Paying Attention To The Sky

Can the philosophy of materialism explain the existence of intelligence? Bertrand Russell believes it can: given the vastness and complexity of the universe, it is probable that among the various combinations you will have one or two that produce intelligent organisms. This, for Knox obfuscates the question: "If the police were to discover a human body in Mr. Russell's Saratoga trunk, he would not be able to satisfy them with the explanation that, among all the innumerable articles of luggage in the world, it is only natural that there should be some few which are large enough to contain a body. They would want to know how it got there." By airily talking of hypothetical possibilities in a vast universe, Russell is avoiding the question of how in fact our material world has produced the spiritual reality of intellect. The existence of something different from the material world requires a cause that is other than material, and points to a Mind which is the source of our human ability to reason.

Sin is one of those tiresome words that have a whole lot of different meanings, nearly the same but not quite the same. Shame is a word like that, and so is progress, and so is democracy. A word is used in one sense by the general public, very often, but the expert will confuse the issues by using it in a lot of other senses as well. Somebody advertises a lecture about cats, and all the old ladies in North Oxford flock to it so as to find the proper way to treat their cats, and then they find the lecture is nearly all about lions and tigers and leopards. And when they complain to the lecturer, he smiles in a superior way and says, “Yes, but I didn’t mean domestic cats.”

So it is if you read a theological treatise about sin; it starts at once by saying, “There are two kinds of sin, original and actual”; and you have to wade through pages and pages about original sin (not a lively subject) before you get on to what you mean by sin, which is actual sin; the sort of sin one tries to avoid, and commits, and repents of, and wants to be forgiven for. It would save a deal of trouble if we all agreed to call Original Sin Original Guilt. Because sin, in the mind of the common man, is something which he commits himself, whereas guilt is something he may get involved in through no fault of his own; all the German people were involved in war guilt in a sense, and they all had to suffer for it. So let’s leave Original Guilt on one side, the handicap, the disability, which we have inherited through no fault of our own from our first parents, and get on to sin.

The next thing your theologian says is, “Oh, you wanted to know about actual sin, did you? You should have made that clear. Well, actual sins — I don’t mind telling you that they are divided into material sins and formal sins.”And there you are at cross purposes again; because of course material sin isn’t what you and I mean by sin. If you wake up in the night and your watch says five minutes to twelve and you eat a slice of cake and go to Communion next morning and then find that your watch was really an hour slow, that is a material sin, because the Church tells you to fast from midnight.

But it isn’t a formal sin; in other words, it isn’t what you and I mean by sin. You are under no kind of obligation to mention it when you go to Confession, though you may prefer to do so on the ground that even material sins ought to be submitted to the Church’s judgment. (That’s another curious point about language; the ordinary Englishman uses the word “material” when he thinks a thing is very important, “a material consideration”; he uses the word “formal” when he thinks a thing is quite unimportant, “the Society passed a formal resolution”. But when you go out to tea with the theologians, you must use the words exactly the other way round.)

Well, I want to play at being a theologian for a moment and say a very little about material sins. This first: if you read the Old Testament you must keep it clearly in mind that material sins, under the Old Law, counted as sins. Saul takes a vow that no soldier in his army shall eat food till night-fall; Jonathan, who hasn’t heard of it, eats a mouthful of wild honey, and everything starts going wrong. The edge of your cloak touched a dead body without your knowing it, and you were nevertheless unclean, you might incur Divine punishment for it. I suppose Almighty God set about training the Chosen Race by a very slow and patient process; outward obedience to a set of rules was all they could understand at first of what it meant to obey God’s will. It was only later on that the prophets taught them it wasn’t much use sacrificing bullocks and things if you were oppressing the widow and orphan on the side.

And here is another point about material sins which is of some importance. It is a maxim of English jurisprudence that “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” The Church takes the opposite point of view; if you do the wrong thing under the honest impression that you are doing the right thing, you do not offend God, you earn his approval. When the Emperor Otho committed suicide, because he saw no hope of peace for his country unless he were got out of the way, he did the wrong thing; it is wrong to commit suicide.

But I think it is fairly obvious that he thought it was the right thing, and if the Emperor Otho went to hell, I am quite certain it was not for that. With this in mind, we can all afford to cheer up a bit about the poor pagans. But what about us Christians, us Catholics? What judgment is going to be passed on us if we do the wrong thing because we did not know our stuff? For instance, suppose you didn’t go to Mass on New Year’s day, and that afternoon somebody mentioned it was a day of obligation. “Gosh”, you said, “I never knew that!” Yes, but how genuine was the surprise? Had you, on New Year’s eve, a kind of feeling that it might be a day of obligation tomorrow, and did you think of ringing up somebody and finding out, and then. . . well, decided not to because it would be rather a bore if it was? That would be affected ignorance, and it does not excuse. It wasn’t that; you really hadn’t the least idea?

