4. How Far
Can I Go?
From What Happened to Sin?, by Seán Fagan. S.M.
The Columba Press, 2008.
The first reaction of many traditional Catholics to the question: ‘is it a sin?’ was to wonder: ‘is it allowed?’ Not infrequently, this was followed with the query: ‘how far can I go? ‘Law’ played a dominant role in many people’s understanding of morality. This is understandable insofar as laws are an attempt to spell out what the morally good response ought to be in various situations. But it is not easy to put a stop to the spelling out process. People want to know what a law means, to what extent it is binding. Religious authorities thus found themselves obliged to go into the measuring business, with the best intentions and full of pastoral concern, but with results that were often less than desirable.
In the Old Testament the simple precepts of the Decalogue were teased out until they became the six hundred and thirteen prescriptions observed so punctiliously by the scribes and Pharisees. These explained, for example, how far one might walk on the Sabbath without infringing the commandment, and what circumstances might justify one in stretching it. Casuistry, or the art of applying general principles to individual cases, is necessary in order to make morality practicable, but it can also reach a point where it becomes a means for getting around the law. Thus, if the law allowed a journey of a thousand paces from home on the Sabbath, one could establish a temporary domicile by placing a pile of one’s old clothing at that distance from home on the evening before, and one would then be able to cover twice the normally allowed distance and still observe the letter of the law. In the Catholic tradition, the Lenten fast allowed only one full meal and two collations or snacks in the day. The relative measure applied to the latter was that together they should be less than one full meal, so in order to get full value from them, one had only to increase the quantity of the main meal.
How much is a sin?
The Council of Trent imposed the serious obligation of confessing all mortal sins in detail, so the faithful needed to know exactly when a sin was mortal. For many people, the question: ‘how far may I go before it is a sin?’ was extended to include: ‘how far may I go before it becomes mortal?’ With the multiplication of Church laws there was an increasing demand for theologians and pastors to mark out clearly the boundaries of sin and the dividing‑line between mortal and venial. One doesn’t have to be a centenarian to recall the casuistry about Sunday Mass, fasting, sexuality, to mention only a few areas. A venial sin was committed by voluntarily missing an unimportant part of the Mass, e.g. up to the Gospel or after the Communion. To miss both of these or the consecration alone would be mortal. With regard to the law of fasting, it was common teaching that it was permitted to interchange the noon and evening meals, and for a just reason one might also interchange breakfast and lunch. To interrupt the principal meal for more than half an hour without reason would be a venial sin, but should the interruption last more than an hour it would be mortal. For a proportionately good reason (e.g. to assist the dying, according to the textbook) one could interrupt dinner for several hours. As for the spirit and letter of the fasting law, it was held that if one had eaten two full meals on a fast day, either deliberately or by mistake, one could no longer observe the fast and, therefore, might eat as much as one wished afterwards.
A textbook reprinted in the nineteen sixties states categorically that ‘kissing the private or semi-private parts of the human body is gravely sinful’, without any distinction between married or unmarried people. The same manual teaches that it is seriously sinful to look at animals mating, though less serious if it is at a distance or it is a question of small birds. On this kind of logic David Attenborough’s magnificently beautiful nature films would be serious occasions of sin, to be avoided. In the matter of justice, the 16th century Scottish theologian, John Major, taught that to steal up to five grains of corn from a rich man’s harvest was no sin, from six to ten was a venial sin, and anything more than ten was mortal.
Once involved in the measuring business, it is hard to stop. The original intention and concern were understandable; people need guidelines and directives. But the ultimate consequences in practice could be ridiculous. The idea of adding the tail-end of one Mass to the beginning of another in order to make up the amount specified in the Sunday obligation does not easily fit into our contemporary understanding of Eucharistic liturgy. It is not just today or yesterday that people found it hard to believe that a devout, good-living Catholic could be in hell for all eternity for missing one Sunday Mass or eating just one sausage on Friday. The teaching authorities in the Church seemed quite happy to leave people with that impression. But today people will no longer accept that this is the case simply because the Church says so. They may be confused in their groping for a more meaningful understanding of sin, but they are very conscious of the shortcomings of the older approach, and are particularly unhappy at the consequences of some of the older teaching.
