Sin

The Greeks had a vocabulary for moral transgression before philosophy took the subject up. Hubris named the overreaching of human limit, and nemesis the divine correction which followed upon it. Plato inherits these notions and gives them a psychological interpretation. In the Gorgias, Socrates maintains that it is worse to do injustice than to suffer it, and worse still to escape punishment for injustice than to undergo it. His interlocutors treat these propositions as absurd. Socrates argues that they follow from the condition of soul which the unjust act produces. The soul that does injustice is disordered, and punishment, by imposing order through pain, is remedial rather than merely retributive. To evade punishment is on this view to remain diseased, so that the man acquitted of a crime he committed has suffered the greater of the two available misfortunes.

The Republic extends the analysis into a systematic account of the soul's parts. Reason, spirit, and appetite each have a proper function, and justice in the individual consists in the rule of reason over the other two. Injustice, which the later tradition will discuss under the name of sin, is the condition in which appetite or spirit usurps the ruling office. The tyrant is accordingly presented not as the man who has whatever he wants but as the man enslaved to his worst desires, unable to satisfy them, incapable of friendship or loyalty, and at war within himself. Whether the appearance of freedom which unlimited power confers can conceal so complete a servitude is the question on which the argument of the ninth book turns. Wrongdoing, so understood, injures the wrongdoer more than it injures the one he wrongs.

The discussion is not confined to psychology. In the Gorgias and again in the tenth book of the Republic, Plato tells myths of judgment after death in which souls are examined and marked by their transgressions, some being purged and others, judged incurable, set up as warnings to the rest. The tenth book of the Laws treats impiety as an offense against the city as well as against the gods, and prescribes correction rather than vengeance for those whose denial of providence proceeds from ignorance. What is absent from these treatments is any doctrine of an inherited fault. The failures Plato describes are individual, and are traced to ignorance, to bad upbringing, or to the disorder of the appetites; they are not consequences of a fall which has corrupted human nature as such.

The Platonic diagnosis passes into the Christian tradition chiefly through Augustine, who takes over the account of disordered love while denying that philosophical discipline can supply the remedy, and through Aquinas, whose definition of sin as an act at variance with the order of reason preserves the Platonic form within a theology of the eternal law. Dante's arrangement of the sins according to the loves which produce them stands at a further remove but in the same line. The ordering of the soul's parts is treated under the ideas of Soul and of Virtue and Vice, the question of remedial as against retributive punishment under Punishment, and the identification of wrongdoing with injustice under Justice.

The Confessions opens with the observation that the self cannot come to rest in itself. The restlessness Augustine describes is not treated as a want of knowledge, which instruction might supply, but as a consequence of sin, the will having turned from God, who is the only adequate object of love, toward goods of lesser worth. The theft of pears in the second book is offered as an instance of sin in its most transparent form. Augustine and his companions had no need of the fruit and no wish to eat it; once gathered, it was thrown away. What was enjoyed, on his own account of the matter, was the transgression itself, the sin being what sweetened the act. He returns to the episode repeatedly, asking what it was that he loved in it, and answers at length that it was the thrill of acting against a law he had no power to overthrow, the delight a prisoner might take in some small gesture of liberty.

Behind the particular act lies pride, which Augustine calls the libido dominandi, the lust of mastery, and which he traces through the whole of human history. The City of God sets two cities against one another, the heavenly built upon the love of God carried as far as contempt of self, the earthly upon the love of self carried as far as contempt of God. Adam's fall is the turning from the first orientation to the second, and Augustine holds that it damaged not Adam's will alone but the nature which Adam transmits to his posterity. Original sin on this account is no mere bad example but a real corruption, propagated by generation. The concupiscence which remains in the baptized, though the guilt of original sin has been remitted, is the standing inclination of the will to prefer the lesser good, and is described as the tinder from which later sins take fire.