Good; but the further question arises whether you had any right not to have the least idea. If you are so little instructed in your duties as a Catholic, oughtn’t you perhaps to be taking steps to get better instructed? There is such a thing, you see, as crass ignorance; a rude name by which the moralists imply that if you didn’t know you ought to have. More probably you forgot to think about it at all; I don’t know what the moralist would call that; my own name for it would be ignorantia undergraduatorum, because it seemed almost universal when I was chaplain.

So we can stop bothering about original sin, and material sin, and go on to discuss sin, by which we mean that men or women, probably ourselves, knowing what they are about, choose the evil and refuse the good. How that is possible, remains a headache for the philosophers. Because after all the good is by definition that at which man naturally aims; and it is very difficult to see how he misses his aim, unless it were from want of proper information, and that would land us right back in material sin, just when we thought we had got rid of it.

Those of you who are reading Greats, if anybody does read Greats nowadays, have probably been introduced to Aristotle’s speculations on the subject, and made to write an essay on whether the doctrine of the practical syllogism solves the problem of the moral conflict. He never seems to be able to make up his mind whether all wrong action is not really a kind of ignorance.

But it is no good telling us that we cannot choose the evil. We are like the drunk man on the edge of the pavement, when they told him he couldn’t sit there all night, and he replied, “You don’t know my c’pash’ties.” Mass observation, conducted over a number of centuries, proves that man does deliberately choose evil; and we have only to examine our own behavior to find that it is true; we can distinguish, in the sorry record of our past failures, which of them were really due to ignorance, which of them to a momentary obfuscation of the mind, and which of them to downright cussedness.

Not that we ever choose the evil as such. Evil as such is something negative, and cannot, therefore, exercise any spell over the human mind. When we sin, we are always aiming at something which is in itself good; but it is the wrong good in that particular context. It is a good thing to drink a glass of wine; as St Thomas says, “If a man deliberately abstains from wine to such an extent that he does serious harm to his nature, he will not be free from blame.” But if the glass of wine happens to be the fifteenth you have taken that evening, it is the wrong good in that particular context.

Sometimes indeed people — undergraduates especially — will use careless language which seems to imply that they mean to choose evil for its own sake. They will say, for instance, “Let’s go and get drunk.” But they don’t mean that; they mean “Let us go and get rid of our inhibitions”, which is a good idea as far as it goes. No, man can’t choose evil for itself; but in some mysterious way man, endowed with free will and then fallen, can and does choose the lesser good instead of the greater, with a kind of moral near-sightedness which is not ignorance, and therefore is not an excuse.

Not, that is to say, a full excuse; sometimes it is a partial excuse. And that brings us on to the two kinds of sin there really are; you really do sit up and begin to take notice when I tell you that there is a distinction between mortal and venial sins. Even that is not a self-evident proposition. The theologian, Baius, that curious sixteenth-century figure who seemed to spend all his life trying to sell the pass to the Protestants, maintained that all sins of their own nature were mortal sins, and merited damnation. You will be glad to hear that he was condemned.

There are sins of inadvertence; you may act knowing what you are doing, but not thinking what you are doing. The sudden provocation is too much for you, and you hit out. And again, there are sins too trivial in their scope to be counted in any serious reckoning. The man who takes a sheet of notepaper from the J.C.R. is performing just the same kind of action as the man who takes a priceless folio from the Bodleian. But, instinctively, you feel that there is something unhealthy about his mental balance if he comes rushing round to confession. Put venial sins on the same level as mortal sins, and it will not be long before you adopt views about man’s fallen nature which will make nonsense of the whole subject we are discussing, Sin and Forgiveness.

But there are mortal sins. Four hundred years ago, when the Reformation movement had got going, it was difficult to persuade people that any sins were venial; now, it is difficult to persuade them that any sins are mortal. We have all got so accustomed to a mental atmosphere in which everything is graded; one thing differs from another in degree, rather than in kind. There is no absolute standard about our human criticisms, no black and white, only shades of grey. There is no absolute justice about our human quarrels; it is always six query plus on one side and six query minus on the other. We are like travelers over a long tract of flat country, who are not prepared to see a sudden precipice gaping at their feet.

But that, you see, is the Christian religion all over; always these sharp antitheses, heaven and hell, God’s smile or God’s frown; you are in the state of grace or out of it, not mid-way between. After all, there is one nasty bump waiting for all of us, death; there are no shades or gradations about that. And why should we assume that the world which lies on the other side of death is a replica of ours?

There’s another reason which disinclines us to believe in mortal sin; we are so ready to make psychological excuses. Is it possible, we ask, for a man to adopt an attitude of conscious, deliberate revolt against his Creator without something a little wrong somewhere, some slight kink? And with that, mortal sin becomes venial again…. Well, I don’t say that this instinct of ours is to be despised. Certainly, if we are sitting in judgment upon the actions of other people, we should be ready to make allowances.