Legalism and complacency
Over-emphasis on law and measurement can lead to legalism, minimalism, complacency and scrupulosity. We recall Jesus’ condemnation of the scribes and Pharisees for their exaggerated reverence for the law and their minute measuring of it, and we know that the Christian community has not always escaped the same temptation. A new insight, a new discovery in Christian experience can be robbed of its vitality when legalism takes over, when it is frozen into a law and rigidly imposed. It has often been remarked that the worst thing that could happen to the documents of the Second Vatican Council would be to transform them into a new code of canon law. Minimalism is to be found in people who feel that there is no sin where a matter is not covered by law or cannot be easily measured. This explains why so many people confessed to missing part of Mass or eating meat on a day of abstinence, but seemed oblivious to the possibility of sin in their insensitivity to their married partner, their lack of concern for the underprivileged, or their share in the atmosphere of prejudice and discrimination in their community or work situation. Basic attitudes are not easily measured or legislated for, so they were frequently forgotten in an examination of conscience. With so much emphasis on identifiable and measurable sins, less attention was paid to general sinfulness, either in the individual person or in the community as a whole.
Complacency and harsh judgement of others are always a danger for the law-abiding citizen and the conscientious Christian, but the danger is increased when fidelity is measured in terms of precise law, and morality is seen more in terms of quantity than quality. When morality is spelled out in so many laws, it is as though each law earned a certain number of marks, like questions in an examination, so that one’s total of credits could be banked to one’s account in heaven. With this attitude, it is easy to give the impression that one can score full marks, that one may go before God with an easy conscience and claim one’s reward. Jesus had little time for this attitude, and in his story of the Pharisee and the publican he made it clear that quantity counts for little. Measuring one’s own goodness by the yardstick of law, it is difficult to avoid the temptation to measure the failures of others by the same law and take comfort from the contrast. But the goodness preached by Jesus is not measurable in terms of quantity at all. What he looks for is the quality of our conduct, that it reproduce something of his own basic attitude, in Paul’s words, that we ‘have that mind which was in Christ Jesus’. This may be present in actions that, objectively speaking, hardly seem virtuous at all, as in the case of many neurotics, and be almost totally absent in the acts of politeness that are merely the result of good breeding and expensive education. Only God can judge where each one of us stands in his sight. Since he alone is good, and our own goodness is his gift to us, none of us can afford to be complacent or presume to judge our neighbours because they don’t measure up to our standard.
Scrupulosity
If Jesus had little time for the complacent, he would surely be very sympathetic to the scrupulous. There are good, conscientious people afflicted with this psychological problem, and our multiplicity of laws and concern for measurement provides a fertile field for them to indulge their weakness and intensify their suffering. A Roman psychiatrist with an international clientele once remarked that of all his patients suffering from this problem, only Roman Catholics had religious scruples. No matter how much advice and counselling they are given, they still agonise over whether a particular thought, word or deed was a sin, and whether it was mortal or venial. Added to the ordinary pain of indecision and compulsive worry, there is the awful fear of eternal punishment in the background. If such people did not have a religious upbringing which laid such emphasis on law and the precise measurement of sin, there is no guarantee that they would be free of the psychological disturbance of scruples, but at least their problem would not be aggravated. It would focus on other things, for example on checking and re-checking that a door is closed.
Emphasis on precise measurement in the assessment of sin came to some extent from the Church’s experience of the sacrament of penance. Not only did the faithful have the obligation to confess all serious sins according to number and kind, but the confessor was obliged to see that they did. The Roman Ritual, in its instructions on this sacrament, stressed the role of the confessor as physician and judge. The moral theologians spelled out more particularly the latter function. A textbook widely used in the sixties puts it: ‘As judge, the confessor must pass judgement on the penitent before absolving him, and for this reason it is sometimes necessary to ask questions. In passing judgement the priest must consider both the sins and the disposition of the penitent. Sins are judged according to their quantity and quality. The duty to ask questions, to insure the integrity of the confession, is grave.’ While most confessors were sympathetic and fatherly in dealing with penitents, some, through a scrupulous sense of responsibility or impelled by other subconscious motivation, applied a kind of third degree questioning that reinforced people’s concern with measurement. For some, the sacrament was almost a court of law in which the priest was like a public attorney looking for an exact reconstruction of the crime, a judge trying to establish the precise degree of culpability, so that every last ounce of guilt could be accounted for. The new rites for this sacrament of reconciliation show a very different emphasis.
