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In more exalted moods, man puts the question differently: "Am I not, indeed, the paragon of the creation, distinctive, unique, set apart and above it by my faculty of reason?" But man has only to observe himself in his dining, bath and bed rooms to feel a stabbing sense of his kinship with the animals.
This paradox is related to another. Sometimes man boasts: "I am essentially good, and all the evils of human life are due to social and historical causes (capitalism, communism, underprivilege, overprivilege)." But a closer look shows man that these things are consequences, not causes. They would not be there if man had not produced them.
If, in a chastened mood, man says, "I am essentially evil," he is baffled by another question, "Then how can I be good enough to know that I am bad?"
The Transcendent Animal. "The obvious fact," says Dr. Niebuhr, "is that man is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its necessities, driven by its impulses, and confined within the brevity of the years which nature permits its varied organic forms. . . . The other less obvious fact is that man is a spirit who stands outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world." Man is, in fact, the creature who continually transcends nature and reason—and in this transcendence lies man's presentiment of God.
Man's world is not evil, for God, who is good, created the world. Man is not evil, because God created man. Why, then, does man sin?
"Anxiety," says Reinhold Niebuhr, "is the internal precondition of sin"—the inevitable spiritual state of man, in the paradox of his freedom and his finiteness. Anxiety is not sin because there is always the ideal possibility that faith might purge anxiety of the tendency toward sin. The ideal possibility is that faith in God's love would overcome all immediate insecurities of nature and history. Hence Christian orthodoxy has consistently defined unbelief as the root of sin. Anxiety is the state of temptation—that anxiety which Kierkegaard called "the dizziness of freedom."
Man seeks to escape from the insecurity of freedom and finiteness by asserting his power beyond the limits of his nature. Limited by his finiteness, he pretends that he is not limited. Sensing his transcendence, man "assumes that he can gradually transcend [his finiteness] until his mind becomes identical with universal mind. All his intellectual and cultural pursuits . . . become infected with the sin of pride.. . . The religious dimension of sin," says Dr. Niebuhr, "is man's rebellion against God. . . . The moral and social dimension of sin is injustice."
But man does not always sin by denying his finiteness. Sometimes, instead, he denies his freedom. He seeks to lose himself "in some aspect of the world's vitalities." This is sensual sin.