The Self Curved Inward

On Sin and the Porous Self

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that we’ve been committed for the last century or so to a fool’s errand—searching for a self that has never really existed. There is no hidden self waiting to be uncovered once we’ve peeled back enough outer layers. We’re layers all the way through: each of us formed in and by the world we inhabit, porous physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Search as much as you like and you won’t find some truer, more authentic you at the centre. In that sense, we’re more like an ecosystem than a machine; more like a communion than a unit.

In that account, I left out the question of sin, and I did so deliberately. But it can’t stay set aside, because thinking of the self as porous pushes us towards a different account of sin.

The Hands That Were Never Clean

Most of us would prefer to think of sin as something we might, with sufficient effort and willpower, avoid. In the lives of the saints we see individuals heroically resisting temptation — Antony in the desert, wrestling with demons. There’s something of this mindset in the biblical language of cleanliness too. It’s a consoling picture because it leaves open the possibility of innocence: the clean hands of the psalmist who declares I wash my hands in innocence and I do not sit with the worthless (Ps. 26).

But a porous self is never in a position to stand clear of anything. We don’t encounter the world’s distortions from outside and decide whether to give way to them. We are, from the start, woven through with them — formed by sinful people who were themselves formed by sinful people who were themselves caught up in patterns of fear, pride, and self-deception older than anyone can trace. There is no anteroom in which the self waits untouched by the world. We arrive already inside it, already breathing its atmosphere before we knew there was any other kind of air.

This is what Calvin meant by “total depravity” — not that human beings are as wicked as they could possibly be, but that there is no part of us the distortion hasn’t touched. No corner left clean. No remainder that stands outside it.

That may be uncomfortable, but it’s closer to the truth of our daily experience than the alternative. We don’t know sin chiefly as occasional dramatic moral failure. We know it as the reflexive reach for control before we’ve noticed we’re afraid, the kindness withheld for reasons we refuse to examine. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 Jn 1.8). Sin turns out not to be a series of discrete choices made from prior innocence. It’s woven into the wanting itself.

Distortion in the Grain

Christian theology has traditionally offered two ways of naming this.

The first sees sin as personal. You stand before God and your neighbour answerable for what you do. Paul writes to the Philippians, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. This account takes seriously the one thing that must be taken seriously: that you aren’t merely a product of a fallen world, that something is required of you, that you personally are responsible.

The second insists that this is incomplete — that no one begins in a moral vacuum, as though the accumulated distortions of generations simply stopped before reaching us. Here Paul sounds different. Writing to the Ephesians, he describes people dead in trespasses and sins... following the course of this world. The language shifts from something you do to something you’re in.

Both accounts protect something meaningful. But the argument between them gets stuck in a question of allocation: how much of what I do is properly mine to own, and how much belongs to the world that made me? That’s the wrong question, because it assumes a boundary between the self and its formation that isn’t there. If the self is porous all the way down — receiving its language, its desires, its habits of attention from those around it — then my sinlessness would require, as a prior condition, the sinlessness of my neighbours, my family, my culture, and the long history that produced them all. Which is to say: it was never really available.

And yet my responsibility is irreducibly mine — not because I make moral decisions in isolation, but because I am the unrepeatable place where everything I’ve received either bends further inward or begins, however haltingly, to open outward again. Our inviolable God-given dignity is real. So is our entanglement in a fallen world.

Ground of Our Own Being

Paul tries to capture this in his language of “the flesh” and “the world.”

In Galatians, the works of the flesh — rivalry, jealousy, division, envy — aren’t simply bodily appetites running loose. They’re fundamentally relational distortions, ways of being with others that bend life inward on itself. Flesh, here, isn’t the body. It’s a life attempting to become its own ground, receiving the world not as gift but as something to be controlled, defended, and possessed. The result isn’t the freedom we yearn for. It’s the anxious work of constant maintenance: keeping what you have, defending what you fear losing, resenting what others have that you don’t.

