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The Fall – R.R. Reno

April 26, 2012

The Fall by Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo.

Sin is crouching at the door (Genesis 4:7)

The Serpent Was More Subtle.
On the sixth day God creates “the beasts. . . and the cattle.. . and everything that creeps upon the ground” (Genesis 1:25). Yet, now appears something “more subtle” and seemingly of a different order. Just who or what is the subtle serpent? The voice of the tradition is unequivocal: it is a worldly form of Satan, the fallen angel. The modern historical-critical tradition rejects this reading; von Rad is typical: “The serpent which now enters the narrative is marked as one of God’s created animals…. In the narrator’s mind, therefore, it is not a symbol of a `demonic’ power and certainly not Satan. What distinguishes it a little from the rest of the animals is exclusively its greater cleverness.” So which shall it be: demonic power personified or the animal trickster of folklore?

At the very minimum, Jewish and Christian readers expect this verse to cohere with other parts of the Bible. For example, Job 1 portrays an interaction between God and Satan that sets up another scene of temptation. God allows Satan to afflict Job in order to tempt him to curse God (Genesis 1:6-12). Wisdom of Solomon 2:23-24 interprets the original temptation along similar lines: “God created man for incorruption, and made him in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world.” The New Testament only reinforces the presumption that temptation and transgression come from the devil.

In Luke’s Gospel, Satan and the demons are closely associated with serpents and scorpions (10:17-20), and in John of Patmos’s vision of end times, the power of Christ is depicted as dethroning “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Revelations 12:9). Even when the image of the serpent is absent, the link between Satan and temptation is clear. In the New Testament scene that recapitulates the circumstances in Genesis 3, Satan tempts Jesus in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13).

Scripture interprets scripture, and the weight in favor of reading the serpent as Satan is overwhelming. But we can do more than adduce intra-canonical warrants. It is useful to think through why there is such a strong consensus that a demonic power lay behind the original transgression.

The benefits of pursuing this question are significant. We not only understand Genesis 3:1 more fully, but we also develop a deeper, more intelligent grasp of why angels and demons become so important in the later books of the Bible and why so many later theologians developed systematic accounts of non-bodily, spiritual creatures.

The way forward is not obvious. As Origen notes, “In regard to the devil and his angels and the opposing spiritual powers, the Church teaching lays it down that these beings exist, but what they are and how they exist it has not explained very clearly.” [On First Principles preface.6 in Origen: On First Principles, trans. G. W. Butterworth ( Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), 245.]But Origen, however tentative in his speculations about Satan, gives him a central role in the cosmological drama of fall and redemption. The role is emphasized in the many later scriptural passages that implicitly comment on Genesis 3:1. As the larger tradition affirms again and again, evil and the possibility of transgression begins with the angels.

It is very important to see that this view of the origin of evil is not the product of an ancient view of the world as bounded by a heaven above and a spiritual realm below, the so-called three-tiered universe often adduced by modern scholars as a sufficient explanation for early Christian (and Jewish) interest in angels and demons. The devil is not a mythological figure invented by a pre-scientific, credulous spiritual imagination.

On the contrary, the idea of a fallen angel helps biblical readers of Genesis 3 in two ways. First, a reference to Satan immediately conjures a cosmos-wide power, and this helps dramatize the cosmos-wide scope of the divine plan and the sinful resistance to it. Second, the concept of the devil serves as a placeholder for the most extreme possible negation of the divine plan that is consistent with the belief that God is the all-powerful and all-good creator of everything out of nothing.

Let us begin, then, with salvation history. In the broadest possible sense, if we assume that the serpent is not just a particular animal in the garden of paradise, but is instead a grand spiritual being who has already embarked on the deepest and widest possible rebellion against God, then at the very least we have succeeded in refraining a quite intimate and concrete story of temptation in Genesis 3 within a cosmic context. What the serpent says is not just a localized event.

Recourse to the devil inflates the significance of the events. The story is not merely about a serpent and a woman and a man. On the contrary, the garden scene depicts the ultimate adversary at work. The transgression, therefore, is infected with the depth and breadth of Satan’s prior rebellion. It is universally consequential, or as the terminology of traditional doctrine would have it, the sin is original.

One might object that this enlargement of the events in Genesis 3 does violence to the plain sense. But the objection ignores the context, which positively begs from a cosmic frame of reference. The seven-day account of creation that opens Genesis is part of the Priestly tradition; in contrast, the second account of creation of man and woman in Genesis 2 reflects the Yahwist tradition. The standard modern approach to reading these two accounts emphasizes their differences. The P writer provides an account of the architecture of the cosmos, while the J writer is more interested in the human-focused flow of history.

However, the two perspectives overlap. The Priestly material suggests a historical dynamism toward the seventh day (Genesis 2:2). Now we can see how an interpretation of the serpent as the devil opens up a cosmic frame of reference for reading the Yahwist. Instead of trying to give a conceptual answer to the question of how a particular event in the past can have universal consequences, the tradition gives an exegetical answer. The episode is cosmic in significance because the serpent is Satan, the primordial agent of rebellion.

Job, the biblical text most closely related to Genesis 3 in theme and situation, evokes a similar conclusion about the human condition. The main body of the book is highly particularized. Job’s flocks are stolen, his house destroyed, and his children killed. These personal tragedies trigger a long series of debates with Job’s friends about the justice of Job’s sufferings, debates that turn on whether Job is a righteous man.

The central premise is that God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. The assumption is that our actions determine our destinies. Have I obeyed? Have I transgressed? As readers familiar with the book know, Job’s friends argue that Job must have transgressed. Job counter-argues that he has not. But for our purposes, the important point of the debate is more general. Throughout the back and forth of argument, all the focus falls on the human condition.

In a sense, Job and his friends live in the Yahwist strand of Genesis. The discrete details of our lives provide exactly the right frame of reference for thinking about the human condition. And yet, Job neither begins nor ends with this focus. Instead, the story opens with Satan approaching the LORD God in his heavenly court. He challenges God, suggesting that God lacks the ability attract spiritual loyalty without buying off the faithful with worldly rewards. The story ends with the famous divine appearance out of a whirlwind, an appearance in which God recounts to Job, not the details of his life and actions, but instead the divine acts of creation. In short, the cosmic perspective frames and contextualizes the human-focused concerns of Job and his friends.

The devil functions in the same way in the New Testament, Again and again St. Paul reminds his readers of the true scale of their struggle against sin. Worldly trials and temptations are not just local; they are afflictions of the devil. The faithful are to resist with confidence, for in due time the God of peace will crush Satan under their feet (Romans 16:20). This image of triumph draws on Genesis 3:15 — the divine prophecy that the children of Eve shall crush the head of the serpent.

In the same way, Hebrews uses the greater spiritual powers of angels and demons in order to frame the significance of the passion and death of Jesus. The one who was greater than angels was made lower in order to destroy what the writer calls “the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). Luke’s Gospel makes a similar move when it evokes the intruding agency of evil: “Then Satan entered into Judas called Iscariot” (Genesis 22:3). The reader is put on notice. The events in Jerusalem, like the events in the primordial garden, have the gravest and greatest of consequences.

Our goal is not to try to reconstruct a New Testament angelology or demonology and transpose it back onto Genesis. The point is much simpler. When 1 Peter 5:8 warns that “the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour,” the effect is not to conjure up pictures of a trident-carrying, horned creature with cloven hoofs. Instead, this and other appeals to Satan function in the same way as the apocalyptic visions of Daniel, Zechariah, and Revelation, all of which portray our destiny in the context of more powerful forces.

Here a reading of the serpent as Satan begins to pay theological dividends. As we allow the image of Satan to guide our reading of Genesis 3, we learn something about the large biblical vision of human freedom. Although our actions are free and we genuinely shape the directions of our lives, we do not define the moral and spiritual atmosphere in which we live. As any mention of the devil reminds us, we are cast into a world already shaped by a creation-wide history of resistance to the divine plan. Our freedom is not pristine, unaffected, and uninfluenced by prior events. We must decide and act in circumstances beyond our control.

Of course, not every portion of scripture can be brought into harmony with every other part. The Bible is fundamentally heterogeneous and cannot be reduced to general theological principles. We should avoid the impulse to interpret scripture simply in order to draw out a theological point, even the very important point that human freedom is constrained by a larger contest between good and evil. Theological concepts are never fully adequate, and no single theological conclusion does justice to the plentitude of the scriptural text. For this reason, it is worthwhile to digress into some further, more technical reasons for calling the tempting serpent “Satan.” These reasons emerge out of the problem of theodicy, the conceptually difficult need to acknowledge the reality of evil while affirming the power and goodness of God.

We can best begin by considering the contrary interpretation. The text says the serpent was an animal — admittedly a strangely clever and talkative animal — and that is the end of it. [A talking animal is not sufficient reason to hypothesize about demonic (or angelic) agents. Balaam's ass talks, but the role of the ass is that of a sensible animal and not a spiritual being (Numbers 22:21-30).] With this approach we gain in literalism, but an immediate problem emerges. As human beings, our acts are voluntary or free insofar as they are motivated. An unmotivated act is accidental, not free. But as embodied rational beings, we are motivated by what we perceive and by conclusions we draw from our engagement with the world. As St. Augustine writes, “Nothing draws the will into action except some object that has been perceived.” [Augustine, De libero arbitrio 3.25.74. I draw this formulation from the translation provided in tt MacDonald's nuanced analysis of St. Augustine's approach to Adam and Eve's sin in "Primal ," in The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 110-39 at 118]

If this is so, then the first transgression must have been motivated by something perceived in the garden. Perhaps it was the novelty of a talking snake. Perhaps it was the loveliness of the fruit. Perhaps the slipperiness of human language, a faulty memory, or the all-too-natural tendency of the human mind to be distracted led the woman to eat. Perhaps the natural affections and loyalty of the man to the woman led him to follow suit.

The point is not to specify the motive or cause. Instead, we need to see what is entailed in allowing the serpent to be just a clever snake. Because our freedom is embodied and responsive rather than purely spiritual and originative, if the serpent is just another bodily creature in the world, then the temptation toward primal sin follows as a consequence of the way God creates.

He makes us free in certain way, but the created order contains realities and impulses that are intrinsically tempting and out of balance: a talking animal such as the serpent, a lovely fruit, the bond of companionship, or some other feature of created, embodied existence. In short, if the serpent is just an animal, then sin emerges out of the human encounter with the natural order.

This conclusion immediately runs up against the problem of evil. The notion that the original transgression occurs as a result of our embodied freedom seems to contradict the biblical assertion that God creates everything and calls it good. Not surprisingly, then, the tradition reads Satan into this verse. There are (so the traditional train of thought presumes) free spiritual beings whose created free wills are not moved by their perception of other created realities. In their independence, these spiritual beings are capable of a pure choice, a choice unmotivated and uncolored by instinct and natural desire. For this reason, spiritual beings can make choices that are originative and not responsive. A spiritual being can choose evil without being motivated by anything God has created. Angels are, as it were, self-moved.

If we suppose the existence of an angel who has fallen, then we have a way out of the problem of evil in our reading of Genesis 3, or at least a way of giving a more subtle form to the problem of evil. [Here I follow Augustine's line of reasoning in his long digression at the beginning of his treatment of the fall in The Literal Meaning of Genesis 11] By interpreting the serpent as Satan, we have created exegetical space for a prior, purely spiritual choice of disobedience, one not motivated by the desire for something in the created world that is perceived as good. The fallen angel is motivated solely by his choice of evil, the darkness of a world without the supreme goodness of God (Genesis 1:4).

Of course, the pure freedom of the devil is a finite freedom. The devil is not a primordial being who exists before creation, and in this sense the devil’s freedom is part of the divine project from the outset. However, although the finitude of a purely spiritual freedom constrains its scope and consequences, finitude does not mitigate the capacity of a disembodied freedom to do and become something out of its own pure choice. In a certain sense, God is still on the hook.

But for God’s creation of the angels, none would have fallen. Yet the important point is secure: no aspect of creation other than freedom itself is implicated as the reason for an angelic fall. The devil falls strictly because of his choice and not because of any other feature or quality of the created order. This allows us to say that the first transgression, the fall of the devil, occurs in creation, but not because of creation. “It was,” writes St. Augustine, “an evil arising not from nature but from choice” (City of God 11.19).

These suppositions about the finite spiritual freedom of fallen angels open up conceptual space for an interpretation of Genesis 3, and this allows us to pursue a reading that avoids the problem of implying that the ordinary conditions of our embodied freedom lead to sin. Interpreted as Satan in bodily form, the serpent in the garden can be understood as the vehicle for the intrusion of a more original evil choice into our world of embodied freedom. Aspects of creation (e.g., the attractive tastiness of the apple) are obviously implicated in and serve as the medium for transgression, but we need no longer presume that created goods trigger the first human sin.

Instead, Satan’s prior, purely spiritual, and self-directing choice influences Eve’s subsequent, embodied, and responsive choice. She is not thrown off balance by anything God has created. Her transgression turns on her response to a prior form of evil that is, in itself, an act of finite but pure freedom. Of course, Adam’s sin has precisely the same form. She hands him the fruit, and he responds to Eve’s prior choice. Once the infection is introduced it spreads.

The conceptual advantages of reading the serpent as Satan shows why it is terribly naive to imagine that the classical interpretation is motivated by a love of mythological figures. [The modern historical-critical tradition is hopelessly confused on this point. See, for example, Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11:.4 Commentary.. Unable to countenance "the mythological explanation of the serpent," Westermann concludes that the origin of evil must be a purely human phenomenon. Westermann is apparently unable to imagine that biblical readers (including readers whose writings would subsequently be incorporated into the canon) would develop interpretive hypotheses in order to avoid contradicting basic theological convictions about the nature of God and creation. Von Rad also falsely assumes that classical demonology is mythical and summarily rejects the traditional reading of the serpent as Satan by insisting that the narrative treats temptation as "a completely un-mythical process.” The dichotomy works only if one supposes that hypothetical or inferred beings are by definition mythical, but this is absurd, since it would make a great deal of scientific and mathematical reasoning mythological.]

To read the serpent as Satan is not to think of the snake as a wicked elf or a rebellious satyr. On the contrary, the traditional exegesis of the serpent as Satan resolves the dilemma posed by a literal reading of the story. To suppose the serpent to be Satan’s worldly guise allows us to coordinate the strong affirmation of the intrinsic goodness of creation in Genesis 1 with the narrative disobedience, resistance, and rebellion of Genesis 3.

At this point we should step back and consider an obvious objection. The reading of the serpent as Satan may help us with the difficulty of affirming the intrinsic goodness of God’s creation. The hypothesis of an angelic fall allows us to assert that freedom alone can pervert itself; it cannot go awry simply as human freedom engaged in response to created goods. Yet this approach, we might worry undermines human responsibility. If the fall is triggered by Satan’s earlier choice, then how can we be held responsible? It would seem that the original sin is the devil’s fault, not ours. And if this is the case, doesn’t the entire Pauline economy of guilt in Adam and forgiveness in Christ collapse?

The objection is helpful, because it forces us to be clear about the nature of our embodied freedom, as well as more attentive to what scripture actually says about our roles in both the empire of evil and the reign of Christ. It is certainly true that we are free participants in the divine plan — for good or for ill. However, transgression is like Caesar’s army crossing the Rubicon. Our freedom does not determine us all at once. It sets us down a particular path. More important, in crossing any number of moral and spiritual Rubicons, we are like soldiers deciding to follow, not generals leading their legions. Our freedom is real; we must decide to move our feet in one direction or the other.

But that freedom is reactive and responsive, not executive or commanding. We need a leader to trigger our movement. This is why human freedom never provides a sufficient explanation for the march toward sin — or the countermarch toward righteousness. Humans seem capable of a depravity — and righteousness — that far exceeds our ordinary capacities, which is why ordinary language stretches toward adjectives such as “demonic” and “saintly” when describing human extremes. We can follow much further than we can lead.

There are scriptural and commonsensical reasons for thinking of human freedom more on the model of an enlistee than an officer. Joshua ends with a re-statement of the choice that determines us. We cannot create endlessly new and different paths into the future. On the contrary, we must decide whom to follow: “Choose this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:14-15). We are free to switch loyalties, but we cannot invent new armies and new objectives. With exactly the same underlying assumptions about the human condition, St. Paul insists that our choice, which recapitulates the original choice of Adam and Eve, is about whom to serve and not an invitation to brainstorm about the good life. “You are slaves of the one whom you obey, writes Paul, and in Adam we are conscripted into the army of sin (Romans 6:16).

The gospel stories evoke the same view of freedom when they portray the good news as a challenge to “the powers” that hold us in their thrall. We seem always beholden to a prior evil that gives us orders that we willingly obey, and Christ frees us by giving counter commands. Mammon leads us one direction; God leads us in another. When Paul says that “for freedom Christ has set us free” (Galatians 5:1), he does not mean that we can opt out and wait for a third option. We are freed from sin precisely because we are taken captive in Christ. In him we serve the life-giving master.

Thus an appeal to Satan in our interpretation of Genesis 3 reinforces a general Biblical claim about our created condition. Our freedom is always a matter of whom we obey, and in sin we seek a perverse fulfillment of our natural desire for obedient service. Promethean self-direction is a fantasy, for we are not created with the capacity to serve ourselves. We can only serve that which is greater, which is why the supposition that the serpent is Satan fits nicely with the larger biblical tendency to see the fundamental form of sin as idolatry. The perverted human will follow the false gods, false leaders, and false promises, all the while imagining them to be the source of life.

The view of human freedom as a decision about whom to obey finds ample confirmation in everyday life. We cannot follow our instincts, but we can follow the idea of following our instincts. We cannot live as natural men and women, but we can follow a philosophy of natural existence. We cannot live only for ourselves but we can adopt the principle of egoism. By St. Paul’s analysis, in sin we pervert rather than undo or destroy the purposes for which human nature was created. We live a distorted facsimile of covenant. We are “slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe” (Galatians 4:3).

We were created to know and worship the living God, but in our blindness we serve dead idols (Romans 1:21-23). Thus, when we introduce the greater power of Satan into our interpretation of Genesis, we are not understanding human responsibility for sin, nor are we compromising the Pauline vision of salvation history. Instead, we are bringing our reading of the fall into conformity with the New Testament account of our slavery to sin. Sin is a perverted obedience, a false following, a deceived discipleship. To suppose the serpent to be a form of Satan helps us see the true form of our slavery to sin — and by contrast to see the obedient form of our participation in Christ.

Although there are strong reasons in support of a traditional reading of the serpent as Satan, neither scripture nor the classical theological tradition gives Satan an ongoing, central role in the unfolding of the divine plan. St. Paul observes “sin came into the world through one man” (Romans 5:12) and that the divine campaign against the entire empire of evil is conducted through “that one man Jesus Christ (Romans 5:15). While we may not be commanders in the cosmic conflict, salvation history turns on our loyalty. Although the possibility of evil should be traced back to the purely spiritual freedom of fallen angels, we need to be careful. The origin of evil should not be confused with the location of its ultimate conflict with goodness. The centers of government may have been in Richmond and Washington, but the tide of the Civil War turned at the small Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg.