The late Canon Barry used to say that it took a Frenchman to commit a mortal sin. He was rather fond of saying not quite the ordinary thing, was Canon Barry; but you saw what he meant. With our own sins, if we are in real doubt whether they were mortal or venial, we must make a prudent judgment about them, as honest and objective as we can make it; going to Communion or not going will depend on that. But in confession, as long as the sin is mentioned, I don’t know that anything is gained by telling the priest whether it was or wasn’t a mortal sin; let him ask questions if he wants to.

And then, having carefully divided up our sins into venial sins, those which can be pardoned, and mortal sins, which presumably cannot be pardoned, we proceed to tell Almighty God that we hope, by the merits of Jesus Christ, for the pardon of all our sins. Once more we are plunged in an atmosphere of mystery. The simplest way to put it, perhaps, is this. If you think of your sin as a personal affront offered to a personal God, the difficulty is to see why he doesn’t forgive it at once, as soon as it is committed. After all, he tells us to forgive our enemies; why shouldn’t he forgive his?

Here lie I, Martin Elginbrodd;
Have mercy on my soul, Lord God,
 As I would do, gin I were God
And thou wert Martin Elginbrodd.

If, on the other hand, you think of your sin as a breach of the eternal order of things, an upsetting of the balance of eternal Justice, how can God forgive that? He is himself eternal Justice; is he not, then, false to his own nature if he agrees to treat the act irrevocably done as if it had never happened? You and I can forgo our right to get satisfaction out of an enemy, because the right is something external to ourselves. But the right God has to punish us is a part of himself, how, without ceasing to be God, can he forgo it?

There is an easy answer we are inclined to suggest at that point, but it’s one we mustn’t make. We are inclined to say, “Surely that was the whole point of the Atonement! It was because God could not forgive us unless we made adequate amends for our fault that Jesus Christ came to make amends for us. If there had been any other terms on which he could grant us forgiveness, surely he wouldn’t have had recourse to so strange an expedient as that!”

But the theologians won’t let you say that. Whenever you think you have got a really good answer to a theological difficulty, the theologians say, “No, that’s where you’re wrong” It wasn’t absolutely necessary for our Lord to die; it wasn’t even necessary for him to come to earth. Almighty God could have consented, if he had wished it, to accept the sacrifice of some less worthy victim; he could have consented, if he had wished it, to forgive us our sins without demanding that any amends should be made for them at all. But he decreed that satisfaction should be made in this way; and since it has been, it is quite certain that the forgiveness to which you and I look forward is forgiveness earned on our behalf by our Blessed Lord, when he died on the Cross…. But the inner nature of the divine pardon is still a mystery.

There remains the question, how you and I are to avail ourselves of this gift of pardon, freely offered. As we know, we have to be sorry for our sins. Not necessarily in the sense of feeling sorry, because our feelings are not sufficiently within our own control. Sorrow for our sins is a matter of the will, not of the affections, and what is required of us is that we should unite our wills, although it be by an act which seems to awake no echo in the sensitive part of us, with the will of God. Nor is it expected of us, that we should feel certain we shall not fall into the same sins again. We know the weakness of our natures, and often the best we can do is to throw ourselves on God’s mercy with the prayer that his grace will enable us to avoid sin thenceforward.

We are also bound to go to confession, if we have reason to suspect that we are in mortal sin. And here, as you know, there is a distinction to be made; the distinction between perfect and imperfect contrition. Imperfect contrition, or attrition, may be dictated to us only by the fear of God, not by the love of him; that is sufficient motive if it is accompanied by actual confession to a priest.

Perfect contrition, which is dictated to us by the love of God, wins us the forgiveness of our sins there and then, as long as it is accompanied by the resolve to go to confession at the earliest possible opportunity. But it is only in rare circumstances that we are encouraged to go to Communion without sacramental confession, if we have committed a mortal sin. We cannot be certain enough, being what we are, of our own dispositions. And, as we know, contrition must be accompanied by the desire to put things right. We must mean to make restitution, if we have defrauded people of their money or their good name; we must mean to avoid the occasions of sin, as far as the way lies clear to us. If in fact those resolves afterwards break down, we nevertheless have been in a state of grace at the time when the resolves were made. But the duty of restitution doesn’t disappear, and our next confession, if it is to be valid, must be accompanied by a new resolve. We must not be, consciously and deliberately, holding something back from God.

One of the most perfectly constructed lines in English poetry is, “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” How perfect is the balance of those words, how rich the sense of them! They enshrine two of the greatest mysteries which, as Christians, we are bound to accept. The doctrine, I mean, that man, being what he is, can rebel against God; and the doctrine that God, being what he is, can forgive man.