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“Born to Sin,” NOT “Born for Sin”
“Born to sin” is a phrase—perhaps the wrong phrase—that is meant to be arresting, and perhaps subversive of the traditional (and now vanishing) view of sin as stated by saints John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and Monsignor Josemaría Escrivá (1902-1975):
The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fall, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in the most extreme agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse.
John Henry Newman
If you were to obey the impulse of your heart and the dictates of reason, you would always lie flat on the ground, prostrate, a vile worm, ugly and miserable in the sight of God who puts up with so much from you!
Monsignor Escrivá
Newman emphasizes the terribleness of sin and Monsignor Escrivá emphasizes the guilt and shame caused by the awareness of sin. I’m pretty sure that if any priest, bishop or pope were to speak about sin in that tone today, almost everyone, inside the Church or out, would roll their eyes—if not worse. Sin is indeed terrible if it separates the sinner permanently from God, the source of all good. But the average person sins every day of the week, and to leave him or her with a sense that every sin they commit should be an overwhelming source of horror, guilt or shame doesn’t seem to me to accord with the general attitude towards sin found in the Gospels.
Moreover it seems to me that the traditional attitude to sin complemented the traditional attitude to hell: sin was such a terrible offence against God that it deserved an equally terrible punishment. The following two quotes may serve to illustrate:
[This passage from Fr. P. J. Kelly’s 1968 book (a reprint?), So High the Price, presents the traditional argument for justifying the horrific torments of hell as the appropriate punishment for sin. Whether the reasoning makes you laugh or shudder, it is interesting to note the explicit appeal to logic—of a sort.]
‘The optimists object: “Can it be possible that God punishes a momentary sinful pleasure with an eternity of pain?” It is not only possible, but it is right and just. The offence given by the sinner to God when he transgresses His holy laws involves infinite malice, since it is an offence to infinite Majesty. Therefore, it deserves an infinite punishment. But since man, being finite, is incapable of undergoing punishment that is infinite in intensity, God punishes him with a chastisement infinite in duration. In acting thus, God acts justly.’
[The following entry from Malcolm Muggeridge’s diary is dated January 4, 1937.]
‘We talked about the fear of Hell, and Hugh Kingsmill read out a remarkable essay by a Roman Catholic in the late nineteenth century arguing that Hell had been made fearful to differentiate it from Heaven, but that as compared with life on earth it was velvet. The reconciliation of the idea of a loving God with the idea of eternal torment was one of the most remarkable feats the human mind had ever performed. Hell up to Calvin was mitigated by purgatory and indulgences. After Calvin, it really was presented as the only alternative to salvation, and began to haunt human beings, for instance Bunyan, who was almost driven mad by the fear of Hell buzzing in his ears. Becoming unhappy was a symptom of virtue. Since virtue was unhappy there had to be terrific compensation for those who practised it. The unhappily virtuous would only be satisfied by a guarantee that the happily sinful were really [in] for it.’
With the exception of Mary, it seems to me that human beings were “born to sin,” in the sense that it is inevitable (and in that sense normal) for them to sin throughout their earthly lives; but not in the sense that they were “born for sin” or that there is nothing wrong with sinning. According to Catholic doctrine, Mary was born without original sin in preparation for being the mother of a sinless son. It was God’s gift to her. But try to imagine how bland and uneventful human life might be if God had given the gift of sinlessness to everyone. Try to visualize a world in which the seven deadly sins and their offshoots were nowhere to be seen: no pride, no avarice, no anger, no lust, no envy, gluttony or sloth. In other words, no brutal dictatorships, no oppression and exploitation, no obscene inequality, no shootings and stabbings, no adultery, no wars, no fat lazy slobs or self-satisfied snobs looking down on them—nothing but heroic virtue on every side. The absence of adultery alone would deprive us of many of the classics: Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, A Handful of Dust, not to mention about half of the operas, soap-operas, films and TV series in which adultery is either a primary or a secondary theme.
If we possessed the secret of eternal joy, the seven deadly sins wouldn’t interest us. In heaven, therefore, we won’t miss hearing about them or reading about them, won’t miss the satisfaction of righteous indignation towards those who commit them, won’t miss the pleasures of committing them from time to time ourselves. As things stand here down below however, if we were surrounded by virtue it’s not inconceivable that boredom might be an even greater problem than it is already. Virtuous people, aside perhaps from saints, don’t generally grab our attention and fascinate us as much as sinners, especially notorious sinners. God in His wisdom surely knows this, and in conjunction with other interlocking parts of the Divine Plan He perhaps ordained that, as William Hazlitt observed, “There must be a spice of mischief and wilfulness thrown into the cup of our [earthly] existence to give it its sharp taste and sparkling colour.”