For Gregory of Nyssa, the human focus of the scriptural story is clear from the outset, and he explains why God fittingly chooses our embodied freedom as the place to work out his redemptive plan. Our amphibious existence as both embodied and free places us at the center of the cosmic drama. “God, taking dust of the ground, formed the man, Gregory writes, “and, by an inspiration from Himself, He planted life in the work. of His hand, that thus the earthy might be raised up to the Divine, and so one certain grace of equal value might pervade the whole creation, the lower nature being mingled with the supra-mundane” (Catechetical Orations 6 in NPNF 5.480).

The human creature has a unique role. We are what angels and demons can never be: a hybrid of body and spirit that participates in all aspects of the created order. Through us, therefore, God can reach into all the corners of his creation. Neither pure spirit nor mere body, we are at the crossroads of reality. The future of the cosmos is in the hands of whichever army controls this strategic point.

Thus, for all the biblical concern about demons and for all the theological principles that warrant the hypothesis of the devil, focus falls on the human. We live out our loyalties in the quotidian realities of everyday life. It is here and now that we do the work of Satan, and it is here and now that we encounter Christ, who has the power to free us from the thrall of our own past choices, from the primordial choice of Adam and Eve, and from the original wickedness of Satan. We do the most to defeat the devil and sanctify the world when we focus on our core competence: obedience to the call of Christ in the midst of human affairs.

Posted in Genesis, R.R. Reno, Scriptural Exegesis, The Old Testament, Understanding Sin | Tagged an evil arising from choice, Genesis 3, human freedom, Job and His Friends, our created condition, Satan, the first transgression, the origin of evil, The Serpent, the traditional exegesis of the serpent as Satan | Leave a Comment »

Sin and Forgiveness — Ronald Knox

February 9, 2012

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.

Posted in Fr. Ronald Knox, Understanding Sin | Tagged contrition, forgiveness, Ronald Knox, Sin | Leave a Comment »

St. Thomas On The Goal Of The Incarnation: Satisfaction — Fr. Brian Davies O.P.

February 18, 2011

The Annunciation by Simone Martini, 1333

“Ave gratia plena dominus tecum” (“Greetings most favored one! The Lord is with thee”) The representation of Gabriel’s voice is interesting. His words are drawn in a straight line from his mouth to Mary’s ear. She’s visibly shrinking back from the angel, not sure what to expect from this encounter. There’s a similar Annunciation dating from slightly later at the Getty Museum, but overall it’s interesting that “word balloons” of one type or another never really caught on, especially when you consider how universally they are used today in narrative art.

————————————

In his book The Strangest Way, Fr. Robert Barron relates this scene from the Purgatorio: When Dante and Virgil come to Peter’s Gate, the portal to the mount of Purgatory proper, they face a great bronze door with three steps in front of it colored white, black, and red.These stand for the three attitudes of the repentant soul: confession, contrition, and satisfaction:

“In the brightly polished white of the first step, sinners see themselves with clarity and uncompromising honesty; in the black of the second step, they appreciate the hard, grinding work of contrition, feeling the pain that sin has caused themselves and others; and in the red of the third step, they sense the work of satisfaction that must be done. Acknowledging sin is not enough; restitution must be made in order that justice (right order) might be restored. The word “satisfaction” comes from the Latin satis facere, literally, to make enough, to do the required work.”

The souls doing their purgatorial work release themselves from bondage, because only they know when satisfaction has been done. In the film The Mission, Mendoza, a mercenary and slave trader, murders his brother in a jealous rage. Overwhelmed with guilt, he sits in a squalid cell, refusing to communicate or eat. The Jesuit missionary Fr. Gabriel challenges him with brutal directness, and Mendoza agrees to accompany him to his mission deep in the jungle. But the murderer resolves, as a penance, to drag behind him a terribly heavy bundle containing the accoutrements of his former life — swords, helmets, muskets, and the like.

Through jungle, over mountains, up streams, the poor man drags this load, until his fellow travelers have had enough. They beg Fr. Gabriel, saying, “We think he has taken this far enough.” The priest responds, “But he doesn’t think so, and until he does, I don’t think so either.” Only when he has lugged his penitential burden up a steep cliffside and arrived at the mission does Mendoza relent. When the bundle is cut away, he breaks down in tears both remorseful and joyful: finally he knew that satisfaction had been made. This is Dante’s third step of red.

A lot of what is related in The Mission originates not only in Dante but in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas:

From The Bible To Aquinas
What does this mean, that “the goal of the Incarnation is `our furtherance in good,’ and that ‘it occurred in order to free us from the thraldom of sin … by Christ satisfying for us’. [Summa theologiae 3a, 1.2]? The roots of the idea lie in the Bible. One of the most prominent and influential teachings in the New Testament is that people subject to sin are restored to a right relationship with God by virtue of Christ’s suffering and death. New Testament authors tend to state this as a fact. They do not explain how the operation works. [1Corinthians 15:3; Romans 5:6 ff]

Sometimes, however, they describe the role of Christ by means of language influenced by the Old Testament notion of acts of atonement (‘at-one-ment’/'bringing together’), by which people do what is needed on their part for sin to be forgiven by God. Thus, for example, the author of 1John calls Christ “the expiation (hilasmos) for our sins’, and St Paul asserts that he is `a means of expiation’ (hilasterion) [1John 2: 2; Romans 3:25. Scholars vary in their translation of hilasterion. Some prefer `propitiation' to `expiation'. Cf. John Ziesler, Paul's Letter to the Romans (London, 1989), 112 ff.]‘

In Hebrews 9, Old Testament images connected with atonement abound with reference to Christ’s death. The general idea seems to be that this was the definitive means by which people are reconciled to God, a means which supersedes the Old Testament sacrificial system. In the Middle Ages there were differing interpretations of these texts. Abelard, for instance, argued, or has been thought of as arguing, that they are best understood as teaching us that God has forgiven our sins and provided us with an inspiring token of his love.

It seems to us that we are justified in the blood of Christ and reconciled to God in this: that through the singular grace manifested to us in that his son took our nature and that teaching us both by word and example he persevered even unto death, Jesus bound us closer to himself by love, so that, fired by so great a benefit of divine grace, true charit^y would no longer be afraid to endure anything for his sake.
[Epistles ad Romanos 2]

Abelard seems to hold that, if God wills to forgive sin, the sin is forgiven and that is the end of it. He also seems to hold that God has willed to redeem humanity. It appears, therefore, that he believes that the death of Christ is not strictly necessary as a means of forgiving sin or reconciling people with God. Rather, it is God loving us in human form and drawing us to himself as we recognize the extent of his love. As one commentator explains, for Abelard, Jesus was not the Man of Sorrows carr^ying the burden of our guilt or the victim offered up to the Father as a recompense for our sins, so much as the divine Logos made manifest to the world, incarnate because he would reveal to mankind the path of righteousness. is that people subject to sin are restored to a right relationship with God by virtue of Christ’s suffering and death. New Testament authors tend to state this as a fact. They do not explain how the operation works.[1Corinthians 15:3; Romans 5:6 ff]

Sometimes, however, they describe the role of Christ by means of language influenced by the Old Testament notion of acts of atonement (‘at-one-ment’/'bringing together’), by which people do what is needed on their part for sin to be forgiven by God. Thus, for example, the author of 1John calls Christ “the expiation (hilasmos) for our sins’, and St Paul asserts that he is `a means of expiation’ (hilasterion) [1John 2: 2; Romans 3:25. Scholars vary in their translation of hilasterion. Some prefer `propitiation' to `expiation'. Cf. John Ziesler, Paul's Letter to the Romans (London, 1989), 112 ff.]‘

Jesus was not the Man of Sorrows carrying the burden of our guilt or the victim offered up to the Father as a recompense for our sins, so much as the divine Logos made manifest to the world, incarnate because he would reveal to mankind the path of righteousness. [J. G. Sikes, PeterAbailard (Cambridge, 1932), 208.] Much more widespread than Abelard’s view, however, was the one classically associated with Anselm, for whom the death of Christ brings us to God because it is a matter of `satisfaction’ (satisfactio).

The word `satisfaction’ was a key-term in Roman law. As F. W. Dillistone explains:

[I]t was a word bearing the fundamental idea that wherever the harmonious ordered working of the whole society has been disturbed by a failure to comply with its essential laws … an adequate reparation must be offered not only in the sense of doing now what was originally commanded but also of offering now an extra which can be accepted as sufficient payment for the delinquency.
[F.W. Dillistone, The Christian Understanding of Atonement (Welwyn, 1968), 188]

For Anselm, `satisfaction’ sums up the significance of Christ’s death since, in his view, the death of Christ made amends required to offset the consequences of sin. We have seen how he denies that sin can be simply forgiven by God. He thinks that compensation has to be made, and here he has in mind a giving back of what is not owed. That is to say, the compensation must be a matter of satisfaction. `Every one who sins,’ he argues, `ought to pay back the honor of which he has robbed God; and this is the satisfaction which every sinner owes to God. [Cur Deus homo? I.II.] And, for Anselm, the satisfaction owed here is provided by the death of Christ.

Why? To begin with Anselm suggests that, because satisfaction involves paying more than what is owed, it is necessary that the one who makes it `somehow gives up himself, or something of his, which he does not owe as a debtor’. [Cur Deus homo? 2.11.] He then goes on to argue that Christ can satisfy for the sin of human beings by dying since sin deserves death and since Christ was sinless.

Is it not proper that, since what is human has departed from God as far as possible in sin, that which is human should make to God the greatest possible satisfaction? … Now nothing can be more severe or difficult for a human being to do for God’s honor, than to suffer death voluntarily when not bound by obligation. . . Therefore, the one who wishes to make atonement for human sin should be one who can die by choosing to do so. [Cur Deus homo? 2.11.]

According to Anselm, Christ made perfect satisfaction for sin, and thereby made it possible for others to turn to God and enter into the destiny originally intended for them, by going to his death without constraint and out of love for others.

Aquinas on Satisfaction
When Aquinas declares that we are freed from sin `by Christ satisfying for us’ he comes very close to Anselm’s position. For one thing, he believes in that in certain circumstances there is a need for satisfaction. He thinks that people who sin produce a kind of disharmony between themselves and God which needs to be erased if proper relationships with God are to be established again. How is it to be erased? Aquinas is clear that the sinner must refrain from sin. But he does not think that things are made right between sinners and God simply because sinners stop sinning. `If someone is parted from another’, he observes, `that person is not reunited to the other as soon as the movement ceases; the person needs to draw nigh to the other and to return by a contrary movement. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 86. 2] On this basis, therefore, Aquinas maintains that repentance is in order. He also thinks that sinners must do something to make up for what they have done in sinning. His view is that sin deserves punishment since it transgresses the order of divine justice. So compensation must be paid.

A sinful act makes people punishable in that they violate the order of divine justice. They return to that order only by some punitive restitution that restores the balance of justice, in this way, namely, that those who by acting against a divine commandment, have indulged their own will beyond what was right, should, according to the order of divine justice, either voluntarily or by constraint be subjected to something not to their liking. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 87. 6]

One might say that God can merely forgive a person who has sinned. And Aquinas would agree. But he would add that forgiveness without compensation does not do enough to meet the requirements of justice. If you wrong me, I may forgive you and act as if nothing has happened. But even my forgiveness cannot abolish the fact that something has happened and that you are, in a sense, indebted to me. By the same token, so Aquinas thinks, for the consequences of sin to be properly dealt with the sinner must take on some form of penance to atone for the sin, or must patiently bear with one imposed by God. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 87. 6] In other words, sinners must acknowledge the need for satisfaction, which Aquinas also sees as having a remedial or healing effect. As he says in his commentary on the Sentences:

Satisfaction can be defined in two ways. One way is with respect to past faults, which it heals (curat) by recompense; thus it is said that satisfaction is a recompense for injury according to justice’s measure. This is also expressed in Anselm’s definition that satisfaction gives to God an honour due him, due because of a fault committed. Satisfaction can also be defined with regard to future faults, from which one is preserved (praeservat) by satisfaction.
[Scriptum super libros Sententiarum 4. 15. 1].

In the Sentences treatment of satisfaction, Aquinas is drawing on two influential definitions of ‘satisfaction’, one from the Liber ecctesiasticorum dogmaticum, 54 (thought by Aquinas’s contemporaries to be by Augustine, but actually produced by Gennadius of Marseille (c.470)), the other from Anselm’s Cur Deus homo? The first definition runs: `Satisfaction is to uproot the causes of sins and to give no opening to their suggestions’ (Satisfactio est peccatorum causas excidere et eorum suggestionibus aditum non indulgere). The second definition is: `Satisfaction consists in giving God due honor’ (Satisfactio est honorem Deo impendere).

In general, then, Aquinas is at one with Anselm in his view that sin requires satisfaction. He also agrees with another element in Anselm’s position. Anselm presupposes that it is possible for satisfaction to be made by someone other than the person who has sinned, and Aquinas shares Anselm’s presupposition here. He does not think that one person can satisfy for another where the satisfaction is thought of as only remedial. He accepts that satisfaction can have a healing effect in the sense that one who makes it behaves in a proper way and may be improved by doing so. But, since my improvement is a fact about me, not you, he denies that, if you make satisfaction on my behalf, it follows that you improve as well.

On the other hand, he allows that you may take on yourself the punishment due to me for my sin. In Galatians 6:2, St Paul writes: `Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.’ With this injunction in mind, Aquinas holds that, just as it is possible in law for people to pay fines on behalf of each other, so it is possible for people to take on themselves the penalty of other people’s sin. He writes:

Satisfactory punishment has a twofold purpose, viz, to pay the debt, and to serve as a remedy for the avoidance of sin. Accordingly, as a remedy against future sin, the satisfaction of one does not profit another, for the flesh of one person is not tamed by another’s fast; nor does one person acquire the habit of well-doing through the actions of another, except accidentally … On the other hand, as regards the payment of the debt, someone can satisfy for another, provided that the person in question is in a state of charity.
[Scriptum super libros Sententiarum 4. 20. 2.].

Elsewhere Aquinas makes the point by saying that `in some cases those who are different in their purely penal obligations remain one in will, through their union in love. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 87. 7]

From all of this, it should be evident how the thinking of Anselm and Aquinas overlaps on the question of satisfaction. Not surprisingly, therefore, it also overlaps when it comes to satisfaction and the Incarnation. For with the Incarnation directly in mind Aquinas offers what one might readily be forgiven for reading as a paraphrase of Anselm’s Cur Deus homo? argument.

Justice demands satisfaction for sin. But God cannot render satisfaction, just as he cannot merit. Such a service pertains to one who is subject to another. Thus God was not in a position to satisfy for the sin of the whole of human nature; and a mere human being was unable to do so … Hence divine Wisdom judged it fitting that God should become human, so that thus one and the same person would be able both to restore the human race and to offer satisfaction.
Compendium Theologiae ch. 200

`A mere human being’, Aquinas observes at one point, `could not have satisfied for the whole human race, and God was not bound to satisfy; hence it was fitting for Jesus Christ to be both God and human. [Summa theologiae 3a 1.2]

People effectively make satisfaction for an offence when they offer to the one who has been offended something accepted as matching or outweighing the former offence. Christ, suffering in a loving and obedient spirit, offered more to God than was demanded in recompense for all the sins of the human race, because first the love which led him to suffer was a great love; secondly, the life he laid down in atonement was of great dignity, since it was the life of God and of a man; and thirdly, his suffering was all-embracing and his pain so great. [Summa theologiae 3a 48.2]

A sin committed against God, says Aquinas, `has a kind of infinity from the infinity of the divine majesty’. [Summa theologiae 3a 1.2 ad2] For proper satisfaction of sin, therefore, `it was necessary that the act of the one satisfying should have an infinite efficacy, as being of God and of what is human’. [Summa theologiae 3a 1.2 ad2]

Although one person can satisfy for another. . . that person cannot satisfy for the whole race because the act of one mere human individual is not equal in value to the good of the whole race. But the action of Christ, being that of one both divine and human, had a dignity that made it worth as much as the good of the entire human race, and so it could satisfy for others.
[De veritate, 29. 7.]

Aquinas also holds that the fact that Christ is without sin means that he can satisfy for sin properly. Commenting on the phrase `through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus’ in Romans 3: 23, he suggests:

It is as if someone, having committed some fault, became indebted to the king and was obliged to pay a fine. Someone else who paid the fine for this person would be said to have redeemed the person. Such a debt was owed by the whole human race because of the sin of the first parents. So it was that no other one apart from Christ was able to satisfy for the sin of the whole human race since he alone was free of every sin.
[Super epistolam ad Romanos lectura 3.1]

On this basis, Aquinas is able to say that Christ was both a priest and a victim, and that his work bore the character of sacrifice. Christ is a priest since he mediates between people and God and since `the characteristic function of a priest is to act as mediator between God and his people’. He communicates to people the things of God and somehow makes reparation for sin. [Summa theologiae 3a. 22. 1] Christ was simultaneously priest and victim, Aquinas goes on to say, since his priestly work was achieved by his offering of himself as a sacrifice (i.e. as something `placed before God with the purpose of raising the human spirit to him’). [Summa theologiae 3a.22.2]

Yet Aquinas’s teaching on the satisfaction of Christ is not quite that of Anselm. For, unlike Anselm, Aquinas does not think that God can only unite people to himself by means of satisfaction. Anselm does seem to think this. At any rate, he does not entertain the notion of it not being so. But the emphasis with Aquinas is different. As Romanus Cessario states, in his thinking satisfaction ^`is not something God requires of man, or even of Jesus, as a condition for accomplishing his saving plan. Rather it is the means whereby (God in very fact accomplishes his plan to bring all men and women into loving union with himself. [Romanus Cessario, OP, The Godly Image: Christ and Salvation in Catholic Thought from Anseim to Aquinas (Petersham, Mass., 1990), xviii.]

We have already seen that Aquinas explicitly holds that people can be brought to God without satisfaction since we have noted him maintaining that `God in his infinite power could have restored human nature in many other ways’ than by becoming incarnate. Or as he says in another place: `Simply and absolutely speaking, God could have freed us otherwise than by Christ’s passion, for nothing is impossible with God [Summa theologiae 3a 46.2] Now we need to note that he also maintains both that God can pardon sin without exacting any penalty and that there are important senses in which the passion of Christ was unnecessary. `If God had wanted to free people from sin without any satisfaction at all’, he writes, `he would not have been acting against justice.’

God has no one above him, for he is himself the supreme and common good of the entire universe. If then he forgives sin, which is a crime in that it is committed against him, he violates no one’s rights. People who waive satisfaction and forgive an offence done to themselves act mercifully, not unjustly.
[Summa theologiae 3a 46.2 ad 3]

As for Christ’s passion, says Aquinas, this was not necessary in the sense that it was something `which of its nature cannot be otherwise’, i.e. it was not logically necessary. [Summa theologiae 3a 46.1] Nor was it necessary in the sense of being forced on God or Christ by an agent apart from them. `It was not necessary for Christ to suffer from necessity of compulsion, either on God’s part, who ruled that Christ should suffer, or on Christ’s part, who suffered voluntarily.’ [Summa theologiae 3a 46.1]

With respect to satisfaction and Christ, Aquinas’s position is that satisfaction by Christ is necessary only in two senses. The first is a purely logical one. Given that God has ordained that people be brought to God by satisfaction through Christ, and given that God knows how people are to be brought to God, then satisfaction by Christ is necessary.