The ‘sin-grid’
It would be unfair to paint a caricature, but if we are to be helped to a more mature understanding of morality and sin, it is necessary to acknowledge the weakness of the over-simplified older approach. It had the merit of being clear, easily taught, easily measured, easily supervised − at least in appearance. But a price had to be paid for this false clarity and unexamined security. Casuistry tended to isolate the individual sin from the overall behaviour of the penitent. Fidelity to God was split up into detailed, individual actions, taking attention away from the sinfulness of basic attitudes, trends and dispositions. The ‘sin-grid’ for examination of conscience established lists of sins individually registered and catalogued, with their varying degrees of seriousness: mortal and venial, sins of weakness and sins of malice. Not only was there an individualistic approach to sins in the life of an individual person, but this carried over into an individualistic approach to the individual sinner apart from the community. In spite of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, little attention was paid to the darker side of the coin, to our solidarity in sin, to the sinfulness of a whole community. In the area of confession, it was easy to think that we could pay our fine, make restitution, merit forgiveness, and forget that God’s pardon is always pure gift, not a reward that can be earned. It would be a mistake of course, to conclude from all this that a Christian must be antinomian, that we can do without laws, that we have no need to spell out the meaning of sin, or that we can ignore the fact of degrees of seriousness in sin.
It is true that the law of Christ is a law of love, but it is an over-simplification leading to moral laxity to claim that love is our only criterion. St. Paul could preach freedom from law, but at the same time felt it necessary to point to specific behaviour that contradicted the new life in the Spirit. He told the Galatians: ‘If the Spirit leads you, then you are not subject to the law. What human nature does is quite plain. It shows itself in immoral, filthy, and indecent actions; in worship of idols and witchcraft. People become enemies and they fight; they become jealous, angry, and ambitious. They separate into parties and groups; they are envious, get drunk, have orgies, and do other things like these. I warn you now as I have before: those who do these things will not possess the kingdom of God’ (5:18‑21).
Identifying sin
Both in Old and New Testaments, the people of God needed practical directives to identify sinful activities and were aware that there were degrees of gravity in sin. It was recognised that Israel’s sins were more serious than those of others because of the special privilege and intimacy of their covenant relationship with God, and those of the Christian community were considered still more serious (Heb 10:26‑31). The Old Testament has several catalogues of sins (Deut 27:15-26; Amos 2:4‑8; 8:4‑6; Hos 4:2; Ezek 18:5‑20). Jesus himself gives an abbreviated version of the Decalogue list in answer to the rich young man’s question about the conditions for receiving eternal life (Mk 10:18‑19), and gives further examples of sinful behaviour in his description of the last judgement (Mt 25:41‑46). There are several lists of vices and sins in the rest of the New Testament (1 Cor 6:9‑10; Gal 5:19‑21; Rom 1:24‑32; 13:1‑14; 1 Tim 1:4‑11; 1 Pet 4:2‑5; 2 Pet 2:12‑22).
In the light of this experience, there can be no question of the Christian community at any stage dispensing with such practical guidelines, though we need to remember that some of the Scripture lists are culturally conditioned and therefore require some care when applied to modern times. For example, when Paul spoke of homosexuals in Rom 1:26‑27 or 1 Cor 6:9, he could not have been aware of the fact that a large percentage of the human race are not personally responsible for their homosexual orientation. Likewise, it would be an abuse of Scripture to quote his lists as catalogues of mortal sins, and especially to claim that each and every act, on Paul’s authority, is a mortal sin. Our notion of mortal sin, with the obligation of confession, was simply unknown to Paul. But Augustine held him to mean that one does not need to have all these vices to be excluded from the kingdom of heaven; any one alone would suffice, and each and every act of these vices is a mortal sin. He went on to teach that in lists like this we have God telling us precisely which sins are mortal. He admits that, without such revelation, we might be tempted to judge some of these sins much more lightly. He recalls that hell fire is threatened on the man who merely calls his brother a fool. Augustine the bishop and pastor was concerned to make people aware of the seriousness of sin and the need for penance, but there seems to have been nobody in his congregation to ask him if he wasn’t over‑simplifying with his hard‑sell.