To take a more analytical approach, it seems to me that sin is a necessary but not sufficient condition for spiritual growth. Animals, who have no sense of sin, can’t grow spiritually. It is believed that the good angels, who are sinless, cannot grow spiritually either. But human beings, who are sinners by nature, can grow spiritually by sinning less and less as they make their way through life, facing its spiritual challenges and learning from their moral mistakes. It would seem to follow, therefore, that sin is both opposed to the Divine will and, paradoxically, also part of it. For though an all-powerful God could have prevented sin, Jesus said “It is impossible that hurt should never be done to men’s consciences; but woe betide the man who is the cause of it.”
Quotes that have influenced me on this subject
Every heresy is a truth taught out of proportion.
G. K. Chesterton
To escape heresy we must accept paradox. Thinking with integrity is paradoxical thinking.
M. Scott Peck
So it is, I tell you, in heaven; there will be more rejoicing over one sinner who repents, than over ninety-nine souls that are justified, and have no need of repentance.
Luke 15:6-7
COMMENTARY: There can’t be repentance without sin. Thus we have the paradox of good coming out of evil. The evil of sin is a necessary prerequisite for the joy that is occasioned by repentance.
Then Peter came to him and asked, Lord, how often must I see my brother do me wrong, and still forgive him; as much as seven times? Jesus said to him, I tell you to forgive, not seven wrongs, but seventy times seven.
Matt 18: 21-22
COMMENTARY: In His answer to Peter I think that Jesus makes it very clear that we should expect sin to be an extremely common occurrence; also, perhaps, that we shouldn’t be scandalized by it.
Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mould and chisel and complete character.
Goethe
I defy anyone to imagine an environment more exquisitely designed to provide us with opportunities for spiritual growth than this life of ours.
M. Scott Peck
The central defect of evil is not sin but the refusal to acknowledge sin.
M. Scott Peck
It is not sin per se that characterizes those who are evil, rather it is the subtlety and persistence and consistency of their sin.
M. Scott Peck
Evil deeds do not an evil person make. Otherwise we should all be evil, because we all do evil things.
M. Scott Peck
It is common knowledge that the good and the wicked do not constitute two distinct human categories. Rather, good and evil are inextricably commingled in our hearts.
Fr. Ignace Lepp (priest psychologist)
The perfection of man consists not in being perfect but in trying to be; and that trying implies, of course, continual failures.
Michael Mason
In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth.
Yoshida Kenko
We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones.
Lewis Thomas
PARAPHRASE: We journey through life by choosing between virtuous and sinful alternatives, and the sinful choices have to be made as frequently—at least at the beginning of the journey—as the virtuous ones.
We should learn to accept human blindness and perversity without indignation.
A vulgar philosophy laments the wickedness of the world, but when we come to think of it we realise that the confusion of life, the doubt and turmoil and bewildering responsibility of life, largely arises from the enormous amount of good in the world.
G. K. Chesterton
The man who has never made a mistake will never make anything.
George Bernard Shaw
PARAPHRASE: The person who has never sinned will never repent from sin.
Man cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor.
Alexis Carrel
PARAPHRASE: Man cannot remake himself without repentance. For he is both a sinner and one who realizes he is a sinner.
There is no getting beyond a thing without first getting as far.
C. S. Lewis
It is dangerous to press upon a man the duty of getting beyond earthly love when his real difficulty lies in getting so far. It is easy enough to love the fellow-creature less and to imagine that this is happening because we are learning to love God more.
C. S. Lewis
Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God’s eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.
C. S. Lewis
Charity is a reverent agnosticism towards the complexity of the soul.
G. K. Chesterton
It doesn’t matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the soul away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick.
C. S. Lewis
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
C. S. Lewis
Professional moralists have made too much of self-denial, and in so doing have put the emphasis in the wrong place. Conscious self-denial leaves a man self-absorbed and vividly aware of what he has sacrificed; in consequence it fails often of its immediate object and almost always of its ultimate purpose.
Bertrand Russell
The mystic in us should surpass the moralist. It’s not a matter of ignoring the moral virtues, but not becoming entangled in them.
Fear and guilt drain all the joy from many lives. The salutary fear of God is based on our nothingness and His power, not on our sinfulness and His petulant wrath.
Fr. Bernard Basset
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde
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