Since it is impossible for God’s foreknowledge to be deceived and his will and ordinance to be frustrated, then, supposing God’s foreknowledge and ordinance regarding Christ’s passion, it was not possible at the same time for Christ not to suffer and for people to be delivered otherwise than by Christ’s passion.
[Summa theologiae 3a 46.2 ]

Secondly, so Aquinas argues, satisfaction through Christ is necessary in the sense that it is a means of bringing people to God in a way that accords with God’s justice and mercy.

That people should be delivered by Christ’s passion was in keeping with both his mercy and his justice. With his justice, because by his passion Christ made satisfaction for the sin of the human race; and with his mercy, for since no single human being could alone satisfy for the sin of all human nature. . . God gave people his son to satisfy for them. . . And this came of more copious mercy than if he had forgiven sins without satisfaction.
[Summa theologiae 3a 46.1 ad 3]

Aquinas thinks that God could have acted only out of mercy. But he also thinks that in Christ’s passion God was acting both out of mercy and out of justice. He admits that people could have been brought to God without the Incarnation and, therefore, without Christ suffering. But he is governed by the recognition that the Incarnation and the death of Christ have, in fact, occurred. And he thinks it is good that this should be so. His line is that, where an offence against God is at issue, full satisfaction is possible, and that God has actually laid this on. Given the desirability of full (or, as Aquinas calls it, `condign’) satisfaction, his conclusion, then, is that everything possible has been done to set matters right between people and God. `It was’, he explains, `more fitting that we should be delivered by Christ’s passion than simply by God’s good will.’ [Summa theologiae 3a 46. 3]

Posted in St. Thomas on the New Testament, Understanding Sin | Tagged Aquinas on Satisfaction, From The Bible To Aquinas | Leave a Comment »

The Struggle Against Sin – Ralph Martin

June 22, 2010

St. Francis de Sales

I’ve been deliberately very slow about reading this book, waiting it seems for it to call me back and to savor more of it. Two chapters, this one on sin and another on prayer have offered up some great reading selections. If this book (The Fulfillment of All Desire) is not in your library, get it (simple as that).

What I love about it is that it draws you into other writers and books. This chapter introduces the wisdom of Saint Francis de Sales, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thérèse of Lisieux.

AS WE BEGIN THE SPIRITUAL JOURNEY, the struggle against sin may be particularly intense. Ignorance about what’s right and wrong needs to give way to true understanding. Conversion has to deepen. Deeply ingrained habits have to be exposed to the light and the power of grace.

Bernard gives a striking summary:

We have seen how every soul — even if burdened with sin (2 Timothy 3:6), enmeshed in vice, ensnared by the allurements of pleasure, a captive in exile, imprisoned in the body caught in mud (Psalms 68:3), fixed in mire, bound to its members, a slave to care, distracted by business, afflicted with sorrow, wandering and straying, filled with anxious forebodings and uneasy suspicions, a stranger in a hostile land (Exodus 2:22), and, according to the Prophet, sharing the defilement of the dead and counted with those who go down into hell (Baruch 3:11) — every soul, I say, standing thus under condemnation and without hope, has the power to turn and find it can not only breathe the fresh air of the hope of pardon and mercy, but also dare to aspire to the nuptials of the Word, not fearing to enter into alliance with God or to bear the sweet yoke of love (Matthew 11:30) with the King of angels.”
Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, Vol. IV Sermon 83

Bernard, excruciatingly aware of the condition of the soul apart from God, nevertheless knows that every soul, without exception, however deeply mired in the mud of sin and disordered lives, is called not only to begin the journey to union with God, but to complete it successfully by attaining spiritual marriage.

It’s time now for us to meet another teacher who can help us a great deal in making progress on this noble journey, Saint Francis de Sales.

Everyday Holiness: The Wisdom of Francis de Sales
Francis was born on August 21, 1567, in France, near the present-day Swiss border. He was the firstborn of thirteen children, five of whom died in infancy, and was named after Francis of Assisi. His father, also named Francis, at the age of forty-three married a young girl named Frances, who was fourteen years old at the time. Unlike Augustine, Francis grew up in the faith, and when he was twelve years old he felt strongly called to serve the Lord as a priest. He was well educated and studied at the Jesuit College in Paris, and was fluent in both Latin and French. He was accomplished in the “arts of the nobility” (horsemanship, fencing, dancing). He pursued higher studies in law and theology at the University of Padua and received a doctorate at the age of twenty-four.

The University of Padua was a large, cosmopolitan university with over twenty thousand students. It was there that Francis learned the wisdom that enabled him to live a life of holiness in the midst of the world, wisdom which he later developed in detail in his famous work, Introduction to the Devout Life. His other major work is the Treatise on the Love of God which presents a detailed account of the more advanced stages of the spiritual journey.

After completing his studies he was given a title of nobility and offered a senatorship in the senate of Chamberey. Francis’s father, now seventy years old, had picked out a fourteen-year-old girl for him to marry, an offer that he declined. He finally told his father of his vocation to the priesthood. After ordination, he was assigned to try to re-establish the Catholic Church in a region near Geneva, which had come under Calvinist domination. Geneva was the diocese in which Francis was born and in which he served as a priest, but during his lifetime it remained firmly in the hands of the Calvinists and the Catholic bishop resided in exile in Annecy, France, not a great distance to the south.

During this time, when passions were running strong between Catholics and Protestant reformers, Francis carried out his mission in a way that showed considerable respect for the Protestants while firmly holding to Catholic truth. In this regard, as in so many others, he anticipated the ecumenical spirit and policy of the Second Vatican Council. He declared that prayer, alms, and fasting would be the spiritual means used in re-establishing the Church in the region.

While firmly resolved to win back Geneva to the Catholic Church, Francis declared that it must be done with charity, and that he and his collaborators should suffer deprivation rather than their adversaries. He received special permission to read Calvin’s major works so he could have a firsthand acquaintance with their thought. He also made private visits to the successor of Calvin in Geneva in an attempt to win him over; efforts that appeared to be unsuccessful but were cordial and established mutual respect.

The years spent in this early mission were difficult. Because of the great hostility to his work, Francis often had to flee in order to avoid being beaten, or worse. He did convince some of the Calvinist pastors to engage him in public debate, however, and also posted hand-copied pamphlets in public places or slipped them under the doors of homes as a way of sharing the Catholic truth. Eventually, he did achieve considerable success. Many Catholic parishes were re-established, and much of. the population reconciled with the Church.

At a certain point Pope Clement VIII invited Francis to Rome to engage in theological debate with the theologians of Rome. He did so well that he was named the coadjutor bishop of Geneva and eventually succeeded to the See of Geneva when the former bishop died. Still unable to reside in Geneva itself, he continued the Catholic exile in Annecy.

On a mission to Paris he came in contact with the writings of Teresa of Avila, who had died only twenty years before and whose reformed Carmelites were establishing a convent in France. He also had occasion to make the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius several times, which confirmed his belief that all Catholics are called to holiness. As a bishop he placed great emphasis on the recruitment and formation of priests, ordaining nine hundred priests in his twenty-two years as bishop. He always encouraged his priests to look for lay people called to “devotion” and work with them, giving them formation.

In 1604 he met a married woman with children, Jeanne Francoise de Chantal, who upon the death of her husband worked with Francis in establishing a new religious order called the Visitation. Francis and Jeanne wanted the nuns to be able to visit people in their homes, but the rules for religious life at the time required that they be cloistered.

In 1609 he published Introduction to a Devout Life, which has been in print ever since.

Experiencing a variety of health problems, Francis died of a stroke on December 28, 1622, at the age of fifty-five. He was canonized a saint in 1665, and declared a Doctor of the Universal Church in 1877.

Up until the time of Francis, priests, nuns, or monks wrote almost all of the books on the spiritual life. Although these works contained much that was useful for lay people, and oftentimes their writers did attempt to relate what they were writing to lay life, they were nonetheless particular to religious life. Francis set out to write a book specifically for people living in the “world.”

Spirituality for Lay people: The “Devout Life”
Francis states his purpose very clearly:

Almost all those who have hitherto written about devotion have been concerned with instructing persons wholly withdrawn from the world or have at least taught a kind of devotion that leads to such complete retirement. My purpose is to instruct those who live in town, within families, or at court, and by their state of life are obliged to live an ordinary life as to outward appearances!

What does Francis mean by devotion? In effect, when he speaks about the “devout” life he is speaking about the fervent, committed life, a life ordered towards growing in holiness. Let’s consider his definitions.

First, he takes pains to show what true devotion is not. He is concerned that popular understandings of the devout life contain many distortions, and even promote false spirituality.

Everyone paints devotion according to his own passions and fancies. A man given to fasting thinks himself very devout if he fasts, although his heart may be filled with hatred. Much concerned with sobriety; he doesn’t dare to wet his tongue with wine or even water but won’t hesitate to drink deep of his neighbor’s blood by detraction and calumny. Another man thinks himself devout because he daily recites a vast number of prayers, but after saying them he utters the most disagreeable, arrogant and harmful words at home and among the neighbors.
Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

Francis goes on to describe how someone else may give money to the poor but not forgive his enemies. Or another may forgive his enemies but not pay his bills unless compelled to do so by law. The point he’s making is that “devotion” or holiness doesn’t consist primarily in external practices of piety but in a heart transformed in love and justice.

Bernard was similarly aware that the outward appearances of devotion can hide inward disorder, even in the life of religious orders.

We do sometimes hear men who have committed themselves to religious life and wear the religious habit, shamelessly boasting as they recall their past misdeeds:

the duels they fought, their cunning in literary debate or other kinds of vain display. . Some recount past vices as though to express sorrow and repentance for them, but their minds thrill with a secret pleasure about how, even after receiving the holy habit, they craftily outwitted their neighbor, how they cheated a brother in a business deal (1 Thessalonians 4:6), how they recklessly retaliated on those who insulted or reproached them, returning evil for evil, a curse for a curse (1 Peter 3: 9)
Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

Francis insists that true devotion must touch every area of our life. True devotion is not just a matter of spiritual practices but of bringing all our life under the lordship of Christ. Francis is known for his slogan: “Live, Jesus! Live, Jesus!” What he means by this is an invitation to Jesus to “live and reign in our hearts forever and ever.”

As we will see later on, the Scripture, and all our writers, make clear that true spirituality or devotion is characterized by both love of God and love of neighbor. The two cannot be separated without serious distortion.

One of the greatest challenges facing the Church today, as Vatican Council II pointed out, is the split between faith and daily life, or, as Pope Paul VI put it, the split between faith and culture.

After establishing what true devotion is not, Francis gives his own unique definition.

When it [divine love] has reached a degree of perfection at which it not only makes us do good but also do this carefully, frequently, and promptly, it is called devotion.. . . In short, devotion is simply that spiritual agility and vivacity by which charity works in us or by aid of which we work quickly and lovingly. . He must have great ardor and readiness in performing charitable actions.

It arouses us to do quickly and lovingly as many good works as possible, both those commanded and those merely counseled or inspired. Like a man in sound health he not only walks but runs and leaps forward “on the way of God’s commandments” (Psalm 119:32). Furthermore, he moves and runs in the paths of his heavenly counsels and inspirations.
Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

In other words, for Francis, to live the devout life is to reach the point in our love for God and neighbor that we eagerly (“carefully, frequently, and promptly”) desire to do His will in all the various ways in which it is communicated to us: in the duties of our state in life, in the objective teaching of God’s Word, in opportunities and occasions presented to us, in response to interior inspirations.

Francis is well aware that reaching this level of devotion is no small thing, and so proceeds to give instruction about how to make progress on the spiritual journey in order to reach this point. As we have already seen in considering the testimonies of Teresa and Augustine, turning from sin is a very important part of the process.

As the psalm puts it:

Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?
And who shall stand in his holy place?
He who has clean hands and a pure heart,
Who does not lift up his soul to what is false,
And does not swear deceitfully.
(Psalms 24:3-4)

The First Purgation: Mortal Sin
Obviously, turning away from serious sin is one of the first things that needs to happen in true conversion. As Francis writes:

What is your state of soul with respect to mortal sin? Are you firmly resolved never to commit it for any reason whatsoever? In this resolution consists the foundation of the spiritual life.
Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

Francis recommends that a person in such a situation — coming back to the Lord from a life that included serious sin — consider the possibility of making a “general confession.” This entails making an appointment with a trusted confessor and going over one’s whole life as a way of making a fresh start. Francis acknowledges that this is not absolutely necessary, but he strongly advises it.

He also points out how important the regular practice of the sacrament of Reconciliation can be in making a real change in our lives. He points out, though, that for the sacrament to be really efficacious it is important that we prepare for going to confession and be sincere and serious about wanting to turn away from sin.

Often they make little or even no preparation and do not have sufficient contrition. Too often it happens that they go to confession with a tacit intention of returning to sin, since they are unwilling to avoid its occasions or use the means necessary for amendment of life.
Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

Francis recommends weekly confession, although other spiritual writers recommend other frequencies, such as monthly. Even when we don’t have mortal sins to confess, Francis points out the advantage of confessing venial sins, even though we don’t have an obligation to do so, as it brings them into focus so we can work on them more intently, as well as benefiting from the grace given in the sacrament. Francis emphasizes that we really need to be sorry for our sins in order to make their reappearance less likely.

Many who confess their venial sins out of custom and concern for order but without thought of amendment remain burdened with them for their whole life and thus lose many spiritual benefits and advantages… It is an abuse to confess any kind of sin, whether mortal or venial, without a will to be rid of it since confession was instituted for no other purpose.
Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

He also recommends that we be as specific as possible in our confession and not just confess generalities. For example, he encourages us not to confess in such general terms such as we didn’t love God or our neighbor enough, or pray devoutly enough, since “Every saint in heaven and every man on earth might say the same thing if they went to confession.”

The Second Purgation: The Affection for Sin
One of Francis’s most helpful insights is his teaching on the affection for sin. He points out that oftentimes we might turn away from serious sins in our life and try hard not to commit them, but still nurture affection for such sin, which greatly slows down our spiritual progress and disposes us to future falls.

He points out that although the Israelites left Egypt in effect, many did not leave it in affection; and the same is true for many of us. We leave sin in effect, but reluctantly, and look back at it fondly, as did Lot’s wife when she looked back on the doomed city of Sodom.

Francis gives an amusing but telling example of how a doctor, for the purpose of health, might forbid a patient to eat melons lest he die. The patient therefore abstains from eating them, but “they begrudge giving them up, talk about them, would eat them if they could, want to smell them at least, and envy those who can eat them. In such a way weak, lazy penitents abstain regretfully for a while from sin. They would like very much to commit sins if they could do so without being damned. They speak about sin with a certain petulance and with liking for it and think those who commit sins are at peace with themselves.”

Francis says this is like the person who would like to take revenge on someone “if only he could” or a woman who doesn’t intend to commit adultery but still wishes to flirt. Such souls are in danger. Besides the real danger of falling into serious sin again, having such a “divided heart” makes the spiritual life wearisome and the “devout” life of prompt, diligent, and frequent response to God’s will and inspirations virtually impossible.

Bernard similarly reminds us that feeling such affection for sin is not necessarily a sin in itself. To feel jealousy without yielding to it is no sin, but “a passion that time will heal.” He warns us though that if we “nurture” such affections or disordered passions we are heading in the wrong direction. He also tells us we should strive to eliminate or reduce such affection for sin by confession, tears, and prayer. Even if we should not prove successful, at least we can grow in gentleness and humility as we bear the burden of such a continuing struggle.12

What does Francis propose as the remedy for such remaining attachment to the affection for sin? A recovery of the biblical worldview.

Francis himself leads the reader of the Introduction to the Devout Life through ten such meditations on these basic truths, focusing on all we have been given by God and the debt of gratitude we owe Him, the ugliness and horror of sin, the reality of judgment and hell, the great mercy and goodness of Jesus’ work of redemption, the shortness of life, and the great beauty and glory of heaven. Francis and all the saints we are considering believe that there truly is power in the Word of God, and that meditating on the truth can progressively free us from remaining affection for sin.

The Scripture is clear:

How can young people keep their way pure?
By guarding it according to your word.
With my whole heart I seek you;
do not let me stray from your commandments.
I treasure your word in my heart,
so that I might not sin against you.
I will meditate on your precepts, and fix my eyes on your ways.
I will delight in your statutes;
I will not forget your word.
(Psalm 119:9-16, NRSV)

The saints have a wonderful way of bringing the insight of Scripture into contact with the circumstances of our lives. Teresa of Avila puts it this way:

A great aid to going against your will is to bear in mind continually how all is vanity and how quickly everything comes to an end. This helps to remove our attachment to trivia and center it on what will never end. Even though this practice seems to be a weak means, it will strengthen the soul greatly and the soul will be most careful in very little things. When we begin to become attached to something, we should strive to turn our thoughts from it and bring them back to God — and His majesty helps.
Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection

We need to make the prayer of Scripture our own:

So teach us to number our days
that we may gain wisdom of heart.
(Psalm 90:12)

Meditating on the passion of Christ is often recommended as being of special value. Bernard puts it like this:

What greater cure for the wounds of conscience and for purifying the mind’s acuity than to persevere in meditation on the wounds of Christ?
Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, Vol. III, Sermon 49

Francis knows that as long as we’re alive in this body the wounds of original sin and our past actual sins will cause affection for sin to spring up again and again. But it’s our response to this bent of our nature towards sin that is determinative of the progress we make on the spiritual journey. We need to grow in our hatred for sin so we can resist it when it makes its appeals. Catherine of Siena talks of the two-edged sword with which we fight the spiritual battle: one side is hatred for sin, the other is love for virtue.

Bernard speaks of how miserable it is to turn back to the slavery of our disordered passions once having tasted the grace of God, Such a person is doomed to continual frustration, as the things of the world simply can’t satisfy our hunger and “ravenous curiosity” since the forms of this world are passing away. He bemoans the fate of the soul “who once fed so delicately now lies groveling on the dunghill (Lamentations 4:5).”

The vigorous effort that the saints urge us to make in the struggle against sin is firmly grounded in the Scriptures.

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you men of double mind… Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you.
(James 4:7-10)

We need to determine, with the help of God’s grace, never to freely choose to offend Him. Francis makes clear that such purification of the affection for sin must extend to venial sins also.

Venial Sin
Teresa, Bernard, and Francis all acknowledge that there will probably always be some inadvertent venial sins that we commit, without full reflection or choice. As Bernard puts it:

Which of us can live uprightly and perfectly even for one hour, an hour free from fruitless talk and careless work?

They all also teach, though, very clearly and strongly, that in so far as it lies in our power, we need to resolve never to freely choose to offend God, even in a small matter, if we are to make progress in the spiritual life.

