Addiction,Sin,and the Kierkegaardian Self: On Immanent and Transcendent Goods

Waters: soul-sickness and the sociality of sin

Waters offers the language of “soul-sickness” to describe addiction, naming it as one among a broader cluster of such behavioral conditions characterized by self-harm and compulsions that she suggests are “signs of the soul in distress” (Waters, 2019, p. 7). Emphasizing the complexity of such sickness and the breadth of external factors that contribute to the development thereof, she writes, “A soul-sickness arises from many interacting vulnerabilities and progresses into one all-encompassing condition of pain. It is not derived from one individual cause, but the result of a multitude of sufferings that merge together under a common self-destructive solution” (Waters, 2019, p. 16). These vulnerabilities result especially from abuse, trauma, and unhealthy attachment patterns in early childhood. Such suffering creates a deficit in one’s ability to self-regulate emotion, and substance use often develops as a coping mechanism to which individuals turn unreflectively, or for lack of any other perceivable option. Yet, for the addict, this desperate attempt at managing pain proves a “Faustian bargain” (Waters, 2019, p. 16), for the substance that initially offered a solution comes to dominate the person’s life at the expense of relationships, responsibilities, and health.

Reflecting on this model of development, Waters describes the core components of addiction construed as a soul-sickness: “First, addiction is relational; second, it is motivated by the problem of pain, not the desire for pleasure; finally, it is an emergent condition that progressively takes over the will” (Waters, 2019, p. 7). In this threefold description, Waters emphasizes that addictions are not ultimately about the pursuit of pleasure but are rather “attempts to survive” (Waters, 2019, p. 8; cf. Koob, 2006; Pombo et al., 2016) the pain of broken attachments, unresolved trauma, or various forms of social oppression. Rather than gluttonously seeking new heights of pleasure, the reality of addicted experience is a desperate desire to find an affective neutral or regain a state of social, biological, and psychological homeostasis. By attending to the way in which the coping mechanism of substance abuse cyclically exacerbates the underlying psychosocial issues it once relieved through the physiological process of tolerance, withdrawal, and increased use, Waters (2019) helps us “to begin to see that addiction is a particular kind of neurobiological possession that arises from our own sins but also the sins of others in a profoundly relational world” (p. 8).

This directs us to the dialectical manner in which Waters frames the relationship between sin and addiction. Describing the way that addiction “self-organizes into an active evil” that “entwines with a person’s state of being,” she maintains on the one hand that “Addiction is not a sin. Rather it is a spiritual bondage. It is not a free-will action. It is a condition of the soul in distress” (Waters, 2019, p. 16). This commitment arises out of her emphasis on the human being as inescapably social and embodied—and therefore, vulnerable—and of the addict as one whose wounds, vulnerabilities, and suboptimal survival strategies have coalesced into a self-destructive force. She thus insists that addiction cannot be reduced to the sin or sins of the individual. Yet she does not extricate addiction from the grammar of sin altogether, nor does she absolve the addict of all responsibility. She insists, however, that we must understand both sin and addiction in terms of humanity’s sociality and vulnerability. She clarifies that the “focus on self-regulation needs in relational contexts does not remove the addict’s responsibility to choose recovery,” while at the same time maintaining that “[i]f there is sin in addiction, it is a much more complicated combination of the sins we do and the sins done to us” (Waters, 2019, p. 8, emphasis added) than has traditionally been recognized.

The vital point for Waters is that addiction is not the result of an especially sinful orientation or set of desires, nor is it simply the consequence of evil or immoral choice(s). This is the strength of the soul-sickness image, for it allows us to hold in tension the way that sin may be interwoven into addiction without being its causal starting point. Approaching addiction as a soul-sickness:

helps us to imagine what shape evil takes when it latches onto our vulnerability. Moral sin is involved in this model, because chronic ritual behaviors compromise our moral decisions over time. But the larger picture is the emergence into a possessive force that slowly takes over the self. (Waters, 2019, p. 36)

Because addiction emerges out of the confluence of inherent vulnerabilities and attempts to cope with pain, Waters concludes that it cannot be properly understood in terms of classical theology’s definitions of sin as pride, misdirected desire, or self-assertion. To do so fundamentally misunderstands what motivates the development and continuance of addictive behaviors: “Pain propels us to substances as a solution. Pain wraps around our use as the addiction takes hold. The spiritual problem of addiction is not in its free-will sin as much as its slow privation of the good” (Waters, 2019, p. 35, emphasis added). Thus, while addiction inevitably leads to sins against God, self, and neighbor, “the dynamics of addiction do not flow out of humanity’s fallen pride. They flow out of our fallen fragility” (Waters, 2019, p. 35, emphasis added).

