Diarmund O’MURCHU. Beyond Original Sin: Recovering Humanity’s Creative Urge. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2018. pp 205. $24 pb. ISBN 9781626982864. Reviewed by Michael H. BARNES, University of Dayton, Dayton, OH 45469.

            The list of ten other books by O’Murchu listed in the bibliography, all published by Orbis, indicate that he has a following.  His audience, I suspect, are those who once favored Matthew Fox’s theology and Joseph Campbell’s love of archetypes and myth.  O’Murchu started with The Prophetic Horizon of Religious Life (Excaliber, 1988). Reframing Religious Life. An Expanded Vision for the Future, St. Paul's (London, 1995), got him in some trouble with at least the Spanish bishops for declaring the era of vowed celibates is over.  He shifted to a new topic in Quantum Theology (Crossroad: 1997), an attempt at something like Fritj of Capra’s 1975 The Tao of Physics, to link up modern physics with a religious vision in a somewhat mystical fashion.

Assembling an account of the dominant theme of this current book is not difficult, though identifying a line of logical development that runs through the chapters is quite hard.  A guiding theme is this: human life in primordial times was not perfect, but it was much better than later (and perhaps now?)  Before agriculture imposed a miserable, patriarchal life on most people – the peasants and plebes and certainly the slaves – a matriarchal society enjoying an attachment to the Mother Goddess and reverencing the Great Spirit in and through the universe enabled people to live creative and constructive lives.  Using Richard Manning’s Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization (2004), O’Murchu paints a sad picture of life imposed on the masses by patriarchal control and competition, and by the contagions made common by crowded city life. (Mannning’s book is persuasive; James C. Scott builds on it in his own Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, 2011, with greater archeological evidence.)  We now need to regain that early condition, says O’Murchu.  That will include identifying ourselves as Earthlings, belonging to this creation rather than to a life to come elsewhere.  We should also de-emphasize rationality in favor of “lateral thinking,” which is intuitional and creative (92).

O’Murchu strives to connect this to Jesus, who, according to Thomas Sheehan, preached the end of religion (106), in part by turning the idea of the Kingdom of God into Crossan’s rather egalitarian “Companionship of Empowerment,” free from the patriarchal style that Christianity fell into after Jesus.  We are strongly indoctrinated, however, by many modern forces including educational systems, transnational corporations, and government (126-128) that will make it very difficult to rise from this fallen state and regain our original innocence and creativity.

The tone of O’Murchu’s book is clear, I hope, from this review. It is a complaint that we are caught in a web of ideas and values that alienate us from our true nature and purpose. His comparison of this to a past semi-edenic state is shaky, though, I believe.  The interpretation of an ancient statuette as a primordial earth mother remains unsupported. We really do not know what this “Venus” figure represents, and fortunately current feminism has much stronger grounds than this to rest on.  Likewise the idea that primal groups worshiped or venerated a Great Spirit now looks more like a product of searches by early Christian missionaries and others for signs of an urmonotheismus, which led, as James L. Cox puts it, to The Invention of God in Indigenous Societies (2014), by Christian missionaries and others, including in native societies of North America. (Or see similar critiques by the Ugandan scholar Okot p’Bitek, in his African Religions in Western Scholarship, 1990).