Both Francis and Teresa point out that to fall into same involuntary lie, out of embarrassment, for example, is one thing; but to maintain an affection for telling little lies, or to freely choose to do so, is a significant obstacle to making progress, and truly offensive to the Lord.

Affection for venial sin, just as affection for mortal sin, needs to progressively disappear from our lives as we make progress on the spiritual journey.

We can never be completely free of venial sins, at least so as to continue for long in such purity, yet we can avoid all affection for venial sins. . . . We must not voluntarily nourish, a desire to continue and persevere in venial sin of any kind. It would be an extremely base thing to wish deliberately to retain in our heart anything so displeasing to God as a will to offend him. No matter how small it is, a venial sin offends God.
Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

Living in the close quarters of a community of monks, Bernard is particularly sensitive to how unkindness in speech and attitude can damage relationships and wound souls.

It is not enough, I say, to guard one’s tongue from these and similar kinds of nastiness [public insult and abuse, venomous slander in secret]; even slight offences must be avoided, if anything may be termed slight that is directed against a brother for the purpose of hurting him, since merely to be angry with one’s brother makes one liable to the judgment of God.
Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, Vol. III, Sermon 29

Bernard also counsels us to be careful how we respond when a wrong has been done to us.

So when an offence is committed against you, a thing hard to avoid at times in communities like ours, do not immediately rush, as a worldly person may do, to retaliate dishonorably against your brother; nor, under the guise of administering correction, should you dare to pierce with sharp and seating words one for whom Christ was pleased to be crucified; nor make grunting, resentful noises at him, nor mutter and murmur complaints, nor adopt a sneering air, nor indulge the loud laugh of contempt, nor knit the brow in menacing anger. Let your passion die within, where it was born; a carrier of death, it must be allowed no exit or it will cause destruction, and then you can say with the Prophet: “I was troubled and I spoke not.”
Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, Vol. III, Sermon 29

To nourish affection for venial sin, Francis points out, weakens the powers of our spirit, stands in the way of God’s consolations, and opens the door to temptations. At the same time Francis doesn’t want to engender a morbid scrupulosity about the myriad temptations and sometimes inadvertent venial sins that are part of life in this world. He assures us that inadvertent venial sins and faults are “not a matter of any great moment” if as soon as they occur we reject them, and refuse to entertain any affection for them.

Francis makes clear that the process of purification will continue throughout our life, and so “we must not be disturbed at our imperfections, since for us perfection consists in fighting against them.”

Hatred for sin is important. Confidence in the mercy of God is even more important.

May the LORD, who is good, grant pardon to everyone who has resolved to seek God, the LORD, the God of his fathers, though he be not clean as holiness requires.
(2 Chronicles 30:l8b-19)

Thérèse makes clear that growth in the spiritual life is usually a gradual process; Jesus is patient with us, for He doesnt like pointing everything out at once to souls. He generally gives His light little by little.”

Thérèse also speaks of a “joyful resignation” to the lifetime struggle with faults.

At the beginning of my spiritual life when I was thirteen or fourteen, I used to ask myself what I would have to strive for later on because I believed it was quite impossible for me to understand perfection better. I learned very quickly since then that the more one advances, the more one sees the goal is still far off. And now I am simply resigned to see myself always imperfect and in this I find my joy.
Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, Chapter VII

Thérèse’ resignation was not one of despair, discouragement, passivity, or lack of effort, but a humble acceptance of her creaturely imperfection despite her efforts, infused with joy by her hope in God’s transforming love eventually bringing her to perfection.

In the last days of her life, when she was virtually suffocating from the tuberculosis, Thérèse was corrected for an impatient remark to a sister whom she found “tiresome.” Her response?

Oh! how happy I am to see myself imperfect and to be in need of God’s mercy so much even at the moment of my death.
Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, Chapter VII

Realistically, Francis says, there will probably be falls along the way, but God can use even these to deepen our humility.

Imperfections and venial sins cannot deprive us of spiritual life; it is lost only by mortal sin. Fortunately for us, in this war we are always victorious provided that we are willing to fight.
Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

Francis, like many of the saints, wants to encourage us on the spiritual journey. This is a journey on which we are all called to embark; and God will give us the grace to make progress on this journey, if only we are willing to persevere, to fight the good fight.

As for the seed that fell on rich soil, they are the ones who, when they have heard the word, embrace it with a generous and good heart, and bear fruit through perseverance.
(Luke 8:15, NAB)

Bernard wants us to know that even in the midst of the struggle — whether it be with mortal sin or venial sin, worldliness or temptation, perseverance in prayer or growth in virtue, loving or forgiving — we profoundly need to “lean on the Beloved.”

Bernard knows that to “fight against yourself without respite in a continual and hard struggle, and renounce your inveterate habits and inborn inclinations” is very hard, impossible really, without the help of the Lord.

But this is a hard thing. If you attempt it in your own strength, it will be as though you were trying to stop the raging of a torrent, or to make the Jordan run backwards
(Psalms 113:3).

What can you do then? You must seek the Word… You have need of strength, and not simply strength, but strength drawn from above
(Luke 24:49).

The words from Hebrews come to mind:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. (12:1-2)

The journey up to the summit of the mountain of God (or Mount Carmel, as John of the Cross calls it) is difficult. And John, Bernard, Catherine, Thérèse, Teresa, Augustine, and Francis know that it’s impossible to attain the summit — spiritual marriage in this life, beatific vision in the next, without leaning heavily on the Beloved.

As Bernard, in accord with his fellow Doctors, explains:

“Who shall ascend the mountain of the Lord?” (Psalms 23:3) If anyone aspires to climb to the summit of that mountain (Exodus 24:17), that is to the perfection of virtue, he will know how hard the climb is, and how the attempt is doomed to failure without the help of the Word. Happy the soul which causes the angels to look at her with joy and wonder and hears them saying, “Who is this coming up from the wilderness, rich in grace and beauty, leaning upon her beloved?” (Song 8:5). Otherwise, unless it leans on him, its struggle is in vain. But it will gain force by struggling with itself and, becoming stronger, will impel all things towards reason… bringing every carnal affect into captivity (2 Corinthians 10:5), and every sense under the control of reason in accordance with virtue. Surely all things are possible to someone who leans upon him who can do all things? ‘What confidence there is in the cry, “I can do all things in him who strengthens me!” (Philemon 4:13)… Thus if the mind does not rely upon itself, but is strengthened by the Word, it can gain such command over itself that no unrighteousness will have power over it” (Psalms 118:133).
Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, Vol. III, Sermon 85

The Good News is that the Beloved loves to be leaned on.

Posted in Book Recommendations, Understanding Sin | Tagged Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis de Sales, Ralph Martin, Sin, Thérèse of Lisieux | Leave a Comment »

Fr. Luc Buyens of the Netherlands

May 20, 2010

Father Buyens during his homily.

This is a homily in which Fr. Luc Buyens of the Netherlands explained to his parishioners (and the protesters who were also present) why he couldn’t give Communion to an openly homosexual man. What with all the media commotion surrounding that and the upcoming confrontation with the Rainbow Sash Movement this next Pentacost Sunday, I think it is interesting to see what Fr. Buyens actually said. Below is the homily in English (emphases mine). Caution: The English can be a tad tortured.

Dear parishioners of Reusel, dear people from elsewhere,

After the feast of carnival last week, on Ash Wednesday we have entered our holy Lent, the Christian time of fasting. For us this is a time of more focus on prayer, the practice of confession and being solidary with our neighbour. A time which Jesus has entered before us in His mortal life. I believe that we, as postmodern people of the 21st century, can still learn from that. When a person chooses for such a time of purification, according to Luke the evangelist, there are three points which become clear.

The temptation to turn stones into loaves… apparently, a lot is possible from the world of spirits. But Jesus replies: “Man lives not by bread alone”, and everyone who knows the Bible, knows what actually follows next: “but by every word of God”. It is sublime to know that Jesus will eventually feed His own with the bread of heaven, which makes us people grow into the ‘living rock’, into the spiritual building that He establishes and of which He is the cornerstone that holds everything together.

But apparently the devil isn’t caught that easily. He comes with a second challenge: “If you therefore will adore before me, all shall be yours”, and Jesus replies, “You shall adore the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve”: the God for Whom every knee must bend. How can we, dear people, adore and honour Him here on Earth?

The only right answer is: there where Jesus shows Himself in the Blessed Sacrament, especially in Adoration. ‘God with us’ in the form of consecrated bread. That is how He shall be with us until the end of days.

And how can we serve Him? In our neighbor, by serving him or her as we would want to be helped ourselves. Jesus lives in the first place in the poor, the small, the abandoned and fragile, the least of all. If we apply God’s word to what is called temptation, the enemy or tempter is sent back from the very start, and so follows the third temptation: Cast yourself down and you will be carried, in other words: the challenge to cross boundaries, to tempt fate as happens so often these days.

What does Jesus say then? “You shall not tempt the Lord your God”. Creature: know your place. Know what you are doing if you want to tempt the Lord your God. Woe that man…

At that point Satan leaves until the designated time to take his revenge, which will cost him dearly, because Jesus’ death has given eternal life to people of good will and the restoration of all things. This is what God’s Church stands for. He who believes and is baptized will be saved from a death that will last forever. From now on man can consider his life from the principle of eternity and let this dictate his values. Jesus entrusted this faith to the Church and, by spreading the Word and administering the sacraments to the people, the Church sanctifies the world.

Following the commotion after pastoral matters were leaked to the press, I would like to say the following. When we Catholics come together to celebrate the Eucharist we do this to consider God’s word and possibly to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist, Communion or Holy Host. “Truly my Body and Blood”, as Christ teaches us.

This ‘bread from heaven’ is one of the seven sacraments of the Church. In 2008 the Dutch bishops published a letter asking the ministers of the Eucharist to make the faithful aware of what communicating in God’s Church means. They gave four models to achieve a good formulation towards the faithful. All four of those models indicate that one can’t receive Communion under certain circumstances, and that, including the amendments in the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism, goes for everyone.

Dear people, why do I mention all this? To tell you that there is nothing wrong when something is lived orderly. There are boundaries for homosexuals and heterosexuals, and for everyone else possible.

There are rules which the Church must apply so that people approach and receive God in the right manner. The Church has the task to keep and protect the people. Especially when they threaten to make mistakes out of ignorance, the Church warns like a concerned mother. On the football field, the referee also engages with a player who acts inappropriately.

It can’t be that in the Church, which is eternal, all rules which stem from the Ten Commandments, are cast aside just like that. When I participate in carnival festivities I know I have to respect their rules and the same goes for when I want to participate actively in the life of the Church. Faith reveals itself in acts and here too the Law is what everything is measured by, to the benefit of all. “One jot, or one tittle shall not pass of the law, till all be fulfilled”, the Lord of heaven and earth says.

I have said a lot and I could say more, but I know that I will feel like a useless help who only tried to do his work in good conscience. I did not want to single out anyone. Everything took place in private. I don’t want to discriminate or hurt anyone. I know that there is often a lot of pain and sorrow for the people concerned but also, despite all difficulties, the intention to do and be good.

The Church is called to be specifically close to those concerned and to help them carry the sacrifices of such a disposition as a cross, together with the crucified Christ. I believe that bringing such a sacrifice can be a great blessing to the Church and the world who needs that so much. They who are willing to carry this cross are even invited and encouraged to frequently receive the sacraments and the blessings of the Church to be strengthened to persevere. After every fall or mistake every believer can and must reconcile himself with God through an honest confession, if he wants to sit at the table of the Lord. That goes for every grave sin of any nature.

To you, who have come here in such large numbers, I would like to say that I, as a priest, am willing to suffer for the sign I stand for. Just like I wish to be respectful to each and every one of you I would want to receive the same respect in return. Sadly, I must inform you, that things do not automatically point in that direction. I do not declare war on anyone, but I ask the Lord of heaven and earth that His peace may soon descend on Reusel once more. Our people here do no benefit from what is happening and do not work that way.

To the press I would like to say that I did not want this disturbance. This parish has been entrusted to my care by the bishop of ‘s-Hertogenbosch. This is my workplace that has been given and nothing more. I think that I have given enough clarity and ask that you turn towards persons of the diocese of Den Bosch and specialists in these matters.

In our Church it is not usual that priests act autonomously. In the case that I have been blamed I have only acted after discussion with the bishop and my colleagues.

I wish to close with the word of the great apostle Paul with his words to the Christians of Philippi: “Be followers of me, brethren: and observe them who walk so as you have our model. For many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping) that they are enemies of the cross of Christ”.

“Whose end is destruction: whose God is their belly: and whose glory is in their shame: who mind earthly things. But our conversation is in heaven: from whence also we look for the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, who will reform the body of our lowness, made like to the body of his glory, according to the operation whereby also he is able to subdue all things unto himself.”

I wish you all a blessed preparation for Easter.

Father Luc Buyens

Posted in Homosexualism, The State of the Catholic Church, Understanding Sin | 4 Comments »

All Have Sinned: The Mystery of Impiety by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa

February 11, 2010

The Anastasis of Christ, symbolizes the promise of resurrection in the Eastern Church. Christ, returning from the underworld, pulls Adam and Eve from their graves to their resurrection.

The following reflection on sin by Fr. Cantalamessa is drawn from the second chapter of his book Life In Christ which is about the spiritual messages contained in Paul’s letter to the Romans. In a series of homiletic meditations, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher to the papal household, explores the main themes of St. Paul’s famous epistle in a manner that draws us closer to a more mature relationship with Jesus Christ. The reading selection that follows will show you what I mean.

Only Divine Revelation Knows What Sin Is
Only divine revelation really knows what sin is and neither human ethics nor philosophy can tell us anything about it. No man can say by himself what sin is, for the simple reason that he himself is in sin. All that he says about sin can, in the end, only be a palliative and an understatement of sin. “To have a weak understanding of sin is part of our being sinners.” Scripture says: “Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart. . . for he flatters himself in his own eyes that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated” (Psalms 36:2-3). Sin also “speaks” just as God does; it too delivers oracles and its place of teaching is man’s heart. Sin speaks in man’s heart and that is why it is absurd to expect man to speak “against” it. Although I am here writing about sin, I too am a sinner and I should therefore tell you not to rely too much on me and on what I write! Sin is a much more serious thing — infinitely more serious — than I shall ever be able to explain. At the most, man can reach an understanding of sin against himself or against other men, but not sin against God; the violation of human rights, but not the violation of divine rights. In fact, if we take a close look around us we can see that this is what is happening in present-day culture.

Therefore only divine revelation knows what sin is. Jesus explains all this more closely by saying that only the Holy Spirit can “convince the world of sin” (cf. John 16:8). I have mentioned that God must be the one to talk to us of sin. When, in fact, God and not man talks against sin it is not easy to remain impassive; his voice is like thunder that “crushes the cedars of Lebanon” (cf. Psalms 29:5). Our meditation will have fulfilled its aim if it manages even to challenge our unshakable basic self-assurance and make us feel a wholesome fear in front of the terrible danger that not only sin but the very possibility of sinning holds for us. With the help of God we want to reach the point of being prepared to shed our blood in the struggle against sin (“In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” Hebrews 12:4).

Sin, A Refusal To Acknowledge God
The basic sin and primary object of God’s wrath has been singled out by St. Paul as asebein, that is impiety or ungodliness. And he immediately explains what this impiety exactly consists of, saying that it is the refusal to g1orify and thank God. In other words, the refusal to acknowledge God as God and not rendering him the respect that is his. It consists, we could say, in “ignoring” God, not however in the sense of “not knowing he exists”, but, in the sense of “behaving as if he didn’t exist.” In the Old Testament Moses shouts to the people, “Know that the Lord your God is God!” (cf. Deuteronomy 7:9) and a psalmist takes up the same cry: “Know that the Lord is God! It is he that made us, and we are his” (Psalms 100:3). Sin is basically the denial of this “acknowledgement”; it is the attempt, on the part of the creature to cancel out on his own initiative and almost with arrogance, the infinite difference that exists between himself and God. Thus sin infects the very root of things; it is “a stifling of the truth,” an attempt to keep truth the prisoner of injustice. It is something much more sinister and terrible than can be imagined or expressed. If the world knew what sin really is, it would die of terror.

This refusal took shape in idolatry in which the creature is worshipped rather than the Creator (cf. Romans 1:25). In idolatry man doesn’t “accept” God but rather “makes” a god; it is he who decides about God and not God about him. The roles are reversed; man becomes the potter and God the clay which man moulds to his pleasure (cf. Romans 9:20 ff.).

The Moral Fruits Of A Fundamental Choice Against God
So far St. Paul has shown us the withdrawal that took place in man’s heart, his fundamental choice against God, Now he goes on to show the moral fruits of this withdrawal. All of this gave rise to a general dissolution in behavior, a real and true “torrent of perdition” dragging humanity unconsciously to ruin. At this point St. Paul outlines the appalling picture of the vices of the pagan society: male and female homosexuality, injustice, wickedness, covetousness, envy, deceit, malignity, haughtiness, arrogance, disobedience to parents, faithlessness. . . The list of vices is taken from the pagan moralists, but the whole picture that results from it is that of the “wicked one” so often spoken of in the Bible. The disconcerting thing at first glance is that St. Paul sees all this disorder as a consequence of divine wrath. In fact, he affirms this unequivocally three times: “God gave them up to impurity. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. . . And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind” (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). God certainly does not “want” these things, but he “permits” them to make man understand where his refusal of God leads. St. Augustine wrote that “these things, although they are punishments, are also sins because the punishment for iniquity is that of being, itself, iniquity. God intervenes to punish evil and from his punishment other sins come.” Sin is the punishment for sin. In fact Scripture says: “One is punished by the very things by which he sins “(Wisdom 11:16). God is “obliged” to abandon people to themselves so as not to have to uphold their injustice and in the hope that they will retrace their steps.

Refusal Of God In Modern Times
Let us listen to a few of those who expressed refusal of God in modern times, keeping in mind, however, that we are judging the words and not the intentions or moral responsibility of the individuals which are known only to God and which might be very different to what they seem to us. Karl Marx gave this reason for his refusal of the idea of a “creator”: “A person” – he wrote – “is an independent being only. insofar as he is his own master, and he is his own master only in so far as he is master of his existence. He who lives through the grace of another sees himself as a dependent being. . . But I would live entirely for the sake of another if he had created me, if he were the source of my life and my life was not my own creation”. “Man’s conscience” — he wrote in his youth — is “the highest divinity”; “the origin of man is man himself.” (K. Marx, Manuscript.of 1844) In this same spirit, J.P. Sartre had one of his characters say: “Today I accuse myself and only I, man, can absolve myself. If God exists man is nothing.. . God doesn’t exist! Happiness, tears of joy! Alleluia! No more heaven. No more hell! Nothing else but the earth.” (J.P. Sartre, The Devil and the Good God X, 4)

Another way of arrogantly eliminating the difference between Creator and creature, between God and the “self,” is to confuse them, which is the form that impiety sometimes takes on today in depth psychology. Paul’s reproach against the “wise men” of his times was not for exploring nature and admiring its beauty, but for not going beyond this. In the same way the word of God does not criticize certain trends in depth psychology for having discovered a new area of the human mind, the unconscious, and for trying to throw light on this, but for having made of this discovery yet another occasion for getting rid of God. Thus, the Word of God renders a service to psychology, purifying it of what threatens it, just as psychology in its turn, can be of use — and has effectively been so in many cases — in purifying our understanding of the Word of God.