Dunnington: habit and wrongly oriented ends

Dunnington frames addiction according to a robust notion of habit as a distinct category of human action. Drawing on Aristotelian and Thomistic concepts of virtue, vice, rationality, and in/continence, he defines a habit as “a relatively permanent acquired modification of a person that enables the person, when provoked by the relevant stimulus, to act consistently, successfully and with ease with respect to some objective” (Dunnington, 2011, p. 62). Because habits are oriented to an objective, they fall within the domain of rational action; yet, they cannot therefore be reduced to repeatedly chosen conscious acts. As Dunnington (2011, p. 63) shows, the category of habit allows for a more nuanced view of addiction, as it is able to mediate between the extremes within which we conceive of human action: (1) instinct and disposition, (2) determinism and voluntarism, and (3) the voluntary and involuntary.

Habitual action is (1) like an instinct in that it does not require conscious thought and therefore can take on something like a life of its own, but unlike an instinct in that it can be changed through intentional effort and not only through operant conditioning. However, it is like a disposition “in that it can be changed,” but also “unlike a disposition in that it cannot be changed without great effort” far beyond immediate willpower or conscious intent. Habit is (2) “like autonomous free will [voluntarism] in that it connects up at some level with reason,” but is also “like determinism in that the actions performed by habit do not issue directly from the process of deliberative reasoning that is constitutive of free will” (Dunnington, 2011, pp. 68–69). Finally, (3) the category of habit as classically articulated challenges assumptions about the meaning of voluntary and involuntary acts. Whereas we moderns tend to think of voluntary action in terms of the capacity for completely arbitrary choice, for Dunnington (as for Aquinas and Aristotle; 2011, p. 72), the voluntary is better construed as that which flows most naturally out of who we are. In this sense, acting out of habit is acting in accordance with our deepest orientation and truest desires.

In light of all this, Dunnington (2011) categorizes addiction as a habit of the cogitative estimation—the evaluative power of the “sensitive soul” (Aquinas) in which ideas “become interwoven with the objects of our experience” and which is therefore “the paradigmatic locus of habit as embodied knowledge” (pp. 74–75, emphasis added). As such embodied knowledge, addiction is a rational habit that is oriented to the acquisition of certain ends. According to Dunnington, the ends sought in addiction are ultimately intellectual goods—specifically, the “ec-static” experience of being drawn out of one’s own immanence and into transcendence. He therefore describes addiction as a counterfeit of the infused virtue of charity (friendship with God), wherein God operates both in and upon the human being, drawing them into the “perfect, transcendent fulfillment” of “an all-consuming love” (Dunnington, 2011, pp. 157–159). Imitating charity, the theological virtue that orders all other virtues and actions as their organizing principle, addiction exerts power over the addicts’ life by giving “the addicted person a sense of being in control of her life and of being able to assess and evaluate every possible course of action in terms of one definite end that eclipses every other contender for absolute allegiance” (Dunnington, 2011, p. 151). In short, addiction is so gripping because, like the true human telos of charity, it “simplifies and orders life by narrowing the focus of the addicted person onto the one object, one ‘final end’,” and therefore nearly makes good on its promise of ecstatic fulfillment (Dunnington, 2011, p. 151).

To be drawn into the ec-static life of charity is to be in right relation to God, a mode of being that Dunnington summarizes as worship (Dunnington, 2011, p. 159). Within and in light of this framework, maintains that we should understand the all-consuming life of addiction as counterfeit worship—which is to say, idolatry Dunnington (2011, p. 159). Yet, to place this claim in its proper perspective, we must grasp that “sin is not fundamentally about human acts but about the human situation. The acts that we call sins are derivative of a deeper malaise called sin.” In the deepest sense, sin “names not a type of act but a state, a situation or an orientation that a person assumes” (Dunnington, 2011, p. 129)—namely, an orientation away from our proper end of friendship with God. To speak of sin is therefore to speak of that which damages the human being by disrupting his relationship to God. The robust Christian doctrine of (original) sin, contrary to a superficial notion of sin reduced to (im)moral behavior, declares that “prior to any sinful action, and therefore even prior to the formation of sinful habits, human beings are already predisposed to reject their calling to right relationship with their Creator” (Dunnington, 2011, p. 131). As a deeply embodied habit of the cogitative estimation that amounts to counterfeit worship, addiction therefore belongs within the category of sin. But, Dunnington insists, “to speak of addiction in the language of sin is not simply to offer a moral or ethical evaluation of addiction, since the category of sin is not primarily a moral or ethical category.” Rather, “when we speak of addiction in the theological category of sin, we draw attention to the way in which addiction constitutes not a moral deficiency but rather a falling away from our perfect good of eternal friendship with God” (Dunnington, 2011, p. 140).