The people of God have always been conscious of degrees of seriousness in sin, but the gradation was differently understood at different times. Our modern notion of mortal sin is not to be found as such in Scripture or the early Church, since it is so much conditioned by the Church’s legislation about confession, which is of much later origin. The clearest text to speak of degrees in sin is St. John’s first letter: ‘If you see your brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, you should pray to God, who will give him life. This applies to those whose sins do not lead to death. But there is sin which leads to death, and I do not say that you should pray to God about that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which does not lead to death’ (5:16‑17). It is clear that, for John, not all sins are on the same level, that some are more serious than others. It is not clear what precisely is the sin that leads to death, or the ‘deadly sin’. In the context, it probably refers to the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit’, final impenitence, the attitude of the person who simply refuses forgiveness and is impervious to the power of prayer (Mt 12:31‑32; Mk 3:28‑30; Lk 12:10).
Basic attitude
This reference to ‘attitude’ recalls an important element in the biblical notion of sin. Though it is clear in both Old and New Testaments that individual actions can be sinful, the emphasis is more on sin as a basic attitude, a state of sinfulness. In his various catalogues, Paul was not so much listing sins as describing the kind of people who exclude themselves from the kingdom of heaven by their way of life. He also speaks of the ‘slavery of sin, which leads to death’(Rom 6:16). The sinful attitude, of course, is built up by individual actions, as James writes: ‘A person is tempted when he is drawn away and trapped by his own evil desire. Then his evil desire conceives and gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full‑grown, gives birth to death’ (1:14‑15). John too speaks more of sin as a state than of individual sinful actions. To emphasise the seriousness of the sinful state he quotes Jesus at the Last Supper: ‘whoever hates me hates my Father also. They would not be guilty of sin if I had not done among them the things that no one else ever did; as it is, they have seen what I did, and they hate both me and my Father’ (Jn 15:23‑24). Sin is a continuing state of hatred of God, and contrasted with new life in the Spirit it is death. ‘We know that we have left death and come over into life; we know it because we love our brothers. Whoever does not love is still under the power of death’ (1 Jn 3:14). This is the origin of our notion of mortal sin or sinfulness, namely a state of mind and will, a way of life amounting to a total rejection of God, a condition of total selfishness. Nowhere in the New Testament do we get a list of individual mortal sins meriting the punishment of hell or needing confession and special absolution, but the various sin-lists are warnings and indications as to the kind of behaviour that can lead to the state of mortal sinfulness, spiritual death.
The early Christians soon discovered that in spite of their new life in Christ, they were still subject to temptation and sin, so there was need for repentance and continual conversion, hence the warnings of the sin‑lists. But Paul was no believer in do‑it‑yourself sanctity. The community is a central theme in his theology, and he was particularly conscious of the harm that could be done to the community by the presence of an unrepentant sinner. We see the beginnings of the practice of excommunication in 1 Cor 5:3-11. Sinners were to be excluded from the community and shunned by their fellow-believers, both to shock them into repentance and to protect the community from the contagion of their sinfulness. This practice came to be systematised by later generations in the Church, which imposed canonical penance as a condition for the re-admission of those excommunicated, and specified the sins which merited the penalty of excommunication. These were called ‘crimes, grave sins, capital sins’. The main ones were idolatry, apostasy, murder, abortion and publicly known adulterous relationship. They were ‘grave’ not so much because of the degree of personal guilt, but rather because they caused scandal and serious injury to the Church. For centuries the sinner could be re‑admitted only once in a lifetime, but gradually re-admission became more frequent and the list of ‘grave sins’ became more extensive, including even internal sins. The Celtic missionaries who were responsible for the development of frequent confession drew up a sliding scale of penances for the various sins, and soon the Church was fully involved in the measuring business. These tariffed penances were proportioned to the external act, without any reference to the degree of moral responsibility. The final phase came when the Council of Trent decreed that penitents were to confess all mortal sins according to number and kind.