The Suppression Of The Distinction Between Good And Evil.
The impiety harbored in some of the recent trends of this science is the suppression of the distinction between good and evil. Following a procedure that closely recalls that of ancient, heretical gnosis, the limits move dangerously: the limit of the divine lowers and the demonic limit rises to the point of meeting and even of, being superimposed. Then, in evil, nothing else is seen except “the other side of reality” and in the devil nothing else but the “shadow of God.” There are some who have even gone so far as to accuse Christianity of having introduced the “ill-omened opposition between good and evil” into the world. The following words of Isaiah could have been written today for just such a situation: “Woe to those who call what is bad, good, and what is good, bad, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20).

Psychologists of this trend give no importance to “saving the soul” (which is even considered ridiculous) or even to “analyzing the soul,” but to “helping the soul fulfill itself,” that is, to making it possible for the human soul — which is like saying natural man — to express itself in all ways, repressing nothing. Salvation lies in self-revelation, in man making himself and his psyche known for what they are; salvation lies in self-realization. Salvation — it is thought — is within, immanent in man. It does not come from history but from the archetype manifested in myth and symbol. In a certain sense, it comes from the unconscious. The unconscious, which at the beginning was considered to be the natural place of evil where neurosis and illusions are rooted (including the “illusion” of God) is now seen as the seat of good, as a mine of hidden treasures for man. One day, after reading some works full of the ideas just mentioned, shocked and quite terrified, I was wondering what God’s judgment on all this could possibly be when I happened to read what Jesus says in St. John’s Gospel: “Though the light has come into the world, people have preferred darkness to the light” (John 3:19).

An Extreme Form Of Sin
However, we have not yet reached the heart of the matter. Alongside the intellectual denial of God by people convinced that God does not exist, we have the voluntary denial of those who refuse God, even though they know that God exists. This extreme form of sin, which is hatred of God and blasphemy, is expressed in an open and threatening insult to God, in the loud proclamation of the superiority of evil over good, of darkness over light, of hatred over love, of Satan over God. This is all directly maneuvered by the evil one. Who else, in fact, would be able to harbor the thought that “good is a deviation of evil and, like all deviations, is of secondary importance and destined to disappear one day,” or that “evil, in fact, is nothing but good ill-interpreted”?

The most evident signs of this form of impiety are: the profanation of the Eucharist (the excessive and inhuman hatred towards the consecrated host is a terrible, negative proof of the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist); the obscene and sarcastic parody of the stories and words of the Bible; the staging of the figure of Jesus in films and spectacles which are willfully blasphemous and offensive. To send a soul to their infernal lord, these persons are capable of such constancy as only the holiest of missionaries would employ to lead a soul to Christ.

Magic
On the other hand, this situation is not as remote as many Christians might think; it is, rather, an open abyss only a stone’s throw away from the indifference and “neutrality” in which they live. One starts with abandoning all religious practice and ends up, one sad day, among the openly declared enemies of God either by adhering to organizations whose aim (mostly kept secret at the beginning) is to make war against God and cause an upheaval in moral values, or through sexual aberrations or use of pornography, or following contacts with magicians, spiritists, esoteric societies, occult practices or other such things. Magic is, in fact, another way and the most blatant, of succumbing to the old temptation of wanting to be “like God.” “The hidden force which guides magic — as is written in one of their manuals — is the thirst for power. The magicians’ aims are defined quite appropriately for the first time by the serpent in the garden of Eden. . . The eternal ambition of the follower of the black arts consists in gaining power over the whole universe and making a god of himself.” The fact that in most cases we are dealing with charlatans and nothing more is of no importance. The irreverent intention behind its practice or with which one turns to it is sufficient to place one in Satan’s power. Satan works through lies and bluffing but the effects are anything but imaginary. In the Bible God says: “There must never be anyone among you. . . who practices divination, who is soothsayer, augur or sorcerer, weaver of spells, consulter of ghosts or mediums, or necromancer. For anyone who does those things is detestable to the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 18:10-12). In the prophet Isaiah we find this severe admonishment: The Lord will strike the country because it is “full of sorcerers from the East and of soothsayers” (cf. Isaiah 2:6).

Claiming To Be Wise, They Became Fools
Man has only the two licit means of nature and grace for gaining power over himself, over sickness, over events and business. “Nature” indicates intelligence, the sciences, medicine, technology and all the resources that man has received from God in creation to dominate the earth in obedience to him. “Grace” indicates faith and prayer through which cures and miracles are sometimes obtained, but always from God, because “power belongs to God” (Psalms 62:12). When a third way is taken, that of the search for occult power, almost hiding from God, without needing his approval or indeed abusing his name and signs, then in one way or another the master and pioneer of this way comes on to the scene. I mean the devil who one day said all the power of the earth had been handed over to him, for him to give to anyone he chose if they would worship him (cf Luke 4:6). In these cases ruin is assured. The fly has been caught in the web of the “big spider” and will not easily manage to get out alive. Exactly what Paul pointed out is happening in our technological and secularized society: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Rornans 1:22): they have abandoned faith to embrace every kind of superstition, even the most childish.

The Wages Of Sin
But let us also examine the consequences of impiety, so that not even the slightest shadow of doubt remains in our minds that no one can prevail against God. In the prophet Jeremiah we read these words addressed to God: “All who abandon you will be put to shame” (Jeremiah 17:13). The abandonment of God leads to personal confusion and the feeling of having gone astray. “Lost” and “gone astray” are the words most frequently used in the Bible when sin is spoken of: the lost sheep, the lost son. – . The very word to translate the biblical concept of sin in Greek, hamartia, contains the idea of being lost and having failed. The same term was used when speaking of a river that flows away from its original course and is lost in the marshes, and of an arrow which misses its aim and is lost. Sin is therefore radical failure. A man can fail in many ways: as a husband, as a father or as a businessman. A woman can fail as a wife or as a mother; a priest can fail as a pastor, as a superior or as a spiritual director. But these are all relative failures; there is always the possibility of compensation; one may fail in all these ways and still be a most respectable person, even a saint. But it is not so with sin; through sin one fails as a creature, that is fundamentally, in what one “is” and not in what one “does.” This is the only case where the words of Jesus about Judas apply to a person: “It would have been better for that man if he had never been born” (Matthew 26:24). Man, in sinning, believes he is offending God, whereas, in fact, he is “offending” and mortifying only himself, to his own shame: “Is it really me they spite”, God says, “is it not in fact themselves, to their own confusion”? (Jeremiah 7:19). By refusing to glorify God, man himself becomes “deprived of the glory of God.” Sin offends God, that is, it saddens him greatly, but only in so far as it brings death to man whom he loves; it wounds his love.

The Existential Consequences Of Sin
But let us take a closer look at the existential consequences of sin. St. Paul affirms that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Sin leads to death; not so much to the “act” of dying – which lasts only a moment — as to the “state” of death, that is precisely to what has been called “mortal illness,” a state of chronic death. In this state the creature desperately tends to return to being nothing but without succeeding and lives therefore as if in an eternal agony. From this state comes damnation and the pains of hell; the creature is obliged by One stronger than himself to be what he does not consent to be, that is dependent on God, and his eternal torment is that he cannot get rid of either God or of himself. Kierkegaard rightly said that “the formula for all desperation is to desperately refuse to be what one is.” (S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death I, A)

Satan embodies this state. In him sin has run its entire course and is shown in its extreme consequences. He is the prototype of those “who do know God (and how he knew him!) but do not give him the glory and thanks that belong to God.” It is not necessary to fall back on the imagination or on theological speculation to learn Satan’s feelings on this point because he himself shouts them into the hearts of those whom God still allows him to tempt today, as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness: “We are not free”, he shouts, “we are not free! Even if you kill yourself, your soul lives on, you cannot kill it, we cannot say no. We are obliged to exist forever. It’s all deceit! It’s not true that God created us free!” Such thoughts make us shudder as it would seem that we are directly listening to the eternal argument between Satan and God. He, in fact, would wish to be left free to return to nothingness. Not because he doesn’t want to exist or to be God’s antagonist, but because he does not want to be what he is, dependent on God. He wants to exist, but not “through the grace of another.” As the Power above him is stronger than he is and obliges him to exist, this is the way to pure desperation

In choosing absolute autonomy from God, the creature is aware of the unhappiness and darkness involved but he is willing to pay this price. As St. Bernard said, “he prefers to he unhappy in his own sovereignty rather than be happy in submission.” The much talked about eternity of hell does not depend on God, who is always ready to forgive, but on the person who refuses to be forgiven and would accuse God of lacking respect for his freedom if God were to do so.

We have, today, the chance to actually verify through our own experience the results of sin by observing what is happening in our present society after the extreme consequences the refusal of God has led to in certain places. Nietzsche, for whom sin was nothing other than an ignoble “Jewish invention” and good and evil just simple “prejudices of God” (once again we are judging words and not intentions) said: “We have killed him; we are God’s assassins!” But then, having perceived or personally experienced the evil results of this, the philosopher added: “What have we done by unlinking this earth of ours from the chain that links it to its sun? Where is it going now? Where are we going? Isn’t ours an eternal descent? Backwards, sideways, forward, from all sides? Aren’t we perhaps wandering as if through an infinite nothingness?” (F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, nr. 125)To kill God is really the most horrific suicide. Death is really the wages of sin and the proof lies in present-day nihilism.

“You Are The Man!”
The Bible narrates this story. King David had committed adultery and to cover it up he had the woman’s husband killed in war. In this way, to make this woman his wife, could even have seemed an act of generosity on the king’s part towards the man who had died fighting for him — a real chain of sins. The Lord then sent the prophet Nathan to him who told him a parable, although the king did not know it was a parable. There were, he said, two men in a certain city, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds and the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb and it grew up with him and used to lie in his bosom. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and instead of taking one of his own flock, he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him. On hearing this story David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man and he said to Nathan: “The man who has done this deserves to die!” Then Nathan, pointing his finger, said to David: “You are the man!” (cf. 2 Samuel 12:1 ff.).

This is what the Apostle Paul is doing with us. After making us feel a righteous indignation and horror for the impiety of the world, as we pass from the first to the second chapter of his Letter, as if suddenly addressing us, he repeats: “You are the man!” “Therefore you have no excuse, Oh Man, whoever you are, when you judge another; for in passing judgment upon him you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. We know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who do such things. Do you suppose, Oh Man, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God?” (Romans 2:1-3). The recurrence, at this point, of the word “inexcusable”, which was used earlier for the pagans, leaves us in no doubt as to St. Paul’s intentions. While you were judging others, he says, you were bringing about your own condemnation. It is time now to turn the horror you feel for sin against yourself.

Safe From God’s Anger Just Because They Can Distinguish Between Good And Evil?
The “person judging” in the second chapter, turns out to be a Jew who, however, is seen here as a kind of stereotype. The “Jew” is a non-Greek, or a non-pagan; he is the pious believer who, with his strong principles and revealed morality, judges the rest of the world and feels safe in doing so. In this sense each one of us is the “Jew.” Origen actually said that in the Church the Apostle’s words were intended for bishops, presbyters and deacons, that is, for the guides and teachers. (Origen, Commentary on the Letter to the Romans II, 2; PG 14 873)Paul himself experienced it when, from being a Pharisee he became a Christian and can therefore confidently indicate to believers the way to abandon Pharisaism. He unmasks the strange and frequent illusions of pious and religious people who consider themselves safe from God’s anger just because they can clearly distinguish between good and evil. They know the law and, when necessary, they know how to apply it to others, whereas, as far as they themselves are concerned, they think that the privilege of being on God’s side or, at least, God’s goodness and patience with which they are very familiar, makes an exception for them.

“Or do you presume”, says the Apostle to us, “upon the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But by your hard and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:4-5). What a shock it will be the day when you realize that these words of God are actually directed at you and that you are really the “you” mentioned! It’s like a jurist who is totally absorbed in analyzing a past sentence which is standard. On taking a Closer look he suddenly realizes that the sentence also applies to himself and is still effective. His state of mind undergoes a sudden change and he ceases to be so sure of himself. The Word of God is engaged here in a real and true “tour de force.” It must reverse the situation of the person dealing with it. There’s no escape. It’s necessary to surrender and repeat with David: “I have sinned!” (2 Samuel 12:13), otherwise the heart is hardened again and impenitence reinforced.

A Masked Form Of Idolatry
The specific accusation the Apostle makes against the “pious” is that “they themselves are doing the exact same things” they judge others for. But in what sense? Is it that they materially do the exact same things? This is also sometimes true (cf. Romans 2:21-24); but he is especially talking about the essence which is impiety and idolatry. There is a masked form of idolatry at work in our present world. If it is idolatry “to bow down to the work of our hands” (cf. Isaiah 2:8; Hosea 14:4), if it is idolatry “to put the creature in the place of the Creator,” then I am idolatrous whenever I put the creature — my creature, the work of my hands — in the Creator’s place. My creature could be the home or the church I have built, the family I have formed, the child I have given life to (how many mothers, even Christian mothers, unconsciously make a god out of their children, especially an only child!); it could be the work I do, the school I direct, the book I write. Then there is my “self,” the prince of idols. In fact, idolatry is always based on autolatry, self-worship, self-love, placing oneself first at the center of the world sacrificing everything else to this. The “substance” is always impiety, the non-glorification of God, but always and only one’s self. It is even making use of God for our own success and personal affirmation. The sin St. Paul denounced in the “Jews” throughout the whole Letter was that they sought self-justice and self-glory and they did this even in their observance of God’s law.

Perhaps, deep within myself, I am ready at this point to acknowledge the truth, to admit that so far I have lived “for myself,” that I am also involved in the mystery of impiety. The Holy Spirit has “convinced me of sin.” The ever-new miracle of conversion is beginning for me. What should I do in such a delicate situation? Let us open the Bible and intone the “De profundis”: “Out of the depths I cry to thee, Oh Lord” (Psalms 130). The “De Profundis” wasn’t written for the dead but for the living: the “depths” from which the psalmist cries is not a reference to Purgatory but to sin: “If thou, Oh Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, Lord who could stand”? It is written that Christ “in the Spirit went and preached to the spirits in prison” (cf. 1 Peter 3:19). Commenting on this, one of the Fathers of the Church said: “When you hear that Christ, going down to Hades, freed the souls who were prisoners there, do not think that these things are far removed from what is being done now. Believe me, the heart is a tomb.”(Macanus of Egypt, On the Freedom of Mind 116; PG 34, 936). We are now spiritually in the position of the “spirits in prison” in Hades, awaiting the coming of the Savior. The traditional icon of the Resurrection shows Adam and Eve desperately outstretching their hands to grasp the right hand of Christ who is coming with his cross to snatch them from prison. Let us also raise a cry from the deep prison of our sinful “self” in which we are kept prisoners. The psalm we are saying is full of confident trust and expectation: “In his word I hope. . . My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning . . . He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.” We already know that help exists, that there is a remedy for our ills, because “God loves us.” So while we are shaken by God’s Word, let us confidently say to God: “For you do not give me up to sheol, or let your godly one see the pit” (Psalms 16:10).

Posted in Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, Readings, Understanding Paul, Understanding Sin | Tagged “You Are The Man!”, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, Idolatry, Life In Christ, Nietzsche and Sin, Sin, St. Paul and Sin | Leave a Comment »

Two Reflections on Sin

August 11, 2009

Sin and Satan In Paradise Lost

More than any other passage, Moses’ farewell speech in Deuteronomy 30:15-20 brings out the real nature and tragedy of sin. “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.”

In all its forms, sin consists in turning away from God with what is described as “a hardened heart” or “stiffened neck” (Psalms 95:8; Jeremiah 7:24-26). It is the “No” to eternal life and to the author of that life. In a sense it is the most obvious in human nature yet it remains shrouded by layers of self deception and wishful thinking. It seems as if one of the undertakings of our secular state is to deny the innate moral weakness of its citizens. Here is a passage from Fr. Robert Barron’s And Now I See and John Paul II’s meditation on the Psalm 51, the Miserere.

“So the project is knowing that we are sinners, but what, exactly, is sin? This is a much more difficult question than it seems, because sin is a negativity, a dysfunction, and hence cannot be looked at directly. Henri de Lubac spoke of it as cette claudication mysterieuse, this mysterious limp, and thereby caught its elusive, derivative, and parasitic quality. We might begin to shed some light on the issue by distinguishing, in accord with biblical instincts, between Sin and sins, that is to say, between the underlying disease and its many symptoms. When, at the end of his career, the Curé d’Ars was asked what wisdom he had gained about human nature from his many years of hearing confessions, he responded, “people are much sadder than they seem.”

Blaise Pascal rests his apologetic for Christianity on the simple fact that all people are unhappy. This universal, enduring, and stubborn sadness is Sin. Now this does not mean that Sin is identical to psychological depression. The worst sinners can be the most psychologically well-adjusted people, and the greatest saints can be, by any ordinary measure, quite unhappy. When I speak of sadness in this context, I mean the deep sense of un-fulfillment. We want the Truth and we get it, if at all, in dribs and drabs; we want the Good, and we achieve it only rarely; we seem to know what we ought to be, but we are in fact something else. This spiritual frustration, this inner warfare, this debility of soul, is Sin.

It is nowhere better described than in the seventh chapter of the letter that Paul wrote to the Romans toward the end of his life. The passage begins simply and magnificently: “I do not understand my own actions” (Romans 7:14). Paul knows, even twenty years after his conversion to Christ, that he remains an enigma to himself. And the mystery is clearly articulated: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Romans 7:15). Paul lives at cross purposes to himself, his best inclinations stymied, his highest thoughts countered by his lowest desires, his good will giving rise to sordid acts. Sounding like an alcoholic who knows that taking a drink is the very worst thing he could do precisely as he raises the glass to his lips, Paul continues, “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it” (Romans. 7:18). When he looks within, he sees, not an ordered harmony, but a battlefield: “for I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind” (Romans 7:23). And the conclusion of this bit of brutally honest introspection is an anguished statement and an equally anguished question: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). The Apostle to the Gentiles …sees the truth of his situation with awful clarity his spiritual life is a civil war, and no amount of fighting will resolve the conflict.

Pascal mines further this Pauline vein when he says, “We are incapable of not desiring truth and happiness and incapable of either certainty or happiness.”This is both our greatness (we know what we ought to have) and our wretchedness (we cannot achieve it). In one of the best known of his Pensees, Pascal says, “Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast.” In other words, when we convince ourselves that all is basically well with us and that through our efforts of mind, will, imagination, can work our way out of our wretchedness, we do not resolve our dysfunction; we intensify it. Part of the mythology of the Enlightenment was just this confidence in auto-salvation.