Short interlude on definitions

A note on definitions will be clarifying here. As should be clear, both Waters and Dunnington are invested in providing a theological interpretation of addiction. Accordingly, neither attempts to proffer their own clinical definitions (although Dunnington does reject the formal logic of the “medical model” that reductively identifies addiction as a brain disease simpliciter) (Dunnington, 2011, pp. 24–27). Nor are they interested in identifying any medical or neurobiological thresholds for what “counts” as addiction; rather, both seem basically content with an approach of “knowing it when I see it.” Waters, for example, finds the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) diagnosis of “substance use disorder” unappealing for a number of reasons both diagnostic and social; though she acknowledges that she is working within this rough paradigm for pragmatic purposes when referring to addiction as a chronic behavioral condition, she nonetheless maintains that “[u]ltimately, the individual is the one who has to assess whether her level of substance use is problematic to her goals for life” (Waters, 2019, p. 11). Dunnington is even more hesitant to subscribe to any particular definition that is not grounded in theological-philosophical categories; he rejects a moral choice model as overly simplistic and a medical model of “brain disease” as logically flawed. Indeed, the essence of his argument is that without the richly nuanced categories of classical and Christian tradition, our definitions of addiction will always shortchange the reality of human nature and experience. He therefore provides no definition until his analysis of current competing conceptualizations is complete, ultimately concluding that addiction is

a habit of the cogitative estimation according to which the object of addiction is invested with meaning that extends to every other aspect of an addicted person’s life . . . a habit that, like charity, informs all other habits by determining the end toward which those habits are directed. (Dunnington, 2011, p. 166)

In these definitional approaches we thus can see a shared resistance to reductive accounts, as well as discern the disciplinary differences of concern at play. And while Dunnington, the philosopher, is clearly more concerned with making fine-grained conceptual distinctions than Waters the pastoral theologian, I read them to basically share the approach made explicit by Waters (2019)—that “I am not able to tell you what addiction ultimately ‘really is’. Instead I hope to offer a compelling version of how we might imagine it to be” (p. 11). This approach, it should be noted, also reflects my own posture in what follows: I do not intend to define or redefine any clinical markers of addiction or substance use disorder, nor do I presume to suggest that the constructive reflections I offer in conversation with Kierkegaard can provide a conclusive theological definition of what addiction “really is.” Rather, I develop what I hope to be one helpful, compelling theological interpretation of such baffling experience—one that may prove not only descriptively and pastorally helpful, but also provoke further reflection on what it means to be a human creature before God. In short, rather than attempting to provide a definition, I am attempting to theologize about human nature as we find it in the fluid and ambiguous web of experiences we call addiction.

The human being as synthesis

Anti-Climacus opens his work by defining the human being as spirit, or as “the self,” a concept for which he provides a highly specific definition: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 13). While the human being is inescapably a synthesis of the infinite and finite, the temporal and eternal, freedom and necessity, the ontological reality of this synthesis does not automatically constitute spirit, or the self. As Kristen Deede summarizes,

the self cannot be reduced to the relation of the two components of the syntheses of which it is comprised but requires a third element, spirit, that relates itself to the synthesis and in a sense unites the two elements of the synthesis into a third factor.

As this third factor, spirit is “the structuring principle of the self,” in that it “differentiates between, for example, body and soul, and then unites them in a synthesis that becomes more than just the two elements of body and soul” (Deede, 2003, p. 29). The self is thus established in properly relating the syntheses in which the human being consists—infinite and finite, temporal and eternal, freedom and necessity, psychical and physical (Tietjen & Evans, 2011, p. 275). And because the human self is not self-establishing but a “derived, established relation” (Kierkegaard, 1980, pp. 13–14), in relating to itself it must also relate to another—namely, that which has established it, which is to say, God.