Mortal and venial
The decree did not specify what constituted mortal sin, so it was left to moral theologians and canonists to answer the questions of the faithful on the point. Mortal sin came to be defined as the transgression of a divine law in a grievous matter with full knowledge and full consent. The textbooks distinguished: 1) Sins which according to their nature could never be venial, allowing of no lightness of matter (e.g. unbelief, lewd desires). Such sins could be venial only through imperfect attention or partial consent. 2) Sins whose matter is important in itself, but which in particular cases may be light; thus theft may be mortal or venial depending on the amount stolen. 3) Sins that always remain venial as long as no circumstance is superadded to change the nature of the sin, e.g. immoderation in sleep or laughter, although these may become mortal sins because of an erroneous conscience. Venial sin in general is when the matter is light or there is not full knowledge or consent. The textbooks also contained elaborate criteria for measuring not only the gravity, but also the number and kind of sins. Furthermore, since laws were binding in conscience, people wanted to know of individual laws whether they obliged under pain of mortal or venial sin, and for laws that could be quantitatively measured they wanted to know what quantity of time or matter was required for mortal sin. Hence the ‘sin-grid’ familiar to generations of Catholics, the long list of sins with their ascending or descending degrees of gravity, and their aggravating or extenuating circumstances.
Since the ‘matter’ of these sins was clearly categorised as mortal or venial, there was little room for discussion. The burden of the enquiry then shifted to the degree of awareness or the amount of consent in order to establish the gravity of the sin. This was the area in which the confessor sometimes asked: ‘did you take pleasure in it?’ Since, in many cases, the examination was done long after the event, which may have been quite hazy in the first instance, it was not always possible to come up with a clear verdict, so for the sake of safety, the phrase ‘insofar as God sees me guilty’ was added to the confession of such sins.
Since mortal sin was considered to mean the rejection of God by the fully deliberate refusal to obey him in one of his commandments, it involved the loss of sanctifying grace, the divine life in the soul. This meant spiritual death, and a person dying in that state would be punished by an eternity in hell. It was a very serious affair, determining one’s destiny in the after-life, and the fear it engendered often gave rise to considerable scrupulosity. On the other hand, a certain laxity developed towards sins which were dismissed as ‘only venial’.
False clarity
It is true that this simple, clear-cut approach helped some people to examine their conscience truthfully and make sincere and fruitful confessions. The casuistry of moral theologians was a genuine pastoral concern to mix mercy and justice, to find a reasonable solution in the apparent conflict between inflexible principle and the intractable human situation. But the clarity and simplicity are only apparent. Today’s Catholics no longer accept such a simple rule of thumb. Modern psychology has added several nuances to the notion of ‘full knowledge and full consent’, and we have come to realise that isolated actions, bits of behaviour, cannot be given moral labels unless understood in terms of their human meaning, and this is not possible except in the context of the total personality. The great theologians like Aquinas and Bonaventure were careful to explain that in listing actions that were matter for mortal sin, they were simply providing an extrinsic criterion, a general indication of the kind of action that would normally involve a person’s basic moral stance and require a choice that would be fundamentally for God or self. But the later tradition, concerned with measurement and control, came to attribute an independent and almost absolute value to the external action. In the minds of the vast majority of the faithful, to miss Sunday Mass deliberately without justification was a mortal sin and to die before repenting of it meant eternity in hell. Perhaps some of the clergy might have been able to explain that the position was never quite as harsh as that, but they seldom told the faithful.
Fundamental option
St. Paul, the Old Testament prophets, and most of all Jesus himself continually stressed that true religion was a matter of the heart, not simply as the symbolic seat of the emotions, but as the core of the whole personality. All of the commandments are simply expressions of the basic command to ‘love God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and love your neighbour as yourself’ (Mt. 22:3739). This involves first and foremost a basic choice about what is supremely important in life, a fundamental attitude or stance that will be expressed in our thoughts, words and deeds. Deep in our hearts we take a stand on the way we intend to live our life; for God and others, or totally for self, symbolised by Mammon or the idols of the world, such as money, power, ambition. God calls us to choose. We cannot live with a divided heart. As Jesus puts it: ‘You cannot serve both God and money’ (Mt. 6:24). The explicit choice for God may be made in a peak moment of religious experience and further renewed in prayer and action, or it may simply take shape as the overall pattern of our lives built up by, and expressed in, the individual decisions of daily living. On the other hand, mortal sin, in the biblical sense, is to choose self before God, to make something other than God the centre of one’s life. This may be done in a single moment, when a clear decision is made involving one’s subsequent life, or, more frequently, it may be the result of a slow process of moral and spiritual decline.