Many nineteenth-century thinkers, including some Christians, held that our technological advances, our improvements in medicine, our growing political wisdom would conduce, finally, to the emergence of the kingdom. The prophets from Kierkegaard to Barth pointed out the dangerous hubris behind this assumption, and the horrors of the twentieth century — two global wars, several attempts at genocide, the nuclear threat, and the beginning of terrorism — have shown the truth of Pascal’s dictum. The perpetrators of the greatest violence in human history were not those who believed in the fall but precisely those who denied it.

Every Advent Christians sing a haunting song whose words and tune go back to the ninth century, but I wonder how carefully they aver to the lyrics:

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appears.

In the ancient world, people were tremendously afraid of being kidnapped and held for ransom, Alone, far from home, malnourished, often tortured, hostages could only hope against hope that their deliverance might come. This is the situation evoked by that well-known song: Israel, the people of God, are held for ransom in their lonely exile, and they cry out for their savior, the Son of God. To be in Sin is to know the truth and to feel the texture of this imprisonment.

In his homilies on the book of Exodus, Origen proposes an allegorical reading of the battle between the children of Israel and the Egyptians. The Israelites, he says, symbolize all of the positive powers of the soul — creativity, intelligence, energy, love — while Pharaoh (and his minions) stand for the negative forces of fear, hatred, and violence. What has happened in our fallen state is that Pharaoh has come to dominate Israel, that is to say, the power of Sin has co-opted and mastered for its purposes our positive energies. Now our minds (which remain hungry for the Truth) are placed in service of falsity; and our wills (which still love the Good) are pressed into service for evil; and our creativity (which still longs for the beautiful) is harnessed to ugly purposes. According to Exodus, Pharaoh compels the Israelites to build fortified cities and monuments to himself. And so, following the allegory, our sinner’s souls are given over to producing fortifications to protect the ego and monuments to trumpet its prominence. This enslavement of our best to our worst is Sin.

Augustine offers one of the pithiest definitions of Sin: it is the state of being incurvatus in se (caved in on oneself). The powers of the soul, which are meant to orient us to nature and other human beings and the cosmos and finally the infinite mystery of God, are focused in on the tiny and infinitely uninteresting ego. Like a black hole, the sinful soul draws all of the light and energy around it into itself. Dante illustrates this Augustinian insight by placing Satan at the pit of Hell, frozen in ice, incapable of movement, and weeping from all six of his eyes.’The Devil’s angel wings (now devolved into unsightly bat wings) beat the air furiously, but he can go nowhere: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” Trying to fly while stuck in the ice; driving your car with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake: that is the dysfunction, the frustration, that the Bible calls “Sin.”

But we mustn’t despair, even after surveying this depressing series of images and metaphors, for we have a savior. We cannot set this condition right (“who will deliver me from this body of death?”), but there is someone who can. Paul’s lament ends with an exultant proclamation: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25). Christianity affirms that Emmanuel (God with us) has come and has gone right to the bottom of Sin in order to defeat it. In his full humanity, Jesus entered into the complex nexus of Sin, and in his full divinity, he did something about it. He stood shoulder to shoulder with us in the muddy Jordan waters of our egotism, but he was not simply a fellow sufferer, He also lifted us out of those waters and offered us transfiguration. And it is none other than those so lifted up and so transfigured that can look with confidence, and even a touch of humor, at the mess from which they are being saved. It is the saints who know that they are sinners.”
Fr. Robert Barron, And Now I See

On The Miserere
1. We have just heard the Miserere, one of the most famous prayers of the Psalter, the most intense and commonly used penitential psalm, the hymn of sin and pardon, a profound meditation on guilt and grace. The Liturgy of the Hours makes us pray it at Lauds every Friday. For centuries the prayer has risen to heaven from the hearts of many faithful Jews and Christians as a sigh of repentance and hope poured out to a merciful God.

From David to prophetic awareness of new heart created by the Spirit
The Jewish tradition placed the psalm on the lips of David, who was called to repentance by the severe words of the prophet Nathan (cf. vv. 1-2; 2 Sam 11-12), who rebuked him for his adultery with Bathsheba and for having had her husband Uriah killed. The psalm, however, was enriched in later centuries, by the prayer of so many other sinners, who recovered the themes of the “new heart” and of the “Spirit” of God placed within the redeemed human person, according to the teaching of the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel (cf. v. 12; Jeremiah 1-34; Ezekiel: 11,19. 36,24-28).

Original Sin
2. Psalm 50 (51) outlines two horizons. First, there is the dark region of sin (cf. vv. 3-11) in which man is placed from the beginning of his existence: “Behold in guilt I was born, a sinner was I conceived” (v. 7). Even if this declaration cannot be taken as an explicit formulation of the doctrine of original sin as it was defined by Christian theology, undoubtedly it corresponds to it: indeed, it expresses the profound dimension of the innate moral weakness of the human person. The first part of the Psalm appears to be an analysis of sin, taking place before God. Three Hebrew terms are used to define this sad reality, which comes from the evil use of human freedom.

Three Hebrew terms for sin
3. The first term, hattá, literally means “falling short of the target”: sin is an aberration which leads us far from God, the fundamental goal of our relations, and, consequently, also from our neighbour.

The second Hebrew term is “awôn, which takes us back to the image of “twisting” or of “curving”. Sin is a tortuous deviation from the straight path; it is an inversion, a distortion, deformation of good and of evil; in the sense declared by Isaiah: “Woe to those who call good evil and evil good, who change darkness into light and light into darkness” (Is 5,20). Certainly, for this reason in the Bible conversion is indicated as a “return” (in Hebrew shûb) to the right way, correcting one’s course.

The third term the psalmist uses to speak of sin is peshá. It expresses the rebellion of the subject toward his sovereign and therefore an open challenge addressed to God and to his plan for human history.

Saving justice of God recreates sinful humanity
4. If, however, man confesses his sin, the saving justice of God is ready to purify him radically. Thus we come to the second spiritual part of the psalm, the luminous realm of grace (cf. vv. 12-19). By the confession of sins, for the person who prays there opens an horizon of light where God is at work. The Lord does not just act negatively, eliminating sin, but recreates sinful humanity by means of his life-giving Spirit: he places in the human person a new and pure “heart”, namely, a renewed conscience, and opens to him the possibility of a limpid faith and worship pleasing to God.

Origen spoke of a divine therapy, which the Lord carries out by his word and by the healing work of Christ: “As God prepares remedies for the body from therapeutic herbs wisely mixed together, so he also prepared for the soul medicines with the words he infused, scattering them in the divine Scriptures…. God gave yet another medical aid of which the Lord is the Archetype who says of himself: “It is not the healthy who have need of a physician but the sick“. He is the excellent physician able to heal every weakness, and illness” (Origen, Homilies on the Psalms, From the Italian edition, Omelie sui Salmi, Florence, 1991, pp. 247-249).

Sense of sin: “against you alone have I sinned” and appeal to mercy
5. The richness of Psalm 50 (51) merits a careful exegesis of every line. It is what we will do when we will meet it again at Lauds on successive Fridays. The overall view, which we have taken of this great Biblical supplication, reveals several fundamental components of a spirituality which should permeate the daily life of the faithful. There is above all a lively sense of sin, seen as a free choice, with a negative connotation on the moral and theological level: “Against you, you alone, have I sinned, I have done what is evil in your sight” (v. 6).

There is also in the psalm a lively sense of the possibility of conversion: the sinner, sincerely repentant, (cf. v 5), comes before God in his misery and nakedness, begging him not to cast him out from his presence (v. 13).

Finally, in the Miserere, a rooted conviction of divine pardon ” cancels, washes, cleanses” the sinner (cf. vv. 3-4) and is able to transform him into a new creature who has a transfigured spirit, tongue, lips and heart (cf. 4-19). “Even if our sins were as black as the night, divine mercy is greater than our misery. Only one thing is needed: the sinner has to leave the door to his heart ajar…. God can do the rest…. Everything begins and ends with his mercy”, so writes St Faustina Kowalska (M. Winowska, The Ikon of Divine Mercy, the Message of Sister Faustina, from the Italian version, L’Icona dell’Amore Misericordioso. Il messaggio di Suor Faustina, Rome, 1981, p. 271).
Against You Alone Have I Sinned by Pope John Paul II

Posted in Understanding Sin | Tagged And Now I See, awôn, Blaise Pascal, Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Fr. Robert Barron, hattá, Henri de Lubac, Miserere, Origen, Original Sin, peshá, Pope John Paul II, Satan, Sin, St. Augustine, St. Paul | Leave a Comment »

Original Sin: A Disputation – by Fr. Edward T. Oakes

August 7, 2009

Original Sin at the Museum of National Arts of Popular Traditions Paris, France

“No doctrine inside the precincts of the Christian Church is received with greater reserve and hesitation, even to the point of outright denial, than the doctrine of original sin. Of course in a secular culture like ours, any number of Christian doctrines will be disputed by outsiders, from the existence of God to the resurrection of Jesus. But even in those denominations that pride themselves on their adherence to the orthodox dogmas of the once-universal Church, the doctrine of original sin is met with either embarrassed silence, outright denial, or at a minimum a kind of halfhearted lip service that does not exactly deny the doctrine but has no idea how to place it inside the devout life. Even the Universal Catechism of the Catholic Church, surprisingly enough, calls original sin a “sin” only in an analogous sense (#404), because unlike other (presumably real?) sins it is only contracted and not committed — a concession that would certainly have surprised Augustine, who had a vivid and almost physical/biological understanding of the First Sin.”

So begins Fr. Edward T. Oakes engaging essay on Original Sin. He continues:

“Clearly, Augustine’s authority notwithstanding, the doctrine is in crisis, a crisis different in kind from the challenge that secular modernity hurls at the totality of the Christian message. Secular culture undeniably plays a part here as well, with its doctrine of evolution or its belief in progress (now a rather tattered and shopworn belief, though one that still lurks in certain editorials and books). But much more severe is the outright discomfort believers feel in the doctrine because of what seems to them its internal inconsistency: how can guilt, an ethical and spiritual category, be inheritable, a category drawn from nature? As with the doctrine of predestination, to which it is often married, there seems to be a kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” aura to the theology of original sin: Free will may be free, declares Augustine without apparent embarrassment, only it is not free to do good. “How then do miserable men dare to be proud of free will before, or of their own strength after, they are liberated?” But no sooner does Augustine fear that the concept of original sin might threaten the idea of human responsibility than he quickly turns around and becomes free will’s best advocate, again without a trace of embarrassment: “Let no man dare to deny the freedom of the will as to excuse sin.” In other words, if you do a good deed, that is God’s doing; if you commit a wrong, it is your doing.”

Fr. Oakes mounts a defense of Original Sin based on Thomas Aquinas’ treatments of “disputed questions” that are found in the Summa Theologiae. He begins with an exposition of the position and then moves to a Videtur quod section of the argument where he refutes it. Thomas stated his opponents positions so fairly and convincingly that sometimes he seemed to present a better argument than they did. Only after stating the case would he move to the Sed contra (“on the contrary”) section of the argument

This is confusing for the modern reader, particularly those who have been raised on the duotone for and against cable news version of discussion. In fact the essay provoked numerous responses and some were generated from the lack of familiarity with the disputatio format that Fr. Oakes used.

The core of his argument is here:

John Henry Newman, for one, always insisted that original sin is the only way believers can make sense of the world when they contrast that world to their faith in God. So powerful is his description of the meaning of this doctrine (it is probably the most famous passage in his Apologia pro vita sua) that it bears quoting in full:

If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflection of its Creator. . . . [To consider] the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turns out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, “having no hope and without God in the world”—all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution. What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence.

This remarkably modern passage does not, admittedly, present a full-throated defense of the doctrine of original sin, for it still allows a choice between atheism or a subscription to a belief in the Fall to account for the presence of evil in the world. But that is how the doctrine of original sin has in fact functioned in the history of the Church’s thought: it is a secondary implication arising from a prior belief in God’s goodness and omnipotence. Thus the waning of belief in God was bound to make the doctrine of original sin seem irrational. But that hardly makes it less indispensable, as Steven Duffy argued in an important 1988 article in Theological Studies:

In the twentieth century, when human beings have already killed well over one hundred million of their kind, disenchantment [with an optimistic view of human nature] has set in. Two world wars, the Gulags, the Holocaust, Korea, Vietnam, the nuclear and ecological threats form a somber litany that makes the optimism of the liberals ring hollow and naïve. Despite technological progress, evil, far from vanishing, has only become more powerful and more fiendish. . . . And artists like Conrad, Camus, Beckett, Golding, and Murdoch contend that because of our hearts of darkness there may be countless nice men and women but few if any genuinely good ones. In all these perspectives evil is held to be inherent, somehow structural, ingrained. And its terrible power defies explanation and solution. Paradoxically, the silver wings of science and technology, on which soared the hopes of the industrialized societies, carry the ultimate menace to the human prospect.

Nor is the doctrine, in its essence, tied to a “literal” interpretation of the narrative of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2-3, despite what so many people think. In fact, the ubiquitous evil of the world, when honestly considered, is not a reality that an honest person should see first and primarily as an abstract issue of speculative theodicy (“How can there be evil out there when God is good?”); rather it is one that should first arise from within the human heart itself (“Why do I do the evil I abhor?”).

What is more, the consequences of abandoning the doctrine are nothing short of disastrous. Indeed, perhaps the best way of defending the doctrine is to follow the career of modernity and see the consequences of not holding to the doctrine. I am reminded in this context of a shrewd observation by Anatole France to the effect that never have so many been murdered in the name of a doctrine as in the name of the principle that human beings are naturally good. When one glances over the catalogue of evils that have so pockmarked this century, it is extraordinary how many have come from doctrines founded on the notion of the perfectibility of man. As Niebuhr puts it so well:

The utopian illusions and sentimental aberrations of modern liberal culture are really all derived from the basic error of negating the fact of original sin. This error . . . continually betrays modern men to equate the goodness of men with the virtue of their various schemes for social justice and international peace. When these schemes fail of realization or are realized only after tragic conflicts, modern men either turn from utopianism to disillusionment and despair, or they seek to place the onus of their failure upon some particular social group, . . . [which is why] both modern liberalism and modern Marxism are always facing the alternatives of moral futility or moral fanaticism. Liberalism in its pure form [that is, pacifism] usually succumbs to the peril of futility. It will not act against evil until it is able to find a vantage point of guiltlessness from which to operate. This means that it cannot act at all. Sometimes it imagines that this inaction is the guiltlessness for which it has been seeking. A minority of liberals and most of the Marxists solve the problem by assuming that they have found a position of guiltlessness in action. Thereby they are betrayed into the error of fanaticism.

This too, like Cardinal Newman’s defense of the doctrine, is not a positive “proof” in the technical sense but merely points to the consequences of abandoning the doctrine. But such a modest opening gambit at least blocks the way to an outright denial of the doctrine. For it is, after all, mostly because of Augustine’s own formulations of a perfect Paradise spoiled by a nearly unmotivated sin that make Christians feel stranded in their sense of the doctrine, especially in the light of evolution. On its own terms, the doctrine stands as a cipher pointing to what everyone senses in his or her own heart: that sin after Adam always takes the form of acquiescence and not of origination. We are born, that is, into a world where rebellion against God has already taken place, and the drift of it sweeps us along.

Nor, properly understood, is Augustine’s rosy scenario of Paradise (which John Milton used so effectively in Paradise Lost) all that absurd: the Catechism speaks of the “figurative language” of Genesis 3 (#390), and the same must therefore apply, a fortiori, to Augustine’s portrait of Adam and Eve before the Fall. The reason we are drawn, despite the theory of evolution, to Augustine’s and Milton’s portrait of Paradise before the Fall is the memory of that original justice we once had with God but lost through sin, as Pascal explains so well:

The greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is called nature we call wretchedness in man; by which we recognize that, his nature now being like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his. For who is unhappy at not being a king except a deposed king? Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no one ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes; but anyone would be inconsolable at having none.

In other words, when Augustine and Milton paint their version of “paradise lost” with the genius of their theological imagination, they are putting into figurative language this elementary insight of Pascal’s, one that every human being can recognize. The Genesis story of the Fall even retains its validity when we admit into our purview the folkloric motif of the serpent. As Paul Ricoeur notes in his book The Symbolism of Evil, which along with Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man is perhaps the best book on this topic written in the twentieth century, the figure of the serpent symbolizes a seldom-stressed aspect of the doctrine of the Fall: that rebellion against God also pre-existed the human species: “It is noteworthy that the Adamic myth does not succeed,” says Ricoeur, “in concentrating and absorbing the origin of evil in the figure of a primordial man alone; it speaks also of the adversary, the Serpent, later [understood as] the devil.” In a way, the term “original sin,” at least when taken, as it usually is, to refer to what happened to humanity in Adam and Eve, is a misnomer, for it is crucial to the narrative that they were tempted, and indeed by an outside force or reality. Niebuhr also emphasizes this point:

The importance of biblical satanology lies in the two facts that: (1) the devil is not thought of as having been created evil. Rather his evil arises from his effort to transgress the bounds set for his life, an effort which places him in rebellion against God. (2) The devil fell before man fell, which is to say that man’s rebellion against God is not an act of sheer perversity, nor does it follow inevitably from the situation in which he stands.

The term “original” sin still retains its validity, though, even when applied to Adam and Eve, for the narrative definitely holds that, in St. Paul’s terms, sin entered the world through the sin of our first parents and henceforth takes on the specifically human form of “giving in,” of yielding to a force already heavily at work in the world of creation. This is why for the saints an asceticism of agere contra, literally “striving against,” was so crucial. For without a conscious effort to “stem the tide” of sin, acquiescence will sweep us along in its path.

…..

There is no doubt that original sin is a hard doctrine. For if we are infected with an original corruption to the very core of our natures, then there is a great deal of evil that cannot be uprooted—not an easy doctrine to accept in our activist times. Without the aid of God, unearned and unmerited, so this doctrine says, our misery is incurable.

No wonder, too, that Christians are more and more opting for a theology of universal reconciliation, hoping for an empty hell, a theological opinion most vigorously defended recently by the late Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. And while he is certainly right that there are certain biblical warrants for this hope, I also feel that the attraction that many Christians increasingly feel to that doctrine can be worrisome. In this accommodating climate perhaps the Church would do well to heed the admonition of Kolakowski:

It is hardly surprising that the optimistic philosophy of universal reconciliation should tempt contemporary Christianity so strongly. After the many failures it suffered through its inability to cope with a secular civilization and its mistrust of intellectual and social changes beyond its control, after its spurious success in overcoming the Modernist crisis at the beginning of this century, a Great Fear seems to have pervaded the Christian world—the fear of being trapped in an alien enclave within a basically un-Christian society. This Great Fear of being out-distanced and isolated now impels Christian thinking towards the idea that the most important task of Christianity is not only to be “within the world,” not only to participate in the efforts of secular culture, not only to modify the language of its teachings so that they are intelligible to all men, but to sanctify in advance almost any movement that arises spontaneously from natural human impulses. Universal suspicion seems to have been supplanted by universal approval; the dread of a forced retreat to the Christian culture of the Syllabus of Errors . . . appears to be stronger than that of losing one’s identity.