As Mark Tietjen and C. Stephen Evans note, the capacity for selfhood is the great blessing of human nature, “and accordingly, it is the task of each human to bring these elements into harmony, to exercise freedom within the concrete limitations of life” (Tietjen & Evans, 2011, p. 275). The end or telos of the human life according to Anti-Climacus, then, is to be and become a self: to relate the synthetic elements of human existence to each other properly, which as derived creatures means also to relate them to God. The human self is thus inherently relational—inwardly, as it relates itself to itself, but also essentially outwardly, as it relates to its source in God. Evans summarizes this second relationality, noting that “a conscious relation to God provides the basis for true or genuine selfhood. A relation to God is not merely the foundation of the self ontologically, but also the task of the self existentially” (Evans, 1997, p. 10). Because the human is not autonomous or self-generated, she or he cannot come to selfhood apart from something toward which they are directed: “What makes the self a self is a ‘criterion,’ a goal or end by which the self measures itself. However, that criterion, that sense of an ‘ideal self’ is given in and through relations with others” (Evans, 1997, p. 10). The “other,” we have seen, is originally and primarily God. But Evans (1997) notes crucially that for Anti-Climacus, the journey toward selfhood is also thoroughly embedded in human-to-human social relations:

I cannot become a self all by myself, and every human self is shaped by relations to other human selves: initially parents and other early care-givers, and eventually ideals of selfhood that are embodied in the language and institutions of a society. (p. 11)

The selfhood for which human beings are created, then, is to willfully and coherently relate the opposite-but-complementary aspects of human nature before God—as Anti-Climacus puts it, “to become concrete” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 30). Although he does not detail what this means for every synthetic pair, he does offer a paradigm of correct relation in terms of that which seems primary: the finite and the infinite. As he has it:

to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite . . . the progress of becoming must be an infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming back to itself in the finitizing process. (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 30)

Selfhood is not simply a balance between opposing features of human nature, but the seamless and perpetual movement out of one, into the other, and back again in such a way as to bring each to perfection ever and again. The self is therefore not a static fact or ontic identity, but “an achievement, something one must become” (Evans, 1997, p. 3).

This conception of the self as the relating relation which human beings are meant to become bears significantly on the question of the human good raised by our exploration of Waters and Dunnington. If we take human nature to be a synthesis of finitude and infinitude, temporality and eternality, necessity and freedom, body and soul ² ; and if it is the task of selfhood to relate these pairs to one another before God, then we have good reason to affirm the claim made at the end of the previous section that immanent and transcendent human good(s) cannot be abstracted from one another, either conceptually or practically. In our context of the good sought in addiction, we might say that according to Anti-Climacus’ conception of the human self, the immanent good of psychosocial homeostasis is conceivable only insofar as it is intentionally related to the transcendent good of friendship with God, and that the eternal bliss for which human beings crave is only possible insofar as it is directs and is directed toward the physical and temporal realities and social bonds through which selfhood is made a possibility.

The despair of misrelation

But of course, such is not the state in which human beings find themselves. Much to the contrary, Anti-Climacus perceives that human beings exist in a state of despair. As is the case for “the self,” Anti-Climacus fills out “despair” with a specific meaning. Although it can include the affect commonly referred to as despair, dejection, or the like, the despair to which he refers is fundamentally a misrelation rather than a feeling (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 24):

The misrelation of despair is not a simple misrelation but a misrelation in a relation that relates itself to itself and has been established by another, so that the misrelation in that relation which is for itself also reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the power that established it. (p. 14)

In short, despair names a lack of selfhood, the failure of spirit to realize the internal relations of the self’s synthetic parts and the external relation to God as its establishing power. As this failure and misrelation, it inevitably results in profound disruptions of the human psyche; as Tietjen and Evans note, “to aim toward one polarity and exclude the other is to fail to be human in a genuine or ideal sense, and . . . there are negative psychological consequences that follow” (Tietjen & Evans, 2011, p. 275). Knut Alfsvåg summarizes that despair in this sense is “the difference between the reality of one’s (God-given) self and one’s identification with it” (Alfsvåg, 2014, p. 378). As such, it is a diagnosis rather than a symptom, and whether or not one is aware of despair makes no difference to its reality (Alfsvåg, 2014, p. 382). To be in despair is to lack the internal and external relations of selfhood for which the human being is intended, and therefore leads inevitably to dysfunction—regardless of whether it is recognized as such.