Against Pelagius, who held that the will retains of its own nature the power to choose the good without supernatural help, Augustine maintains that grace is not an addition to natural capacity but its condition. A will damaged by original sin cannot repair itself, and the gratuitous gift of God's love is what turns it from self to God. Two difficulties follow, and Augustine is occupied with both. If evil has no positive nature, being a privation of good rather than a substance, the sinful act must be explained by a defect in the will rather than by anything in the thing chosen. And if God foreknows and elects, the freedom on which the imputation of sin depends must be shown compatible with that foreknowledge. Neither answer settled the matter, and both have been disputed since.

The question Augustine leaves, of what the will can accomplish of itself and what requires grace, governs the Western discussion of sin for a thousand years. Aquinas attempts a settlement in which grace perfects a nature wounded but not destroyed; Calvin and the Reformers press the Augustinian side of the account further than Augustine had pressed it, and Mill will later describe the result as a theory on which the one great offense of man is self will. Pascal restates the doctrine in the seventeenth century, and Milton gives it narrative form. The condition of Adam before the fall and the nature of fallen man belong also to the chapter on Man, the relation of election to responsibility to the chapters on Will and Punishment, and the doctrine of grace to the chapter on God.

Aquinas treats sin with the precision of a jurist and the concerns of a pastor. Sin is defined as an utterance, deed, or desire contrary to the eternal law, and the definition places sin within the order of reason. God governs creation by the eternal law, in which the rational creature participates as natural law; human reason is thus the proximate rule of the acts of the will, while the eternal law is the supreme rule. When a human act tends to its end according to that order, the act is right, and when it turns aside from that rectitude, it is called a sin. Sin is on this account not in the first place the breach of a command imposed from without, but the failure of a creature to act as its own nature directs. Only in the divine will, Aquinas adds, can there be no sin, since every created will has rectitude of act so far as it is regulated by the divine will.

Of the distinctions Aquinas draws, the one between mortal and venial sin is the most often applied in the later tradition. Mortal sin turns the soul altogether from God, its last end, and destroys charity, which is the principle of the spiritual life. For a sin to be mortal, the matter must be grave, the knowledge full, and the consent deliberate. Venial sin disorders the soul's movement toward its end without redirecting it, weakening charity rather than destroying it, and does not merit eternal punishment. Further divisions accompany these, between original and actual sin, between the spiritual and the carnal, and an ordering of the several species according to their gravity, matters of moral theology which connect the treatment of sin to the classification of the virtues and vices. Such distinctions answer questions an undifferentiated severity leaves open, since on the graduated view the soul's relation to God is neither simply intact nor simply destroyed.

On original sin Aquinas follows Augustine, but with a doctrine of the wounds of nature which sets limits to the damage. By original justice, he holds, reason had perfect hold over the lower parts of the soul, while reason itself was perfected by God in being subject to Him. That justice being forfeited, the powers of the soul are left destitute of their proper order. So far as reason is deprived of its order to the true, there is the wound of ignorance; so far as the will is deprived of its order to the good, the wound of malice; so far as the irascible is deprived of its order to the arduous, the wound of weakness; and so far as the concupiscible is deprived of its order to the delectable as reason moderates it, the wound of concupiscence. But sin cannot destroy the whole good of human nature. What it diminishes is the natural inclination to virtue; it cannot take away the fact that man is a rational being, for then he would no longer be capable of sin.

Dante turns this taxonomy into narrative, distributing the mortal sins among the circles of Hell and the terraces of Purgatory. Calvin denies precisely the residue Aquinas is at pains to preserve, holding that no part of the fallen soul can be treated as a reserve of moral power, and the Council of Trent afterward reaffirms against him that the image of God in man is obscured rather than effaced. The eternal law from which sin is a departure is treated under the idea of Law, the classification of sins in relation to the vices under Virtue and Vice, and the penalties attaching to mortal and venial sin under Punishment.

The Divine Comedy is the most fully articulated treatment of sin in the poetry of the tradition, given in narrative and image rather than in propositions. The structure of Hell rests upon a moral taxonomy taken from Aristotle and mediated by Aquinas: incontinence in the upper circles, where lust, gluttony, avarice, and wrath are punished; then violence, against neighbor, against self, and against God; then fraud; and at the bottom treachery. The ordering is Augustinian as well as Aristotelian, since the descent measures the degree to which the will has consented to disorder rather than been overborne by passion. Satan, fixed in ice at the center, neither rages nor speaks. Where the poem places him is itself an argument, for the sin which began in the aspiration to rise above every other creature ends at the point furthest from the light and least capable of motion.

