Forgive Me, Father, for I Have Sinned

 

Yesterday I wrote on the nature of original sin and “original blessedness.” “Man is born to love, but learns fear,” the theme of a recent talk I attended, is wrong. Man is born with an inclination to sin.  Nor is this inclination eliminated b baptism, nor by faith in Christ. As the Bible says, we must “work out our salvation in fear and trembling.” 

Even leaving aside the Bible, consider the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

“Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.”

“The whole of man's history has been the story of dour combat with the powers of evil, stretching, so our Lord tells us, from the very dawn of history until the last day. Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God's grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity.” (Gaudium et Spes, 37 § 2). 

Of the heresy of Pelagianism, the Catechism notes: “Pelagius held that man could, by the natural power of free will and without the necessary help of God's grace, lead a morally good life; he thus reduced the influence of Adam's fault to bad example.”

Which is what our sermonizer of the last post did: he reduced original sin to the example of our parents.

“Ignorance of the fact that man has a wounded nature, inclined to evil,” the Catechism warns, “gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education, politics, social action and morals.”

This is the fatal flaw in left-wing thinking since Rousseau. His notion of original blessedness led to the excesses of the French Revolution, Romanticism, Marx and Communism. It fosters the tragic mirage of a paradise on earth, created by human effort. It has killed tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions in the attempt.

To give the Devil his turn at the podium, our speaker cited the parable of the Prodigal Son as evidence of God’s readiness to forgive.

The prodigal spent all his inheritance. Yet his father, representing God the Father, did not reject him, but welcomed him home and killed a fatted calf in his honour.

The first common misunderstanding is that the son’s fault was in taking his inheritance and leaving home. No, it was being prodigal—that is, he spent all his inheritance. ”He squandered his property in reckless living.”

And it is essential to notice that he did not just come running to Abba to be embraced. Like Job, he repented in dust and ashes. He prepared this speech for his father, and delivered it: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.” 

God cannot forgive our sins unless we are both fully repentant and prepared to accept just punishment. No Get out of Jail Free. This is the step the evil ones always elide in the telling.

Compare the Good Thief, who died on a cross next to Jesus. He was granted heaven despite his sins. 

Why? 

Because he accepted that his punishment was deserved and just. He rebuked the third thief, who mocked Jesus: “Have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation? And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes.”

This is why the sacrament of Confession/Reconciliation includes penance. This is why there is a purgatory, or we must believe there is. Only then can we hope for God’s forgiveness. We cannot expect it. “Thou shalt not put the Lord your God to the test.”

Nor is the repentant prodigal of the parable, significantly, going to get another inheritance to replace the one he squandered. Too many miss this, wanting to stress forgiveness. He does not achieve equal standing with the brother who had not sinned. When the son who had remained objected to the feast his errant sibling was getting in his honour, the father responded by telling him, “all that is mine is yours.” 

That, surely, suggests that the prodigal gets no second inheritance. He gets, no doubt, secure food and lodging; but will remain now forever a lodger.

In terms of the afterlife, this suggests that the repentant sinner achieves heaven, the Divine Presence, reconciled to God. But there are ranks in heaven. We know this from the listed ranks of angels, the reference in Revelations to those “close to the throne,” and Jesus’s reference to “the least in heaven” when speaking of John the Baptist. 

He, the repentant sinner, will be given no authority.

God does not spoil his children.

Original Blessedness and Original Sin

 

I am disturbed by a Catholic sermon I listened to recently. The repeated theme was “you were born for love, but learned fear.” The audience was given to understand that God’s love for us is infinite and unconditional, and our existential problem was simply not understanding that Daddy, “Abba,” is always here ready to embrace us.

The clear message being that guilt, not sin, is the problem. Spoken like Martin Luther, who famously declared, “Love God, and sin boldly.” The speaker was a convert from Protestantism, and he may have brought Luther’s sola fides doctrine with him: salvation by faith alone.

He was preaching ”original blessedness” instead of original sin. In fact, his slogan seems to echo Rousseau’s in praising the natural man: “man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Rousseau’s philosophy was in direct and deliberate opposition to the Christian message. 

The doctrine of original blessedness faces an obvious problem: if each of us is born innately good, how did evil ever come into the world?