“Despair is a sickness of the spirit, of the self” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 13), Anti-Climacus writes, and it is the sickness that leads unto death. It is “a self-consuming, but an impotent self-consuming that cannot do what it wants to do”—it cannot get rid of itself (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 18). As Alfsvåg (2014) summarizes, Anti-Climacus describes this sickness at “three possible levels: ignorance of having a self, despairingly not wanting to be oneself, and despairingly wanting to be oneself” (p. 382). The first form—that of ignorance—is qualitatively distinguished from the latter forms by its unconsciousness; in this state, the person “squanders” his life, “loses himself,” and lacks imagination to see beyond the immediate (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 31). But ignorance of being in despair does not mean that one is not in truth in despair, for it still manifests itself “when the seemingly stable foundations of one’s life disintegrate” (Alfsvåg, 2014, p. 283).

The second and third forms are indirectly advantageous insofar as consciousness of despair can potentially bring one closer the realization of selfhood, but they are also intensified and made more serious by this awareness. When one is aware of despair, Alfsvåg explains, it “manifests itself either as despair in weakness (not wanting to be oneself in one’s eternal significance) or as despair in defiance (despairingly wanting to realize one’s eternal significance by oneself)” (Alfsvåg, 2014, p. 383). In despairing weakness, one shirks the responsibility of selfhood by divesting the self into other persons or things, and loses themself in finitude, temporality, necessity, and the physical. In despairing defiance, one wishes to be oneself on one’s own terms and not in relation to God or the given realities of life, and posits oneself in infinitude, eternity, freedom, and the psychical. Anti-Climacus describes these forms of despair as characteristically feminine and masculine, respectively, and yet, he reflects at some length that these are only “ideal”; in the complex realities of life, they are never entirely distinct from one another and the gendered designations for the types of despair are relative at best (Kierkegaard, 1980, pp. 49–50). ³ In fact, the two forms of despair exist inseparably, and are constantly and imperceptibly bleeding into one another (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 20). As Louis Mackey reflects, “in either case one claims a power of self-determination that the dialectical and differential nature of the self makes impossible” (Mackey, 1989, p. 157).

We have seen that selfhood, construed as the self’s properly relating to itself inwardly in its synthetic dimensions and outwardly to its establishing power in God, is the human being’s proper good. As a misrelation, despair is the disruption of self that extends to all aspects of the human being, disturbing the dynamic relation of his or her immanent and transcendent good by remaining inordinately fixed in one or the other and interrupting his or her relation to God by the refusal of selfhood. Given the destructive, disrupting, and compounding nature of addiction seen earlier, it makes good sense to consider addiction in light of despair. This will be shown doubly true shortly, as we will find the condition of despair is ultimately a theological diagnosis and not merely a psychological one.

It is important to remember that despair is primarily a diagnosis, and not an observed symptom. It is by itself the sickness, and as such can be expressed through the symptoms of any number of dynamics. Given this, I see two ways in which we might understand addiction in the light of despair. On one hand, we could describe addiction as a symptom of despair—as a particular manifestation of a universal condition of illness. In this case, despair would be the causal starting point of addiction, and addiction would be one among many possible results of the misrelation of despair. This is not quite the right move, however; for a symptom does not perpetuate the illness that causes it, but addiction does perpetuate despair in manifold ways. Thus, rather than a symptom of despair, we should instead construe addiction as a means by which the person remains in despair. This distinction needs further fleshing out.

We have seen that despair is “a self-consuming,” and returning to the opening pages of Sickness, Anti-Climacus adds that the person in despair “wants to tear his self away from the power that established it” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 20). Whether by remaining in ignorance, through the weakness of self-loss, or in the defiance of self-assertion, the person in despair does all that they can—consciously and/or unconsciously—to remain in their state of self-destructive sickness. This insanity is what makes despair the sickness unto death, as the result of the disease is that the person insists upon remaining sick. In so doing, they become self-contradictory, existentially striving to get away from their ontological relationality. But “in spite of all his despairing efforts, that power [which established him] is the stronger and forces him to be the self he does not want to be” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 20).