Theologians today speak of this as our basic choice, or fundamental option, our general life-direction, for or against God. This basic attitude of will flows from the core of our personality and determines the overall pattern of our lives. But not all our decisions and actions are central in the sense of coming from the centre of our person. Many of our actions are at the periphery and not at the centre. They come from instinctual drives, both positive and negative, such as the sexual urge, aggressiveness, fear, insecurity, all of which obscure our insight, or from routine, so that our full freedom is not involved. Such actions may be in line with our basic option, perhaps strengthening it, or they may be inconsistent with it and so weaken it, though not central enough to change it. It is clear that mortal sinfulness in the biblical sense of spiritual death is not present unless in the case of central acts coming from the core of our personality, acts which change our basic attitude away from God. The change need not be a dramatic one concentrated in a single act, but we can discover that we have arrived at such a state where God has been excluded from our lives. Human life, however, is seldom a clear-cut, black‑and‑white picture, and the human heart has its own deviousness and perversity, so we cannot be certain where we stand in God’s eyes. Only God himself knows. 'I, the Lord, search the minds and test the hearts of men. I treat each one according to the way he lives, according to what he does’ (Jer 17:10). Thomas Aquinas reminds us that we can never have more than a moral certainty that we are in the state of grace. Hence, though we trust in the infinite love and mercy of God who is our Father, we work out our salvation in fear and trembling.
Living with uncertainty
Christian realism demands that we accept this uncertainty and learn to live with it. This applies not only to our basic option, but even to individual sin actions. Such is the basic imperfection of our human nature, the influence of subconscious factors, the weight of external pressures from the sinful world around us, and the gradual and groping development of our freedom and moral insight, that we can seldom be sure that a particular action is central, that it flows from the core of our personality and the depth of our conscience. Here too we must beware of the lust for certainty. It is far more helpful to keep our eyes firmly fixed on Jesus our model and the ideals he sets before us than to become preoccupied with self by trying to gauge the precise measure of our failure or virtue. It does not follow, however, that the external action is of little account, that we have nothing to learn from the sin lists of Scripture or Church documents. The community, in the light of its experience of human nature, intends such lists to indicate that certain actions are so serious in their consequences that morally developed people performing them could normally presume that they came from the centre of their person and not from the periphery. People could well have a moral certainty that such is the case, but no one else, lay person, priest, bishop or pope, is ever justified in pointing a finger at such people and judging that they are in mortal sin.
No matter how fickle or inconsistent people may be, however, there is a basic continuity in human living, so that one does not change one’s fundamental option every second day. Psychologically, it simply does not make sense to think of people falling in and out of mortal sin every week. This ought to alert us to the inadequacy of our traditional mortal/venial division of sin. Mortal sin as presented in our traditional catechisms cannot be simply equated with the mortal sinfulness which is spiritual death described in the biblical texts. The Bible distinguishes between sins that amount to a rejection of God, hence spiritual death, and lesser sins, the result of human weakness or inattention, the sins into which even the just person falls seven times a day. Modern psychology distinguishes between basic option and the actions that flow from the centre of the person, on the one hand, and peripheral actions on the other, actions that do not engage the totality of the person. But the traditional mortal/venial distinction of the catechism owes its origin to the Church’s discipline for the sacrament of confession. Mortal sins, in this tradition, are those for which sacramental confession is required before Communion. Because they obviously included the biblical kind of mortal sinfulness, and the same name ‘mortal’ was used, all sins subsequently listed as ‘mortal’ were understood in the biblical sense, and confusion followed.
Threefold division
Theologians today prefer a threefold division: 1) mortal sinfulness, 2) serious or grave sin, and 3) less serious or venial sin, in general the daily faults of the earnest good person. The term ‘mortal sinfulness’ is used in the biblical sense explained above. Some of the ‘mortal sins’ of the catechism tradition could well come within this category, if they involve a change of basic option. Others would not. For example, the decision to omit Sunday Mass, for one person, might well be the final step and the external expression of a state of mind that had already become alienated from God. The same decision, for another person, might be nothing more than laziness or a bout of depression, leaving intact the basic orientation towards God. The new category ‘serious or grave sin’ would straddle the old mortal/venial division, insofar as some sins once considered ‘mortal’ do not involve total alienation from God (and so do not merit the title ‘mortal sinfulness’), and on the other hand, some of those formerly considered ‘venial’ cannot be simply dismissed as ‘only venial’.