It is my deep conviction that any mitigation of the doctrine of original sin will prove disastrous for the health of the Church in the future, and for just the reasons that Kolakowski adduces. If the experience of human history from Rousseau to Stalin means anything, it must be that we are stuck, like it or not, with the doctrine—nay, the reality—of original sin. But as St. Paul knew, this need not be a morbid doctrine. For our diagnosis has come with a cure. Even Augustine’s formulation is perfectly understandable to people today, for he, perhaps even more than St. Paul, got to the heart of the issue when he noted that although (by virtue of our nature as human beings) we are free to do what we like, we are not free (by virtue of original sin) to like what we ought to like. And this insight is the beginning of the journey toward that holiness which God has destined for His Church. For as the Rev. N. P. Williams so wonderfully notes, “The ordinary man may feel ashamed of doing wrong: but the saint, endowed with a superior refinement of moral sensibility, and keener powers of introspection, is ashamed of being the kind of man who is liable to do wrong.”

….

My only argument here, against the whole plausible array of arguments against the doctrine, is that, despite its obvious paradoxicality, it proves to be more illuminating of the human condition than its competitors. As Pascal—who can set forth in two lines what it takes other theologians two books to show—says with his usual precision: “Doubtless there is nothing more shocking to our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has rendered guilty those who, being so removed from its source, seem incapable of participating in it. Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine, and yet without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves.”

You will find the complete article here.

Posted in Understanding Sin | Tagged Augustine, Fr. Edward T. Oakes, Original Sin | 2 Comments »

Learning from Sartre

August 4, 2009

Jean Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre is not, to put it mildly, very high on the reading list of those seeking to grow in Christian piety. Indeed, most would express mild shock at the suggestion that his writings could ever make such a list. His atheism would unsettle the tremulous soul, his contradictions would both confuse and infuriate the logical, and his unrestrained verbosity would bore everybody. Yet, while it is true that the greater part of his work is a terrible wasteland, curiously enough, there is a particular element in his thought that is valuable to believers-and in an area where help is greatly needed. This need is one that often goes unperceived by Christian writers, who, ironically, have let it fall to an unwitting atheist to address in depth. Allow me to explain.

Anyone who has ever seriously committed himself to following Christ and conforming to His character quickly discovers how difficult it is to do. There are hindrances everywhere, but the greatest of these is the sin within the disciple himself. Indeed, the motivation for following Christ in the first place is to be rid, eventually, of the sin that destroys life and offends God. Hence we are exhorted to turn from our sin, which we do by ceasing from various activities that we know to be sinful and by undertaking others that we know to be good. So far so good, but there remains a nagging uneasiness. Our behavior may be better, but how much real growth in holiness has taken place? The feeling that we have only scratched the surface of this problem creates a deep desire to get to the bottom of our sin, to start attacking it at its very core. But how? What exactly is the very core of sin? If we knew this, we would certainly be better equipped for the attack.

Christian theologians have often addressed this question. The most notable example is Augustine’s description of his stealing pears in his youth, a passage that has long been widely read in the Western world. Augustine was struck that it was the very forbiddenness of the act that caused him to take such delight in it; the pears themselves were no attraction at all. His analysis is a chilling anticipation of Sartre:

So all men who put themselves far from [God] and set themselves up against [Him], are in fact attempting awkwardly to be like [Him]. And even in this imitating of [Him] they declare [Him] to be the creator of everything in existence and that consequently there can be no place in which one can in any way withdraw oneself from [Him]. . . . And was I thus, though a prisoner, making a show of a kind of truncated liberty, doing unpunished what I was not allowed to do and so producing a darkened image of omnipotence?

Augustine realized that the essence of sin is to place oneself in God’s rightful place, to attempt to be like Him in ways impossible for one of His creatures. Usually, such attempts involve a denial of God’s authority to command His creatures and to set limits on their behavior. Sometimes, all creaturely limitations are thrown off. Sartre, as we shall see, took the latter approach.

If the true nature of sin has been identified for so long, it might be asked, what can an atheist like Sartre possibly contribute to our understanding of it? His “contribution” consists in turning the very essence of sin into the foundation of a philosophical system. He concedes as much when he tells us that “Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position.” Or again, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.” As he develops his thought, we begin to see how sin has infected us in ways we are not even conscious of. This is handy information for anyone whose highest desire is to turn away from sin, and it keeps one focused on what sin really is. Sartre is, of course, perfectly oblivious to this assistance he is providing for the Christian church.

The cornerstone of his philosophy is the sovereignty of human freedom. He is quite frank about what he means by freedom. For Sartre, freedom is nothing less than the power to define one’s own being, to determine what one is. Anything outside oneself that exerts any influence over one’s being is by definition an obstacle to freedom. He explains: “It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are. Furthermore this absolute responsibility is not resignation: it is simply the logical requirement of the consequences of our freedom.”

This leads Sartre to distinguish between being-in-itself, which lacks freedom and cannot choose what it will be, and being-for-itself, which is continuously determining itself and hence has no fixed essence of its own. Man, says Sartre, is the latter: “There is no human nature, since there is no God to have a conception of it.” This means that Man is in a constant process of becoming what he now is not. Since Sartre cannot say that Man ever is anything at any particular time, he equates Man’s being-for-itself with nothingness. It is amusing to note that those who begin by assuming the sovereignty of human freedom must go on to conclude that they are as nothing. But it is more important to note that Sartre’s assumption is arbitrary. It is the starting point for his speculations, for which no defense is ever given.

The obvious objection at this point is that if Man always possesses such absolute existential freedom there should be no need to speak of obstacles to freedom. For, on the one hand, Sartre tells us “Man is condemned to be free,” which implies that it is not possible to lose our freedom. Yet on the other hand he is forever lamenting Man’s inability to overcome the things that deny him his freedom, such as his past, his surroundings, other people (more on this later), and especially death. This is precisely why Sartre uses the word “condemned.” He is really saying that we must forever struggle to retain a freedom that we can never lose.

But no one should expect consistency to arise from atheism. What is remarkable is the unrestrained usurpation of divine attributes that constitutes Sartre’s view of human freedom. S. U. Zuidema summarizes Sartre’s position:

In fact this amounts to the self’s “dis- realization” of its own contingency, and the incorporation of “reality” into the realm of the sovereign self; . . . to the actualization and realization of man’s lordship and form-creating power over reality; to the cultural duty of man, in which he puts reality at his own service, takes possession of reality, incorporates it, governs it, rules it, makes himself its undisputed master.

This is pure sin, if these two words may be put together without contradiction or blasphemy. Most people who hold a similar position look for a way to talk around it to make it appear less rebellious. But Sartre doesn’t mind coming right out and telling us that he wants to rule the world: “The best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God. . . . [M]an fundamentally is the desire to be God.” This is rather refreshing, in a convoluted way. It is a perfect articulation of Augustine’s “darkened image of omnipotence.” We don’t have to guess what he’s up to. But why, one might ask, shouldn’t we at this point just lay Sartre aside and pick up the Sunday comics? The answer is, because he goes on to analyze how the desire for omnipotence is manifested in life, and his analysis is important for anyone willing to acknowledge that this desire to be God still dwells within. It serves as a catalog of the symptoms one may expect to find whenever this disease breaks out.

Sartre also wrote of a third category of being, the being-for-other. This may seem at first glance to be an improvement over the other two, since it seems to say that Man has some purpose outside himself. But in Sartre’s world, being-for-other is a catastrophe. Sartre, remember, thinks he is omnipotent. The last thing such a person wants to be confronted with is something he has no control over, i.e., incontrovertible evidence of his own non-omnipotence.

Sartre is never directly confronted with God, so he gets away with denying Him (for a while), but other people are all around him, and each one possesses his or her own sovereign freedom in competition with Sartre’s. Intolerable! He becomes aware of other people when they look at him (though it is difficult to believe he is unaware of them otherwise). In any case, it is the glance of the other that so disturbs the delusion of omnipotence. Sartre is for himself pure subject; but the glance turns him into the object of another’s subjectivity, and so robs him of his delusion. He now exists for another, and sovereignly free beings just cannot live this way. Sartre cries out in his distress:

With the Other’s look the “situation” escapes me. To use an everyday expression which better expresses our thought, I am no longer master of my situation. . . . The appearance of the Other, on the contrary, causes the appearance in the situation of an aspect which I did not wish, of which I am not master, and which on principle escapes me since it is for the other.

What can be done about this? Stare back, of course, until one party wins the battle and becomes pure subject, while the loser becomes pure object. In Sartre’s own words, “the objectivation of the Other . . . is a defense on the part of my being which, precisely by conferring on the other a being for-me, frees me from my being-for the Other.” Though Sartre describes this action as a defense, it is really more of a counteroffensive. Zuidema gives another astute summary:

This all means, then, that the “world,” including the world within myself, is a battlefield, on which the continual struggle between myself and everyone else is fought out. It is a struggle for unending mastery over this world.

This is the sort of thinking that prompted Sartre’s famous quip, in his play No Exit, that “hell is other people.”

The silliness of this analysis is easy to expose and ridicule, but it must be remembered that this constant struggle actually goes on, all over the world, all the time (not in the form of a staring game, of course, but as the clash of conflicting desires). It is the inevitable result of sin, and sin is everywhere. It even serves as its own provisional judgment, alerting us all to the folly of our desire for control. Sartre was saying more than he knew when he said we are condemned to freedom. If we rightly recognize how silly Sartre’s analysis is, we also ought to recognize how accurately it identifies the root of all our own foolish and destructive behavior.

Sartre is also vaguely aware of the connection his philosophy has with sin, though his atheism precludes his holding any real concept of sin. He speaks of the feeling of shame as the immediate consequence of the other’s glance. He writes, “Shame . . . is the recognition of the fact that I am indeed that object which the Other is looking at and judging. I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a given object.” Now shame figures prominently in Scripture as the immediate consequence of sin (Genesis 2:25, 3:7). The two are indeed connected, but Sartre cannot make the connection between his own view of others and sin. Marjorie Grene explains his view:

It is the transformation of myself from free agent shaping my own world to body seen by another that is the source of shame. Hence Sartre’s explanation . . . of original sin: it is the revelation of my body as a mere body that makes me ashamed; and that shame is at the root of the sense of sin.

Indeed, the revelation of the body is nakedness, and Scripture agrees that consciousness of nakedness was the original source of shame. If we didn’t know better, we might say Sartre is trying to point us to the Bible, and he is not unaware of this odd agreement himself, for he writes:

Modesty and in particular the fear of being surprised in a state of nakedness are only a symbolic specification of original shame; the body symbolizes here our defenseless state as objects. To put on clothes is to hide one’s object-state; it is to claim the right of seeing without being seen; that is, to be pure subject. This is why the biblical symbol of the fall after the original sin is the fact that Adam and Eve “know that they are naked.” The reaction to shame will consist exactly in apprehending as an object the one who apprehended my own object state.

But Sartre is merely trying to account for the feeling of shame after having assumed that there is no real sin on which it might have been based. This is why he speaks only of a “sense” of sin. He seeks a cause elsewhere, and he thinks he has found it in the assault on his freedom. As Grene explains, “the existence of an onlooker implies shame. Fear and shame are, for [Sartre], the two proper and immediate reactions to the intrusion of another person into my world.”

But rather than explaining shame, Sartre has explained it away. What is lacking in his argument is an adequate accounting for the sense of culpability that is essential to shame. A mere intrusion would only produce annoyance and a sense of mission: we must eliminate the intruder. When we are intruded upon, we do not feel ourselves to be culpable. But shame is not shame without just such a sense of culpability.

Sartre tries to deflect this objection by assuming that we do not feel shame until we are observed. He accepts it as a universal that “anyone may recognize . . . that immediate and burning presence of the Other’s look which has so often filled him with shame.” The implication is that solitary people know no shame. Wilfrid Desan explains: “The meaning of culpability arises through the Other: would culpability ever make sense without the existence of the Other? Is it not before the Other that I feel my abjectness, my nakedness?” The idea of culpability presupposes the existence of an “other” (i.e., a watcher), hence the “other,” according to Sartre, must be the cause of the shame. Now, it may be conceded that an absolutely solitary person cannot know shame. If I were the only person in the entire universe (as Sartre would like to be), it would be impossible for shame ever to arise in me. This proves that an observer is necessary for shame. But not that an observer is sufficient for shame. It is possible to be observed shamelessly. The glance of the Other will not generate shame unless it falls upon some sin that exists objectively within the shamed one. This is a perfect example of the false cause fallacy.

Furthermore, Sartre’s “observation” that shame implies an observer may be used against him. The only thing we must assume is that human beings can feel shame even when alone. Most people have had this experience, and would therefore not hesitate to grant our assumption. But who is the observer in such cases? He can only be the God Sartre denies. Yet his denial is also a concession: “God,” he says, “is only the concept of the Other pushed to the limit.” If Sartre were to admit that he even once experienced solitary shame, then his own philosophy would require him to become a theist. This might even constitute a new “proof” for the existence of God: the “proof from solitary shame,” perhaps? And we would owe it all to Jean-Paul Sartre.

Mostly, however, we owe Sartre for exposing the dreadfully absurd consequences of denying God by setting ourselves in His place. Sartre ends with an echo of the life lived apart from God as described in the book of Ecclesiastes. Desan summarizes:

The For-itself is a failure in its conquest of the world: it will never be what it wants to be, the For- itself-in-itself: i.e., God. “Human being is useless passion . . . and to intoxicate yourself alone in a bar or to conduct the nations is equally vain.”

The latter paraphrase is Sartre’s own conclusion to his Being and Nothingness, where most of the foregoing rebellion is laid out. This world of vanity and endless conflict that results from Sartre’s failed quest for sovereign freedom, however, is necessary only for those who insist upon embarking on it. Sad to say, this includes all of us. We can see reflections of Sartre’s quest in our own conflicts. They are all due to our own, or someone else’s, desire to rule the world.

Yet understanding this gets us below the surface of our sinful behavior to that sinful core which so often haunts and disturbs us. The deepest repentance must include the acknowledgment of creaturely limitations and the acceptance of divinely appointed limits. Sartre has done us the favor of showing us how our refusal to accept our limits is the root of our tendency to treat others as objects and to hate others for the ways in which they limit us.

In our relations with others, a simple acknowledgment that the “other” has been created as a subject along with us will prevent us from seeking to squash his subjectivity beneath our own. And neither should the thought of being an object cause such distress. It simply goes along with creatureliness. Others will necessarily incorporate us into their view of the world, but it is understood that, as creatures themselves, their view will be incomplete. It is only God’s view that need concern us, and for those who know that His glance comes with forgiveness and healing, all of Sartre’s terrors are reduced to nonsense.

Augustine concluded his analysis of his own depravity with the following expression of revulsion. It should be read with Sartre’s futile quest in mind:

Who can disentangle this most twisted and most inextricable knottiness? It is revolting: I hate to think of it; I hate to look at it. . . . I slipped from you and went astray, my God, in my youth, wandering too far from my upholder and my stay, and I became to myself a wasteland.

Ironically, those who, unlike Sartre, share Augustine’s revulsion, may look to Sartre for unwitting help in untying the knot.

John Mullen, the author, is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida.

Posted in Understanding Sin | Tagged Existentialism, human freedom, Jean-Paul Sartre, S. U. Zuidema, St. Augustine, the essence of sin | 1 Comment »

Annals of Evangelization: Fear of Redemption

June 30, 2009

At An Impasse

When I conjure in my mind the objections that people I know make to Christianity, I am reminded of my friend on the couch, enervated by life’s manifold demands. Most of these people are not confident rationalists dismissing the supernatural or wanton hedonists rejecting moral constraint; they are not dogmatic about the universe being purely material, and most want to live according to some moral code. Their real objections have to do with stretching and the fear of breaking. Faced with the Sermon on the Mount, they collapse on the couch, as it were, and protest that the degree of demand is just too much. Christianity promises new life in Christ, and our reaction is to shrink from the prospect. We think of our present lives, and we cannot imagine enduring the long commute. We hear St. Paul’s appeal — “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” — and we worry that we lack the inner resources to stretch so far. We fear breaking across the difference.

It is important to understand this fear, for it is at the core of a great deal of contemporary American culture. The threatening force of moral demand haunts the modern and postmodern soul. When we talk about respecting the unique individuality of each and every person, we are signaling a desire to permit and encourage self-possession. Instead of forcing individuals to stretch toward generic norms and expectations, we want to create a social environment in which moral ambition can be tailor-made. None will break across alien demands. We can endure if we carefully adjust moral demands to our unique abilities and special circumstances.

Christianity teaches otherwise. In The Divine Comedy, Dante describes the exit from the seventh and final ledge of purgatory as a wall of fire. In the poem, Virgil passes through, but Dante hesitates, overcome with fear. The voice of Virgil reassures him. “My son, there may be torment, but not death.” According to the promise of the Gospels, death has been swallowed up by life. What is alien can be inhabited. We can make the long commute from sinner to saint. Such is the reassurance that Dante portrays in Virgil’s encouraging words. That confidence turns on the way in which Christianity understands atonement.

We tend to think that the modern project is dominated by ambition. If we will but break the shackles of dogma, we are told, then the true potential of the human mind will burst forth. Progress, the great watchword of modernity, is the promised fruit of freedom. Ambition is certainly present, but greatly influential modern figures such as Rousseau and Emerson were also concerned about the spiritual exhaustion that comes from fruitless efforts to meet unrealistic and inhumane demands. They focused their criticisms of traditional morality upon the socially constructed project of inducing men and women into adopting social roles unconnected to their true natures. Both sought to give men and women breathing room to be themselves.

Rousseau’s First and SecondDiscourses emphasize the ways in which prevailing social mores alienate human beings and corrupt the intrinsic dignity of each person. Our healthy instinct of self-regard, our basic loyalty to our own identities as persons, which Rousseau calls amour de soi, is transmuted into a competitive comparison of ourselves with others, amour-propre. As a result of this shift, we bend and distort ourselves so that we can fit into prevailing social categories and succeed according to dominant social norms. We become calculating social animals rather than spontaneous, free human beings. We disperse ourselves into our many social roles, and as a consequence, we are not linked to our true selves. Not surprisingly, then, Rousseau wishes us to throw off the shackles of social expectation and live according to the inner truth of our own natures. As the freethinking Savoyard Vicar proclaims in Émile, “I long for the moment when, delivered from the chains of the body, I will be myself without contradiction, without division, and I will only have need of myself to be happy.” Fulfillment comes when everything that defines our lives grows out of our individuality.

Emerson, a century later, does not follow Rousseau’s specific theories of the origins of social alienation, but he joins in Rousseau’s broad condemnation of the dehumanizing effects of social conformity. The crucial similarity between the two is a common judgment that the disciplinary structures of social life force changes upon the individual that create a discontinuity between one’s true self and one’s social self. When Emerson says, “Imitation is suicide,” he is drawing attention to the spiritual death that stems from self-alienation. When we stretch ourselves to meet the standards and goals set by others, we risk waking up one morning drowning in the responsibilities of marriage, children, job, and mortgage, feeling as though we have lost touch with all the passions and desires that once animated and moved us.