Rather than a symptom of despair then (i.e., rather than in terms of straightforward cause-and-effect), I propose that we think of addiction as belonging to this effort; as a means by which the despairing human being strives to remain in despair and avoid becoming the self he was created to be. Addiction can clearly serve this function for all three forms of despair: For the one who is ignorant of having a self, addictive behaviors keep her numbed and distracted from the loftiness of selfhood. For the one who despairs in weakness, addiction provides a substance and a ritual process in which to lose himself. For the one who despairs in defiance, addiction provides illusions of control and self-generated transcendence. Of course, addiction is far too complicated a condition to neatly fit into any one (or two) of these descriptions—but as we have seen, so is despair. As Merold Westphal (1987) summarizes, “[n]o real, concrete despair is a pure instance of any of these. Weakness and defiance are always intermingled in varying degrees, and the same is true of consciousness and unconsciousness” (p. 54). Despair thus offers a description of the human situation complex enough to coherently account for the dynamics at play in addiction. In relation to despair, I suggest that addiction is best understood as a means rather than a symptom, contributing to the self-destructive avoidance of selfhood rather than manifesting the sickness in a particular way. This is a subtle difference, but will prove important when Anti-Climacus moves us to the explicitly theological.

The explicitly theological: the sin of despair versus the transparent rest of faith

Moving from a psychological and philosophical treatment of the human condition in Part I of the book to an explicitly theological interpretation thereof in Part II, it will come as no surprise that in the second half of Sickness, Anti-Climacus identifies despair with sin: “Sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 77). With the added emphasis on “before God,” sin is distinguished from despair insofar as it is the “intensification of despair” by its theological nature—it is the refusal of selfhood in the knowledge that it is God who commands one to be a self (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 77). James Marsh (1987) comments that sin incorporates despair “as an aspect of itself. Despair correlates with philosophy and sin to faith” (p. 67). In short, sin is despair Christianly understood, though it is only from the Christian starting point of sin that one can perceive despair.

Two aspects of Anti-Climacus’ treatment of sin are central to our considerations. First, contrary to the Socratic notion of sin as ignorance of the good, Anti-Climacus insists that Christianity’s distinctive claim is that sin is “rooted in willing” (Kierkegaard, 1980, pp. 93, 96–100), and that it is therefore a position rather than a lack. As Deede (2003) summarizes,

Sin has to do with the despair of misrelation, namely the misrelation between man and God. Moreover, it is a matter of will . . . which is why Kierkegaard defines the two forms of despair in terms of will (i.e., in despair not to will to be oneself and in despair to will to be oneself). (p. 34)

Ultimately for Anti-Climacus, sin is taking offense at the paradox of God in Christ, and willfully refusing him who reveals the heights of selfhood that are both demanded and made possible through God’s own self-emptying forgiveness of sin (Kierkegaard, 1980, pp. 113–125). The second relevant dimension of Anti-Climacus’ conception of sin is his emphasis that

In the deepest sense, the state of sin is the sin; the particular sins are not the continuance of sin but the expression for the continuance of sin; in the specific new sin the impetus of sin merely becomes more perceptible to the eye. (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 106, emphasis added)

Much like we saw in the formulation of despair as a diagnosis and not a symptom, sin is not essentially individual wrong actions—or even their exponential accumulation—but a position or a state: the state of sickness that is a refusal to be a self before God. From the perspective of human wisdom or pagan reason, sin is only ignorance, for to know the good is to do the good. Its opposite is therefore virtue, the embodied knowing of the good (Kierkegaard, 1980, pp. 87–96). Christianity, however, begins with the paradox of faith in Jesus Christ and the possibility of offense at him, through which it is revealed that sin is a matter of will rather than ignorance, and that its opposite is faith rather than virtue.

As Deede (2003) helpfully summarizes, “[t]he crucial idea for [Anti-Climacus] is that sin is neither a matter of ignorance nor of wrong-doing, but of willful misrelation to oneself and to God” (p. 34). Before considering how addiction might fit into this conception, it bears reiterating Anti-Climacus’ claim that the correct contrast is not between sin and virtue, but between sin and faith. As with “the self,” “despair,” and “sin,” Anti-Climacus ascribes a highly particular meaning to faith, which is “the formula for the state in which there is no despair at all,” the cure for the sickness unto death, and the completion of selfhood: “in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. This formula . . . is the definition of faith” (Kierkegaard, 1980, p. 131).

To analyze addiction and sin from Anti-Climacus’ perspective, we recall the way we positioned addiction in the previous section: as a means by which the human being keeps herself in a state of despair. The significance of this movement now comes to the fore, as we transpose our considerations from the philosophical to the theological with Anti-Climacus to draw the following conclusion: Addiction is a means by which the human being keeps herself in the position of sin; a means of avoiding the arduous task of selfhood.