The theoretical statement of the whole scheme comes in the seventeenth and eighteenth cantos of the Purgatorio, where Virgil explains to Dante that love is the root of virtue and of sin alike. Neither creator nor creature, he says, was ever without love, either natural or of the mind. The natural is always without error; the other may err through an evil object, or through too little vigor, or through too much. While love is directed on the primal goods, and with due measure on the secondary, it cannot be the cause of ill delight; but when it is bent to evil, or runs to good with more zeal or with less than it ought, the creature works against its Creator. Three disorders of love thus generate the capital sins: love of a wrong object, which produces pride, envy, and wrath; deficient love of the proper good, which produces sloth; and excessive love of secondary goods, which produces avarice, gluttony, and lust.

What distinguishes the poem from the treatises is that its sinners are particular persons, many of them known to its first readers, and each is seen at the moment which the disposition of a lifetime has made permanent. The contrapasso, by which the punishment answers the sin in kind, renders the moral doctrine as experience: those who surrendered to passion are driven upon the wind, and the counsellors of fraud are wrapped each in a tongue of flame. Hell is presented less as a penalty imposed from without than as the condition of the sinner made visible. Purgatory, where the same faults are treated as curable, orders its terraces by the same doctrine of love and adds the discipline through which love is set right. In Paradise, Adam tells Dante that the tasting of the tree was not by itself the cause of so great an exile, but only the overpassing of the bound, which returns the account of the first sin to disobedience and to pride.

Later poets take from Dante the assumption that sin can be shown rather than defined. Milton's Satan is a further working of material Dante had set at the bottom of Hell, and the moral allegory of the following centuries draws upon the Comedy even where it declines its theology. The classification of sins according to gravity is treated more fully under the ideas of Virtue and Vice and of Punishment; the doctrine that love orders the soul toward its last end, under Love and under Good and Evil; and the condition of Adam before his transgression, under Man.

Calvin's treatment of sin is a return to Augustine, taken further along the same line. Augustine had said that after the fall the human will is no longer able to will the good without the help of grace, and that even the good that fallen man appears to do, when it is not the fruit of grace, is in fact a refined form of self-love, turned inward upon itself. Calvin takes up this teaching and extends it. Where Aquinas had moderated the Augustinian inheritance by holding that the natural powers of the soul, though wounded by the fall, retained a real if weakened capacity for the goods of this life, Calvin denies that any such residual capacity can be the ground of moral credit. The corruption of the fall reaches into every part of the soul. Reason is darkened, will is turned aside, memory is unreliable, imagination is a workshop of idols. From such a nature, nothing good can proceed except what grace produces in it from without.

The doctrine is often summarized under the name of total depravity, and the name has been the occasion of some misunderstanding. Calvin does not mean that every act of fallen man is as evil as it could be, or that the natural affections which bind families and cities are of no worth. He means that none of the goods which fallen man may exhibit qualify as merits before God, and that the corruption of the will reaches so deep that no part of the soul can be treated as a reserve of moral power from which the work of salvation can begin. The image of God, in which man was created and in which the older theology had located the ground of human dignity, is on Calvin's account not merely damaged but destroyed, to be restored only through the work of Christ in the elect. The creature which remains is capable of civil righteousness, in the ordinary sense, but not of the righteousness which God requires.

The questions raised here belong to several neighboring ideas. The relation of sin to the will is treated in the chapter on Will, where Calvin's bondage of the will is his theme; the relation of sin to punishment, in the chapter on Punishment; the question of whether the redeemed man is made righteous in himself or only reckoned righteous through the righteousness of Christ, in the theological chapters on God and on Soul. What belongs under Sin itself is the insistence that sin is not a particular act, or a sum of particular acts, but a condition of the nature from which the acts proceed; and that any account of particular sins which does not begin from the corruption of the nature will miss what Christianity has principally wanted to say.

