make you feel? Did you value your body or were you ashamed of it? Was the earth your sacred home or simply another dead planet? And what about sex? Were you taught the original goodness of physical passion or were you told those developing desires were in and of themselves evil? Is it any wonder many of us continue to live with a neurotic sense of shame, utterly dissociated from our bodies, and separated from the natural world? 

“Original sin” is a concept that was first articulated by Augustine 1,600 years ago and has been accepted by many Christian traditions ever since. Although abhorrent to Celtic Christianity and minimized in the Orthodox Church, it has become so ubiquitous in the Western church that we assume the concept is biblical. But a closer look reveals it as a theological forgery, based on a botched translation of the Bible. 

The original Greek text had Paul saying that, after Adam sinned, death spread to all “because all have sinned.” But Augustine, reading from the mistranslated Latin Vulgate Bible, read that death spread to all through Adam “in whom all sinned.” Notice the slight alteration? The question isn’t whether or not everyone has sinned but rather the source of everyone’s sin. His innocent misinterpretation makes everyone culpable in Adam’s sin because in his reading, we were all present in Adam’s act of disobedience. Stepping back, one realizes original sin does not appear in any Old Testament writings, nor is Jesus known to have taught it. “How strange that a religion would sustain itself on a theory that its founder never even heard of,” quips theologian Matthew Fox. It should come as no surprise that the doctrine’s popularity coincided with the marriage of the Church with the Roman Empire, providing ecclesiastical authority for institutional Christianity to control the masses via a theology of shame. 

The damage done to the earth, our bodies, and our souls is plain to see. If we think the physical world is inherently bad and will one day be destroyed anyway, why waste time stewarding creation? If we believe we were born bad instead of broke that way, there is no limit to our license for depravity. The accentuation of original sin leads to haunting insecurity, a negation of the body, and a shameful understanding of human sexuality. We cannot devalue our bodies without also devaluing our souls. 

But thankfully, hidden behind centuries of institutional religion and spiritual domestication lies the prime essence of creation. In the beginning, God composed a good world. Original goodness, not original sin, is the natural state of creation. If we are to rewild our soul, and therefore the world with it, we must balance this exclusive “original sin” model of spirituality with a more ancient truth, one we will reclaim, or perhaps discover, in our next issue...

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