The older tradition, at least in its popular understanding, had a clear boundary‑line for mortal sin, and everything short of that was considered venial. But there is a world of difference between the ordinary daily sins of weakness, the occasional delays, halts and even minor detours of the person sincerely trying to walk in the path of the Lord, and the creeping paralysis, the emptiness of those who only pay lip‑service to God, who do not really care, who blind themselves to their growing alienation from God with the rationalisation that their sins are ‘only venial’. In the light of what we have said about central and peripheral acts, good people sincerely doing their best need not worry even if they experience serious faults. Their ‘heart’ is in the right place. They know that they cannot rely on their own strength, but all their trust is in the Lord, and they make their conversion a daily-renewed life-commitment.
Perhaps at this point the old lust for certainty will again make its appearance. People will accept this new threefold division, but immediately ask for a list of sins for each category. It would be a mistaken kindness on the part of theologians or pastors to meet the request. There is real need for a catechesis of sin, but a new ‘sin-grid’ to replace the old would be disastrous. Surely the time has come to trust people to grow up, to take the emphasis off measurement and control. The old sin‑lists can still be referred to, even developed to encompass new problems and situations, but without the mortal‑venial labels that encourage a quantitative approach to morality, with all its dangers of legalism, minimalism, complacency and scrupulosity. A later chapter will deal with the problem of ‘teaching morality’, for parents, teachers, pastors, in fact for all the teaching authorities in the Church, but a few points may be appropriate in the present context. The real challenge is to enable people to internalise and make their own the basic Christian values, to evaluate their daily living in the light of these values, and to go on forming their conscience in an ever‑growing sensitivity to what God expects. Morality cannot simply be decreed. People need to be persuaded and convinced, so it is not enough to label something a ‘sin’ or a ‘mortal sin’ and leave it at that.
Objective sin?
To describe something as ‘objectively sinful’, implying that it is sinful in itself, without any reference to motive or circumstances is nonsense. There are no ‘objective sins’. Sin is present only where people freely choose something which they personally know to be evil. Their action may be bad or wrong or evil in the sense that it is harmful to others or to oneself, and so may be described objectively as ‘wrongdoing’, but it is not a moral evil, not a ‘sin’, unless people themselves judge it to be so and yet go ahead and do it. However, even though an individual may not be subjectively guilty of sin in a particular action, he or she is responsible for the consequences of it, and so may be bound to make ‘restitution’ for the harm caused.
The word ‘sin’ cannot be applied to a physical activity as such, but only to the total action in its human meaning, therefore including motive and circumstances. In fact, the same physical activity can have several human meanings. Thus, killing may be murder, self-defence or carrying out a legally-decreed death-sentence. Speaking a falsehood may be lying or preserving a secret to save a life. An act of human intercourse might be an expression of married love, rape (even within marriage), hatred of women, etc. These are essentially different human actions, not the same action plus different motives or circumstances. It is only the total act, with its full human meaning for the person doing it that can be described as ‘sin’. This does not mean that the physical component does not enter into the moral assessment of a particular action. Normally, the physical action is an expression of the doer’s attitude of will, so that, for example, it is generally presumed that one who deliberately burns down a neighbour’s house has more hatred than one who merely calls the neighbour names. But the physical act alone, without motive and circumstances, cannot decide the sinfulness of the action.
Intrinsic evil?
If one should speak of ‘objective wrongdoing’ rather than ‘objective sin’, the same caution applies to the use of the word ‘evil’ and particularly the phrase ‘intrinsically evil’. An evil is a disvalue, something harmful to people, like poverty, suffering, disease, injury, death. Whatever good consequences they may occasionally have, these are bad or evil in themselves. We have a moral obligation to fight them as far as possible. But they are not sins, not moral evils, whether they are caused by chance, by natural causes or by human action. Even when caused by human action, in themselves they still remain non-moral or pre-moral evils. The word ‘moral’ attaches only to free human behaviour. These pre-moral evils do not become moral evils until they are willed for their own sake, without proportionate reason. In this case, they still remain pre-moral evils in themselves, bad things to happen, but they are moral evils, immoral actions, sins, only for the persons bringing them about, e.g. inflicting injury or death without proportionate reason. Thus, to kill a person with no justifying reason is a sin, a moral as well as a pre-moral or non-moral evil. Killing a person in self-defence is still evil, a pre-moral evil, a bad thing to happen, something to regret and to be done only with great reluctance, but it is not morally evil or sinful; it is part of the morally good act of self-defence. Too often in the past we marched off to battle and killed with gusto because we reasoned that the war was just. It was too easily forgotten that the killing was still evil, a bad thing to have to do, even though it might not be counted as sin.