Shakespeare's tragedies, particularly Macbeth, present this condition in the form of a particular man's ruin, and the later Milton, in Paradise Lost, takes up the question of how such a nature could have come from the hand of a good God. Pascal, in the Pensees, describes the misery of man without God in terms which owe a great deal to Calvin, even where his Jansenism puts him at a distance from the Reformed churches. The Calvinist account does not go uncontested. The Council of Trent will reaffirm, against it, that the image of God in man is obscured but not destroyed, and the later Protestant liberals will soften the doctrine nearly out of recognition. But the tradition cannot go back to the confidence of the medieval account of human nature, and every later discussion of sin is conducted in the shadow of what Calvin and the Reformers had insisted upon.

The Shakespearean treatment of sin is presented less as a theological doctrine than as an anatomy of the consequences that flow upon the soul after the act has been committed. The plays take over from the older tradition the categories of guilt, contrition, and absolution, and they assume the Christian framework in which these categories hold their force. What they contribute to the discussion is a set of cases in which the conscience and the will, having come apart from each other, remain at odds in a way the ordinary rites of penitence cannot repair. Macbeth is the principal document. Macbeth has killed Duncan and knows immediately that the blood on his hand will not wash off with water; Lady Macbeth, who had urged the deed in confidence that a little water would clear them of it, returns at the end of the play as a sleepwalker, rubbing her hand in vain. The plays show the inward separation which sin effects, and the inability of those who have sinned to return to the condition they had before the act.

A still more explicit case is the scene in Hamlet in which Claudius tries to pray. He kneels, he knows the prayer he ought to make, and he finds that he cannot make it, because he cannot bring himself to give up the crown and the queen which the murder of his brother has won for him. His words go up; his thoughts remain below; words without thoughts, he says, never to heaven go. The scene sets out more clearly than any treatise the doctrine that contrition without a willingness to surrender the fruits of the sin is not contrition at all, and that the conscience cannot deceive itself on this point however hard it may try. Richard III shows the same truth at the opposite extreme: the tyrant, after a long and deliberate series of murders, finds on the night before his last battle that his own conscience has a thousand several tongues, and each tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns him for a villain.

The questions raised belong to the treatments of Will, of Good and Evil, and of Punishment. Under the idea of Sin, what is distinctive of Shakespeare's contribution is the showing that the sinner, after the act, is not the same soul that he was before, and that no resolution of the intellect alone can restore what was lost in the doing.

Milton, writing Paradise Lost, will draw upon what the Shakespearean plays had made familiar about the inwardness of sin, especially in the portrait of Satan and in the counsels of the fallen angels. Dostoyevsky, centuries later, will make the same kind of portrait the center of a long novel. The treatment of sin in the Great Books is not complete without these dramatizations, which show what the theological categories look like when they are carried out in the life of a particular soul, and what remains after the categories have been applied.

Paradise Lost proposes to justify the ways of God to men, and the justification turns upon the account it gives of sin. Neither Satan's rebellion nor Adam's transgression is charged to God, because both proceed from free choice. Milton's God says of man that he made him just and right, sufficient to have stood though free to fall, and says of the fallen angels that they decreed their own revolt, foreknowledge having had no influence upon a fault which would have proved no less certain unforeknown. Creatures incapable of sinning would have been incapable of the obedience worth having. The argument is the familiar defense from freedom, and the poem does not conceal what it costs, since the grandeur of Satan, the plausibility of the temptation, and the ruin which follows are all given their weight.

Satan's sin is pride, exhibited as the tradition had defined it, the preference of one's own dominion to one's proper place. His soliloquy before he enters the garden admits the whole of the case against him. He acknowledges that God deserved no such return, that the service was not hard, that his own free will had been as capable of standing as the wills of the angels who did not fall; and having admitted this, he asks whether any place is left for repentance, and answers that none is left but by submission, which disdain forbids. The successive appearances of Satan record a diminution, from the archangel of the first book to the tempter of the fourth and the serpent of the ninth. On the Augustinian analysis the poem follows, pride contracts the self it seeks to exalt, since it severs that self from the good on which its being depends.