The human being is given the task of being and becoming a self, which as we have seen means the dynamic act of properly relating the synthetic aspects of human nature to each other and to their source in God. Yet, this good is unachievable because of sin: “For though man is not essentially sinful, no one becomes a man without becoming a sinner” (Mackey, 1989, p. 63). Every human being is therefore incapable of achieving the synthesis of selfhood and is thereby in a state of despair, in the impossible position of sin as willful refusal of the good of selfhood before God. As such, Jesus Christ is “the only means whereby the self can properly relate itself to itself” (Deede, 2003, p. 37), as it turns to him in the transparent rest of faith.

As the refusal of selfhood, sin is the position of willfully refusing the human good, of failing to relate the finite and infinite aspects of the self to one another and to God. My claim that addiction is a means of remaining in sin is therefore to say that addiction is a means of avoiding selfhood, rather than a cause or a consequence of that avoidance. To identify it as a cause would be to invert the relationship between the state of sin and particular sins, as though the severity or volume of sinful acts in addiction brings about the position of sin. To identify it as a consequence would be to reduce it to a symptom; but as we have seen, this would render it merely passive or accidental to despair, whereas in reality it ensures its perpetuation. To name addiction as a means of remaining in sin (i.e., avoiding selfhood) is therefore a highly dialectical move, but one that I maintain is both justified by our conversation with Anti-Climacus and consistent with our considerations of Waters and Dunnington.

We recall that the task of becoming a self means becoming concrete by properly relating the finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, necessary and possible aspects of human nature, and that the person in despair refuses this becoming either by burying the self in the finite/temporal/ necessary (the despair of weakness) or by attempting to posit the self solely in infinitude/eternity/ possibility (the despair of defiance). I have suggested that addiction may be a means to either of these ends, which is to say, a means to the sin of refusing selfhood in weakness or in defiance.

Addiction is not itself a conscious or intentional refusal of a known good—indeed, the defining feature of the addictive experience for both Waters and Dunnington is the perpetual seeking after some good. Rather it is a (self-)deceptively misleading pursuit of false goods. As such, it is a means of avoiding the true good of becoming a self before God, the task from which every human being is disinclined by original sin. This formulation thus allows us to hold together both Waters and Dunnington. For with Waters on one hand, it declines to place addiction and individual sin in a direct causal relation, while on the other hand with Dunnington, it retains the linking of addiction with idolatrous orientation away from God.

In Waters’ terms, addiction as a result of attempted self-regulation reflects the failure of the individual to become concrete by remaining mired in finitude and necessity, rather than moving through the immediacy of pain, trauma, or victimization to self-transcending possibilities for deliverance and healing. As such, it enables despair in weakness by allowing the addict to remain subsumed within the immediacy of the addiction rather than taking up the task of selfhood. This understanding of addiction admits the central role of vulnerabilities and the desire to escape the pain of sins done to one, while also maintaining that one cannot dissolve into this pain without committing what feminist theology has called the sin of self-loss (cf. Green, 2017).

In Dunnington’s terms, addiction as an idolatrous pursuit of transcendence reflects the willfulness of human beings to remain in the position of sin, by attempting to craft their own selfhood and positing themselves in infinite possibility. From this perspective, addiction is a means by which the person tries to refuse the determined and given aspects of life, pursuing instead an illusion of control and self-grounding. In this sense, addiction allows the person to despair in defiance by providing a sense of escape from that which they cannot master.

Thus, by understanding addiction as a means for the continuance of sin, we are able to decouple it from a direct causal relationship with sin (satisfying Waters’ concern), while also affirming an indirect relation to original sin (in agreement with Dunnington). On one hand, addiction is a means for refusing possibility and remaining in necessity; on the other hand, it functions as a means for rejecting necessity and reaching for infinite possibility. We have seen with Anti-Climacus that despair flows incongruously from one polarity to the other, and I suggest that we view the perplexing condition of addiction as an exceptionally flexible—and exceptionally self-destructive—defense mechanism against the undesired human good of becoming a self before God. Furthermore, by following the movements of sin and despair back and forth between the finite and infinite dimensions of human life, we are referred back to the fact that the human good is found not in one or the other, nor in one then the other, but in the self’s dynamic and coherent relating of the immanent and transcendent human synthesis before God.