The same dynamic appears in Romans, though now Paul isn’t describing sin from the outside but confessing it from within: I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. This isn’t the language of someone who has stood apart from sin. It’s the language of someone who has looked honestly at his own experience and found sin already there, woven into will and desire prior to any particular choice — and who is still, despite that, called to resist it.

And then there are the powers and principalities: sin become historical, structured into arrangements that outlast every individual who contributed to them and will outlast every individual who benefits from or suffers under them now. The “world” in this sense isn’t creation, which Genesis insists remains good. It’s a shared order of distorted meaning — economic, political, cultural — that simply feels like the way things are because it’s everywhere and has always been there. Like the colour of the light: you don’t notice the tint until you step outside it, and most of us never do.

The world forms the flesh. The flesh, in turn, keeps the world going.

The Desire to Be One’s Own

If we’re formed through relation all the way down, then the fantasy of the self-originating individual is more than a philosophical mistake. It’s a longing — deep, persistent, and recognisable — to author ourselves without remainder, to owe nothing to what we have received, to be, finally and fully, our own.

That is the oldest sin in Scripture. The first disobedience in Genesis is, among other things, a reach for exactly this: life no longer received as gift but grasped as possession, the desire to be like God understood as the desire to become self-grounding, to know and determine from one’s own centre rather than to receive from another’s. It is, at its root, a refusal of the porous condition of creatureliness itself — the creature’s attempt to become the kind of thing that needs nothing it didn’t generate.

Augustine gave the resulting movement its name: incurvatus in se — the self curved inward. We often picture this as withdrawal, but it’s stranger than that. The curved self never stops reaching outward. It keeps reaching toward people, the world, even God, only to pull everything back into its own orbit. It isn’t less relational. It’s relational in a deformed key.

The same openness that makes us capable of love and learning, turned inward, draws everything it touches into the service of the self. The porousness doesn’t disappear. It deforms. Gift becomes acquisition. Communion becomes leverage. The other person becomes, subtly or not so subtly, an object.

What sin produces, then, isn’t independence but only the illusion of it — a self-sufficiency that requires increasingly anxious maintenance, like a man who has borrowed heavily and keeps pretending he’s rich. Dependence, which is simply the condition of being a creature, comes to feel like weakness. Relation, the very medium in which the self exists, comes to feel like exposure. We speak endlessly of authenticity and self-creation, as though freedom meant the progressive loosening of every tether. But a self that has cut every tether isn’t free. It’s falling, and calling the falling flight.

Reordering Our Openness

Healing, if it comes at all, can’t primarily be a matter of trying harder — of the curved self making a greater effort to straighten itself. If the distortion runs as deep as the formation does, the mending has to run equally deep. Not a surface scrubbing but something more like a badly set bone that has to be re-broken before it can heal straight: painful, slow, and impossible to manage alone.

That may be why Christian worship has always insisted on remaining so stubbornly physical — bread, wine, water, gesture, bodies gathering in a specific place, week after week, year after year. If sin enters through the slow, embodied formation of desire — folded into what we want before we know we’re wanting it, absorbed through bodies and habits and repeated experience below the level of conscious choice — then healing has to work by the same route, at the same depth, over the same kind of time. You can’t think your way out of a distortion that was never primarily cognitive. Liturgy isn’t decoration laid over something more spiritual happening elsewhere. It’s the patient remaking of a self that is always already inside relation, by drawing it, repeatedly, patiently, and bodily, into a different relation — ordered not by the self’s own gravity but by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

This, finally, points toward something I want to explore next. If the porous self is the self that sin distorts, it’s also the self that grace can remake. The same openness that left us vulnerable to formation by a fallen world is the openness through which we can be incorporated into something else entirely. Paul has a name for that something: the Body of Christ. And what he says about it turns out to be considerably stranger and more demanding than we usually allow. We aren’t, he insists, merely members of that Body. We’re also members of one another. What that means — and why it requires exactly the kind of self this series has been describing — is what I intend to explore next.