The fall of man is distinguished from the fall of the angels. The angels fell self tempted, and Milton's God finds no grace for them; man, deceived by another, may find grace. Eve is moved by the promise of becoming as a god, which is the pride and the envy that had moved Satan. Adam is not deceived. He eats against his better knowledge, out of love for Eve, unwilling to live without her, so that his sin is a love which exceeds the worth of its object and displaces the love owed to God. That the disorder should take this form, in an act generous in one aspect, is part of what the poem contributes to the discussion, since it shows how sin may arise from an affection not in itself vicious.

The last books turn from the fall to its consequences. Michael shows Adam the history which follows, and the poem closes with the knowledge of evil joined to the promise of redemption, in what Milton calls a paradise within thee, happier far. Whether the fall is on this account a fortunate one, as the tradition of the felix culpa had held, the poem raises without deciding, and it insists throughout on the reality of the loss. The freedom presupposed by the imputation of sin is discussed under Will and under Fate, the relation of foreknowledge and election to responsibility under God, and the perdition of the unrepentant under Punishment and Immortality.

The Pensées are organized about a single question: how the human condition, taken as it is found, is to be explained. Men are capable of geometry and of aspirations no animal shares, and are at the same time unable to remain quietly in a room. They know they will die and refuse to think of dying. Pascal treats these as one phenomenon rather than as separate puzzles, the astonishing contradiction of greatness and wretchedness in the same creature, and he offers the doctrine of original sin as the hypothesis which accounts for both. In the state in which men now are, he writes, there remains to them some feeble instinct of the happiness of their former state, and they are plunged in the evils of their blindness and their lust, which have become their second nature. Without the fall the greatness and the wretchedness have no common cause; with it, each is what the other requires.

The account of divertissement is the part of this analysis most nearly his own. Men are not merely ignorant of their condition; they take pains not to learn it. Occupation, company, hunting, gaming, and war are pursued less for what they yield than for the distraction they afford from a stillness in which mortality and guilt would have to be faced. The will damaged by sin, so understood, does not simply fail to choose the good; it arranges a life in which the choice need not be made. Whether this should be counted a moral failing for which men are answerable, or the settled condition of a fallen nature, Pascal leaves in a form which admits either reading, though the design of the work presses toward the second.

His conception of what makes an act sinful is severe. Whatever God does not permit is forbidden, since the absence of God's will, which is all goodness and all justice, renders the act unjust and wrong. There are, he writes, only two kinds of men: the righteous who believe themselves sinners, and the sinners who believe themselves righteous. Much of the Provincial Letters is directed against a casuistry which, by multiplying distinctions and admitting probable opinions, allowed penitents to be absolved of what Pascal took to be mortal sin. The dispute is partly about the classification of sins by gravity, which belongs to moral theology, and partly about whether the doctrine of grace that Jansenius drew from Augustine had been justly condemned. On both counts Pascal held that the accommodations of his contemporaries had made sin easy to forget.

Dostoyevsky's novels return to the position from which Pascal begins, that the sinner's condition is known to him and evaded rather than unknown. Freud gives a naturalistic account of the same evasion under the name of repression, and traces the sense of guilt to the dread of authority rather than to any offense against God, which is the reading Pascal's argument was framed to exclude. The greatness and wretchedness of man belong also to the chapter on Man, the wager and the assent it asks for to the chapter on God, and the question of grace and good works to the chapters on Will and on Virtue and Vice.

Dostoyevsky's treatment of sin is centered on the inward consequences of the act of wrongdoing, and he gives to the subject a length of treatment the earlier writers in the tradition had not attempted. In Crime and Punishment the murder of the old pawnbroker is committed in the first pages, and the remainder of the novel, some five hundred further pages, is an analysis of what the murder has done to the soul of the one who committed it. Raskolnikov has not been caught, and for much of the novel he is in no danger of being caught. What torments him is not the fear of punishment but the separation from other men that descends on him after the act. He has tried to convince himself that he stands above the moral law; he finds, instead, that he stands outside the human community to which he had not realized he belonged.