An empty life is the antithesis of self-possession, and it is against the dispersing, emptying force of duty and responsibility that Emerson preaches his American version of the faith of the Savoyard Vicar: “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and evil are but names readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.” The highest good is self-affirmation, and thus Emerson concludes, “If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” Self-loyalty is the antidote to alienation. To thine own self be true is the first commandment.

Ironically, Rousseau’s and Emerson’s diagnosis of self-loss in social conformity has become conformist wisdom in our time. “Question Authority” is the bumper-sticker philosophy of millions, and it flows directly from the worry that collective demand will corrupt individual integrity. The therapeutic atmosphere of contemporary culture is likewise saturated with variations on the fundamental Rousseauian and Emersonian strategy of resistance to self-alienation: Be Yourself! Some proponents of traditional morality claim that this modern and postmodern quest for “authenticity” is but a cover for self-indulgence and a justification for immoralities; but this reaction misdiagnoses the deep structure of Rousseauian and Emersonian protests against the shaping demands of morality. For at root, the impetus for rejecting traditional morality is protective, not permissive. The worry concerns atonement, not freedom.

Both Rousseau and Emerson are profoundly pessimistic about any form of personal change that is not internally motivated. They despair of the possibility of linking who we presently are to the persons traditional morality would discipline us to become. They cannot see how a man or woman subjected to the disciplines of commandments can be “at-one” with himself or herself. Both see morally mandated personal development as a form of self-destruction, an immolation of one’s desires and impulses for the sake of something extrinsic to the self. Thus, in order to affirm their loyalty to their own individuality, both Rousseau and Emerson reject all forms of moral discipline that are not tailored to their consciences.

Again, I want to emphasize that the goal is not to clear away moral demands in order to make room for heedless self-indulgence. Neither Rousseau nor Emerson wants us to disperse ourselves in vain projects that yield only momentary satisfaction. They want our unique circumstances, our distinctive needs as individuals, and our intensely personal sensibilities and feelings to guide a life of self-possession, since only in this way can we be both morally ambitious and “at-one” with ourselves.

Christian critics of modernity are quick to point out that it is a Promethean fantasy to imagine that moral ideals can somehow emanate out of this project of self-loyalty. Even critics who have no faith at all have asserted that the idea of moral discipline tailored to individuality is a recipe for, at best, mediocrity. Nietzsche was perhaps the most colorful of the irreligious critics of the modern hopes for an individualistic morality that is applicable to all.

According to Nietzsche, those who appeal to secular substitutes for the moral discipline provided by traditional Christianity are nothing more than “comedians of the Christian-moral ideal.” With delicious invective, Nietzsche describes the legions of modern educators who are forever trying to teach a humanistic ethic as “whited sepulchers who impersonate life.” Equal-opportunity individualism will produce a wishy-washy morality that does not have the courage of saying an unequivocal “yes” to the irreducible potency of the self, the “will-to-power” of the strong. For Nietzsche, the modern ethic of egalitarian authenticity produces small men who lack the courage to reject morality — or to break themselves heroically across ambitious ideals.

Nietzsche’s own proposals for creating ideals are fatally flawed, but I will not argue that here. I’ve enlisted Nietzsche only to show that even an anti-Christian can recognize and expose the incoherence of Rousseau’s and Emerson’s moral vision. But simply to show the failure of modern humanistic ethics is not to make Christian humanism immediately more plausible. In order to do that, I want to show that the underlying concern about self-loyalty that motivated important modern thinkers such as Rousseau and Emerson is, in fact, very much a part of the Christian tradition. Modernity did not discover the threat of alienation. The concern about self-loyalty is present in classical Christian literature as well, and it is a concern that Christianity meets head on.

St. Augustine’s story of his conversion to Christianity, for instance, turns on the same problem of atonement and personal identity that worries Rousseau and Emerson. As a young man, Augustine read Cicero’s Hortensius. “The book changed my feelings,” he writes in his Confessions. “It gave me different values and priorities. . . . Suddenly every vain hope became empty to me, and I longed for the immortality of wisdom.” With newfound zeal, Augustine embarked on a search for the truth.

For Augustine, the search was difficult and involved setbacks, but in the end he came to see the truth of Christianity. Yet this was not enough. For all his intellectual gains, nothing had changed for him as an individual. “I myself was exceedingly astonished,” he reports, “as I anxiously reflected how long a time had elapsed since the nineteenth year of my life, when I began to burn with a zeal for wisdom, planning that when I had found it I would abandon all the empty hopes and lying follies of hollow ambitions. And here I was already thirty, and still mucking about in the same mire in a state of indecision.”

The problem Augustine faced is one of personal identity, not human nature. Augustine was convinced that chastity is virtuous, and that virtue is a fulfillment and not a diminishment of his nature as a rational creature. He had no difficulty imagining a transformed human nature — and yet, he could not change. “Fettered by the flesh’s morbid impulse and lethal sweetness, I dragged my chain, but was afraid to be free of it.” Augustine sought to change, but he could not, for he wished to be loyal to himself. “Now I had discovered the good pearl. To buy it I had to sell all that I had,” but, he reports with dismay, “I hesitated.” Augustine loved his habits, and he could not conceive of living without them, not because he thought them good, but simply because the habits were his.

Augustine’s story of his spiritual journey dramatizes the true nature of our resistance to the Christian view of redemption, a resistance expressed in such influential modern form by Rousseau and Emerson. Like Dante before the wall of fire that forms the exit from purgatory, Augustine hesitated before the disjunctive demand of Christian morality, a demand that is the moral form of the promise of redemptive change. The demand seems to require a death of the self, a renunciation of personal identity. Augustine could not believe that a bush might burn without being consumed.

In his modest divine comedy, The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis portrays this fear of renunciation. The spectral souls who are met by the Solid People at the entrance to heaven can only journey toward God if they will give up their doubts, vices, and shame. In Lewis’ account, few do, and the reason is simple. They cannot imagine being themselves without the very qualities of soul that alienate them from God. As the hissing lizard of lust warns the frightened man in a scene that echoes Augustine’s hesitations, “[Without me] how could you live?” It is difficult to trust the Christian promise that undergoing such change will bring new life and not death — will stretch us but not shatter us.

Christian proclamation should have no interest in allaying the existential anxiety that naturally arises when we wonder whether our individual desires, commitments, habits, and projects can really endure an otherworldly ethic. For the otherworldly character of Christian ethics stems from the fact that sin structures our personalities and gives shape to our habits. Sin is not a peripheral defect; it is not an unfortunate but subsidiary feature of our lives. Sin determines our identities. As Augustine was well aware, overcoming this propensity requires becoming a different person. Redemptive change must break the bonds of self-loyalty if we are to be delivered from the self that is in love with its sin. St. Paul uses the starkest possible language: “We know that our old self was crucified with [Christ] so that the body of sin might be destroyed. . . . Whoever has died is freed from sin” (Romans 6:6-7). Insofar as we are loyal to our sinful selves, we quite rationally fear that our identities as persons will not survive redemptive change.

For the martyrs of the early Church, loyalty to Christ was very much a question of physical life and death. Their deaths stand in visible and evident witness to the disjunctive structure of a Christian ethics of redemption. The Pauline language of death, however, does not denote a physical cessation of life. At issue is who we are, as individuals: our loyalties, our commitments, our hopes and aspirations. The Gospels report Jesus saying again and again, “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” St. Augustine did not face martyrdom, but he felt the horror of loss. It was not as though Augustine was unable to imagine a human being living a celibate life, any more than the rich young man in the Gospels was unable to imagine selling all his possessions. The world has plenty of examples which show that it is possible to be human and celibate or poor. Rather, the problem for Augustine and the rich young man was personal: How can I be celibate, how can I be poor, without dying to my current projects, loyalties, and commitments? And if I do so die, then will I even be myself anymore? Once again, this is a problem of atonement.

How, then, can I endure redemptive change? For Christian faith, the answer rests in the identity of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. He is pro nobis, “for us,” as the incorporative power of redemption. In some classical accounts of atonement, this incorporative power is discussed in terms of an exchange or substitution. Others describe a representative or pedagogical role that Jesus plays. The metrics of analysis can focus variously on debt, penalty, sacrifice, or moral influence. Each account has its advantages and disadvantages, but what unifies atonement theory is a common concern to show that the changes both effected and demanded by the Christian view of redeemed life can be met. A link can be established between old and new, between dying to sin and coming to life, and that link is to be found in Christ.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer provides analysis that highlights this aspect of atonement theory. Describing the logic of redemption, Bonhoeffer observes, “God does not ‘overlook’ sin; that would mean not taking human beings seriously as personal beings in their very culpability.” Whatever God does for human beings in Christ, it must be a “doing” that accounts for the reality of our lives as we actually live them. Bonhoeffer continues with the central affirmation of all atonement theory: “God does take human beings seriously in their culpability, and therefore only punishment and the overcoming of sin can remedy the matter.” This punishment Christ endures in our place.

Readers should not stumble over Bonhoeffer’s use of punishment as the metric to describe the conditions for divine seriousness about the particularity of human life. He might have used satisfaction or sacrifice or pedagogy or some other as-yet-undiscovered concept to describe the bridging function that links the person who has died to his old self with the one who lives as a new person in Christ. The crucial point is that Jesus Christ does what is necessary to establish the link; he effects atonement, and we participate in that atonement.

One of the greatest problems with atonement theory is that the terms are so often abstract. Debts must be paid; satisfaction must be offered; sacrifice must be made. This seems remote from the concern about authenticity that we moderns have learned from the likes of Rousseau and Emerson. In the Letters of St. Paul, from which a great deal of Western Christian atonement theory draws its inspiration, the link to authenticity is more evident, because Paul sees the incorporative power of Jesus Christ as enacted concretely in the lives of believers. “Do you not know,” Paul asks the Christians in Rome, “that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4). At issue is not an abstract reconciliation of cosmic accounts. God is not up in heaven calculating debts and payments. Rather, for Paul, God is doing something here and now, and that “doing” is addressed to concrete individuals. The incorporative power of Jesus Christ, given objective form in the sacrament of baptism and subjective form in faith, carries the believer across the difference between a life dominated by sin and a life that stretches in authenticity toward righteousness.

As a consequence, Paul can use the greatest possible image of disjunction — death — while still affirming a continuity of personal identity. Jesus Christ is the enduring power across this disjunction. He has died and has been raised. The promise of the gospel is that we can participate in his bridging reality. The upshot is atonement. However great the moral demands, we can stretch toward them, even stretch to the point of dying to ourselves, without shattering our lives. To put the matter in scriptural terms more familiar to students of classical theories of atonement: in Christ, we can draw near to the holiness of God without being consumed by the purifying fires of judgment. We can become radically different — even holy — without emptying ourselves of our individuality.

A clear expression of this confidence that radical moral demand is consistent with continuous personal identity may be found in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical on fundamental questions in moral theology, Veritatis Splendor. The dominant theme of the encyclical is the sovereignty of moral truth, not only as universal and unchanging, but also as commanding the loyalty of the whole person. The ideal of moral perfection flows from this sovereignty, and John Paul’s specific reflections on technical questions in Roman Catholic moral theology are detailed defenses of the scope and depth of moral demand against various efforts to narrow and soften ethical obligations. One of the most important discussions concerns the relationship between divine law and human freedom. There, John Paul responds to contemporary worries about self-alienation with this dogmatic claim: “Patterned on God’s freedom, man’s freedom is not negated by his obedience to the divine law; indeed, only through this obedience does it abide in truth and conform to human dignity.” The demands of Christian ethics, even the counsels of perfection (as in that intimidating Sermon on the Mount) that press the follower of Christ toward supernatural ends, are a fulfillment rather than a diminishment of our individuality.

In order to make good on this claim, John Paul must provide some account of atonement. He does not adopt or articulate any particular theory. Instead, he reiterates the basic dynamics of Romans 6. For John Paul, the sovereignty of moral truth “is confirmed in a particularly eloquent way by Christian martyrdom.” Spiritual death to the dominion of worldly powers may well be accompanied by physical death. The earthly kingdom may hang its traitors. Yet the eloquence of the martyrs rests in more than the extremity of their obedience. For John Paul, as for the early Church, the eloquence of martyrdom is evangelical, not Stoic, for the path of suffering and death recapitulates the way of Jesus Christ. The same holds for the less visible suffering of all who feel the painful death of worldly loyalties — hating mother and father, plucking out the eyes of lust, selling possessions dearly loved. The very real personal grief and travail under the disciplines of moral perfection recapitulate the way of the Man of Sorrows. This recapitulation serves as a figural expression of the logic of classical atonement theory. We can endure being stretched across the demands of discipleship because Christ has gone before us to establish the way. He has stretched himself out upon the cross.

At this point the concerns of Rousseau and Emerson return. John Paul’s unembarrassed affirmation of the goal of moral perfection and his embrace of the ideal of martyrdom would seem to vindicate the criticism that Christian faith does violence to the human person — that while Christianity may talk of redemption, it actually nurtures a death wish, a ruthless self-denial that relishes suffering. And certainly it is legitimate to wonder whether the sovereignty of a moral truth that is most visible in martyrdom leaves room for individuality, for the projects and loyalties that populate our lives and shape our identities. Far from making us “at-one” with ourselves in Christ, the perfection of Christian moral demands seems to drive a wedge into our lives and split us in two: the thin sliver of righteousness and obedience over against the vast reality of our unredeemed lives.

Were the Israelites at the base of Mount Sinai right to exclaim in fear, “Do not let God speak to us, or we will die” (Exodus 20:19)? A return to St. Augustine allows us to see how the Christian process of redemptive change can consume profoundly intimate loyalties and habits in the fires of self-discipline, while still affirming our authentic personal continuity. On this point, the crucial aspect of his Confessions is not any particular theological argument Augustine makes. Instead, what stands out is the successful literary combination of disjunction with continuity. Augustine both pushes away his past in repudiation and draws it near in memory.

The key to Augustine’s success is the repentant structure of the first eight books of the Confessions. This structure allows him to drive a wedge between his present identity and his past loyalties. He sought pleasure, self-command, fame, knowledge, and even wisdom. All of this was vain and nugatory. In his self-description, however, Augustine does not push away his past as we so often do in our own self-assessments. He does not say of his youthful lusts that they were learning experiences. He does not seek to submerge his particularity as a person into some general pattern of maturation, as when we say, “It was an adolescent stage.” He does not make himself anonymous by excusing his errors and sins as functions of inauspicious circumstances or bad social influences. Rather, he draws his youthful lusts and his adult vainglory as closely as possible to his identity. Augustine claims every episode, every byway and dead-end of his seeking, as both wrong and his own. One cannot repent of what one refuses to own.

To both renounce and own the main features of one’s life, as does Augustine in the voice of repentance, creates a literary effect that we might rightly call atonement. It is possible because, at every turn, Augustine’s penitent voice places the reality of his life into the hands of God. He concludes the extended address to God that opens the Confessions with these words: “Dust and ashes though I am, let me appeal to your pity, since it is to you in mercy that I speak, not to a man, who would simply laugh at me. Perhaps you, too, may laugh at me, but you will relent and have pity on me.” God’s identity as the one who comes as the power of redemption allows Augustine to own his past as indeed his own, while, at the very same time, he can disown it as governed by sin. God atones for those whose lives are broken, as was Augustine’s, across the difference between love of self and desire for the divine.

Donald MacKinnon was one of the more idiosyncratic theologians of the twentieth century, and his capacity to think against the grain of conventional theological fashions led him to recognize that we often puzzle out our deepest questions in disguised or muddled forms. Writing in the 1960s, when the key questions of morality and religion were framed in epistemological terms, he offered these cautionary words of dissent: “The philosopher of religion easily tends to think that the greatest obstacles today in the way of religious belief are to be found in the unintelligibility and inadmissibility of such fundamental concepts as that of a creator God, an immaterial soul, etc. But it may be that as a matter of empirical fact, the most deep-seated unwillingness to take seriously the claims of the Christian religion has its roots in a sharp criticism of Christian ethics, of the Christian image of the good life.”

I have little doubt that MacKinnon was correct. However little Rudolf Bultmann’s “modern man” was capable of believing in the “mythological worldview” of premodern culture, I am certain that the postmodern men and women of today are capable of believing almost anything. Ours is a skeptical age, and the fruit of skepticism is most often credulity. We know that we cannot know, so we settle for what is convenient or alluring or exciting or familiar. Why stretch myself when there is nothing out there to stretch toward, and when I’m okay as I am, more or less? The revulsion that we postmodern men and women feel toward Christian ethics stems in large part from the way in which redemptive hope endorses a disjunctive, otherworldly ethic, one that seeks a new identity in Christ.

You can attempt to show the theological cogency of this ethical demand, a cogency that rests in the clarity of the Christian identification of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, who, for us and for our salvation, became incarnate, was crucified, died, and was raised by the Father. You can show how the premise that Christ is the Son of God who is “for us” allows for an analysis of atonement that makes Christian moral ambition an authentic possibility and a possibility of authenticity. You can expound the repentant logic of Augustine’s Confessions to illustrate the way that Christianity, unlike the dominant modern ways of talking about moral change, encourages a life of morally ambitious self-renunciation and honest self-loyalty. But if the postmodern world falls back into modern doubt and says, “But how can you prove that Jesus really is the incarnate Son of God who died for us and for our salvation?” — then you have little recourse other than proclamation. As Karl Barth knew and never tired of insisting, the grace of God is the answer to every ethical question. Only the power of the great divine fact, the God who is who He is, can overcome our fear of moral change.

The evangelical imperative in our time is thus clear. Be patient with Rousseauians and Emersonians whose anxious desire for self-possession causes them to shrink from the sovereign ambitions of the Christian moral life. Their fear of redemptive change is an honorable fear, one that St. Augustine himself named as his own strongest resistance to God. But don’t confuse patience with concession. Tell them patiently that Christ came to redeem us and that there is no danger that the disciplines of the Christian life will stretch us beyond the breaking point — not even those of us who already feel “maxed out.” Christ, crucified and raised, promises otherwise.

R. R. Reno is an associate professor of theology at Creighton University. In addition to In the Ruins of the Church, he is also author of Redemptive Change: Atonement and the Christian Cure of the Soul (Trinity Press International, 2002). His shorter works have been published in First Things and Pro Ecclesi

Posted in Understanding Sin | Tagged Confessions, Donald MacKinnon, Emerson, Pope John Paul II, Question Authority, Rousseau, St. Augustine, The Divine Comedy, To thine own self be true, Veritatis Splendor | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Understanding Sin’ Category

The Fall – R.R. Reno

Sin and Forgiveness — Ronald Knox

St. Thomas On The Goal Of The Incarnation: Satisfaction — Fr. Brian Davies O.P.

The Struggle Against Sin – Ralph Martin

Fr. Luc Buyens of the Netherlands

All Have Sinned: The Mystery of Impiety by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa

Two Reflections on Sin

Original Sin: A Disputation – by Fr. Edward T. Oakes

Learning from Sartre

Annals of Evangelization: Fear of Redemption

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