The speaker did address this problem. We learn fear from our parents. This is the “original sin.” Our parents are scary, presumably because they do not show unconditional love for us, and we project this lack of love on our image of God.

But this does not solve the problem: it’s turtles all the way down. How did Adam and Eve ever sin, then, since they had no parent to falsely teach them to fear, only God himself?

Adam and Eve feared God because they had sinned. And so this inclination to sin must also be in us. 

The speaker had skipped an essential step, like those Protestant churches that will not display a crucifix, but only an empty cross: they want the resurrection without the crucifixion. He made the original sin fearing God, which is to say, feeling guilt over having sinned.

Compare what the Bible says:

Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”

And Saint Paul:

“Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

We are not born blessed, ready and able to love. We are born fallen, imagining like Eve that we are gods, and must learn to love. It is a hard and painful process; one that needs divine intervention.

And the first step is to learn to fear. 

“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.”

My grandmother used to recite Francis Thompson’s poem, “The Hound of Heaven.”

“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
‘All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.’”

God treats us like a father, not a too-indulgent mother. He does not spoil his children.

Too Many People

 

Friend Xerxes notes that he finds individuals almost invariably kind, while society as a whole is systemically at least nearsighted.

I am completely in agreement with his claim that individuals are more trustworthy than people in groups. What he presumably does not see is that this, if true, is a powerful argument for free markets and individual liberty, as opposed to government control and group identity. In other words, for the right and not the left.

Xerxes, on the other hand, is probably trying to argue for original blessedness; for the idea that people are innately, naturally good, and will always do good if they just follow their instincts—a romantic notion, in the proper sense of the word. Therefore, impositions on instinct from “society”—formal ethics—are the source of all evil.

But the basic claim, that individuals are usually more trustworthy than groups, is in accord with what we all can observe: mobs are irresponsible and dangerous. 

The problem is with identifying the mechanism to explain this. If you assume that people are all individually good, yet corrupted by society, you have a classic “problem of evil.” Society is a human creation. If people are good, yet society is evil, where did the evil come from?

Xerxes’s theory is that people are good only in moderation. The evil comes somehow from there being too many in one place. He uses, among others, the analogy of a campfire versus a forest fire. Too much fire is bad; too many people are bad.

But the difference between a campfire and a forest fire is not quite that. It is that the campfire is under control, and the forest fire is not. A fire in a waste paper basket is probably smaller than a campfire, but it is still bad. A controlled burnoff of a field is a common agricultural practice, and it might easily be larger than a forest fire. A nuclear reactor is a rather bigger fire in a sense than a forest fire, but can be useful.

So with people. The problem is not more or fewer of them, but whether they are controlling their animal instincts and their selfishness. As individuals, we are obliged to take responsibility for our acts, so our conscience is engaged. If we pass our individual responsibility over to the group, we can more easily shirk our conscience. We can let our sinister tendencies “run riot,” to use the familiar phrase. This is most evident in a mob, but a clear danger in any group. “I was only following orders.”

This is because, like fire, we already have those sinister tendencies. This cannot support a romantic idea of original blessedness. The bad tendency must already exist at the individual level; but be held in check.

Trying to find an analogy that might work better to justify Xerxes’s concept of innate human goodness, I thought of locusts. According to at least some theories, they change from relatively benign to humans to a plague due to overcrowding—due, then, to sheer numbers, more or less. But again, this does not really work in support of his concept of humans, because each individual locust also transforms in nature. In Xerxes’s human model, the individual remains good even as the society in which he or she participates misbehaves.

I have read that lab rats, if overcrowded, begin to bite one another. Perhaps this is more apt, but it still does not work. Each bite is an individual, not a group, action. The individual does not remain moral while the group imposes immorality.

Given the correct observation that people behave better individually than in groups, we are left needing to acknowledge the concept of original sin. The tendency to evil as well as good must be innate at the level of the individual.

There is also something troublesome, surely, in the very concept of “too many” humans. Too many for what? If your measure is what is good for humans, surely existing is the most fundamental of goods. If your standard is not what is good for humans, what is your standard? The obvious suspicion is that it is what is good for yourself…