The novel's treatment is distinguished by the refusal to let this separation be relieved by anything less than a full confession. Raskolnikov suffers, he argues with himself, he is drawn toward and away from discovery, and the partial movements toward reconciliation which his encounters with Sonya seem to promise are not accepted as discharging the debt. What is required is that he should go, publicly, and say what he has done. The last pages of the novel, in which this is accomplished and the novel's epilogue begins, are not the conclusion of an argument but the removal of an obstruction: the sinner is not shown to have proved his guilt, but to have acknowledged it in the presence of another, and the acknowledgment is presented as the beginning of whatever return from sin is possible.

The treatment is extended and made more general in The Brothers Karamazov, particularly in the sixth book, where the elder Zosima teaches that every man is guilty of the sins of all other men and must hold himself answerable for them. Whether this is doctrinally defensible is a question the novel does not settle. What it does is to show what the teaching looks like when it is lived out, and how it alters the terms in which the question of sin can be asked.

The questions raised here are discussed also under the ideas of Will, Good and Evil, and Punishment. What Dostoyevsky contributes to the idea of Sin is the showing that the interior consequence of the act is itself the principal punishment, and that the remission which the religious tradition had placed in the act of confession is not an institutional device but a reflection of what the sinner has in fact come to need. Freud, reading the same novels in a quite different spirit, will find in Raskolnikov the type of the neurotic whose guilt exceeds any external cause, and whose confession is the discharge of a burden the conscious mind had not known how to carry. Whether this is a rewriting or a translation of the Dostoyevskian insight is a question the tradition continues to debate.

Freud does not use the word sin, but the analysis of guilt in Civilization and Its Discontents is directed upon the phenomena the tradition has discussed under that name. Civilization requires the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction, and the aggression which can no longer be turned outward is taken over by the super-ego and turned against the ego as a sense of guilt. When one asks how a sense of guilt arises in anyone, Freud observes, one is told that people feel guilty when they have done something they know to be bad, and one then sees how little the answer tells. What is bad, on his account, is to begin with whatever threatens a loss of love, which is why it makes little difference whether the deed has been committed or only intended. The consequence inverts what the moral tradition expects: the more righteous a man is, the stricter and more suspicious his conscience will be.

The external authority of the father, and through him of society, becomes internalized in the development of the super-ego, and only at that second stage, Freud says, should the manifestations be called conscience at all. The origin of the whole arrangement he places, speculatively, in the killing of the father by the band of brothers described in Totem and Taboo, from which he had first drawn the suspicion that the sense of guilt in mankind, the ultimate source of religion and morality, was acquired at the beginning of history through the Oedipus complex. The same mechanism is applied to the religious sense of sin. The people of Israel, he writes, believed themselves to be God's favorite child, and when visitation after visitation was hurled upon them, they brought their prophets into the world to declare their sinfulness, and out of their sense of guilt constructed the stringent commandments of their religion.

Those who reject the religious meaning of sin do not commonly deny that a sense of sin is widespread, or that many men suffer remorse for what they suppose to be evil in the eyes of God. What they deny is that the feeling reports its own cause correctly. Freud holds that the man tormented by conscience is under an illusion concerning the true nature of his guilt, and that when the sense of sin is intensely active and out of proportion to the character and conduct of the person, the guilt feelings take on the attributes of pathological distortion and enter into the symptomology of the neuroses. The sincerity of the sufferer is not in question, only the account he gives of what he suffers from. Freud allows, without irony, that saints who proclaim themselves sinners are not far wrong, since temptations increase under constant privation.

Freud's account stands to the older treatments as a translation rather than a refutation, in the sense that it identifies much the same phenomena and assigns them other causes. Where Augustine finds the root of sin in pride and in a love turned upon the self, Freud finds an economy of drives which reason may observe but does not govern; where Pascal describes the flight from self knowledge, Freud offers a mechanism for it. Whether a psychological genesis for the sense of guilt settles anything about the reality of sin is the question at issue between him and the theologians, and neither side has settled it by the evidence it brings. The psychogenesis of conscience is treated further under the ideas of Mind and Emotion, the claim of the great religions to relieve men of the sense of guilt under Religion, and the relation of guilt to desert under Punishment.