To say that something is ‘intrinsically evil’ means that it is evil of its very nature, and the impression is given that nothing would ever justify it. We can say of non-moral or pre-moral evils like death, injury, sickness, etc. that they are evil in themselves, and in that sense intrinsically evil. But it does not follow that there are never situations in which they are necessary and therefore justified. It serves no purpose to use the phrase ‘intrinsically evil’ of pre-moral evils, especially since it gives rise to such confusion.
It makes even less sense to apply it to moral evils or sins, since these are always individual human actions each with its own motive and circumstances. The same physical action, e.g. using contraceptives, for one person may be an exercise in responsible married love and parenthood, and for another an act of selfishness and exploitation. To say that artificial methods of contraception are intrinsically evil is to give the impression that in no circumstances could they be morally justified. But this is not the case. Our Catholic Church claims that they are immoral as a means of responsible parenthood, yet the Vatican allowed nuns threatened with rape in the Congo to take contraceptive precautions, and it is accepted that contraceptive pills may be taken for therapeutic reasons (to regularise the cycle, etc.). All these cases involve the same pills, working in precisely the same way according to God’s chemical and physiological laws. Since the main difference is the intention or motive, it cannot be the ‘artificial contraception’ which is evil, but the whole human action involving motive and circumstances, in which case ‘intrinsically evil’ makes no sense whatever.
Most theologians nowadays admit that the phrase ‘intrinsically evil’ as applied to moral evil serves no purpose. Perhaps out of reverence for traditional usage, some try to justify it on the basis of pastoral concern for formulating practical norms. It is claimed that if questioning were allowed in some cases, exceptions would multiply, hence the need for a simple direct prohibition. This seems a short-sighted pastoral policy. The Church may be concerned about psychological and sociological as well as logical factors when formulating moral norms, but pastors who ignore logic too blatantly are insulting the God-given intelligence of the faithful and putting a premium on a kind of unquestioning simplicity and obedience which does not help moral maturity or responsibility. That the phrase could profitably be dropped is shown by the fact that the Holy See’s Declaration on Abortion (1974) makes no use of it whatever and yet presents a very convincing moral argument, whereas its Declaration on Sexual Ethics (1975) uses it freely with reference to masturbation and homosexuality and signally fails to prove its point. If homosexual people are considered intrinsically or objectively disordered (the more recent expression to avoid a harsher word) because they have an inbuilt natural inclination towards morally evil acts, the Church ought to be able to explain why God created so many millions of them.
Under pain of sin?
Another phrase that might well be dropped in the Church is that certain laws are binding ‘under pain of mortal sin’. From all that has been said above, it should be clear that the transgression of no law can automatically be described as mortal sin, meriting hell for all eternity. Neither the authority making the law nor a lawyer commentator nor a moral theologian can specify the precise moral obligation of a particular law. This will depend on the individual, the situation, and particularly the value the particular law has in promoting the welfare of the individual or the community. A law that is arbitrary simply cannot bind in conscience. The individual needs to be aware of his or her own limitations and bias, and realise the wisdom of the old saying that no one is a judge in their own case, but a law will appeal to conscience only to the extent that the person is convinced of its necessity or usefulness. It is true that canon law decrees that ‘laws made to counter a common danger impose an obligation even though this danger does not exist in the particular case’, but a much older tradition left more to conscience by the principle that a law founded on presumption of common danger loses its binding force when the presumption is not verified. In principle all laws are binding in conscience, but the extent of the obligation is not something that can be precisely measured and expressed in a blanket phrase applicable to all.
Most clearly of all, no lawgiver has the power to impose the sanction of mortal sin, and certainly not eternal punishment. To decree that ‘dancing after midnight or attendance at non-Catholic schools is a mortal sin’ is simply nonsense. If the situation demands it, a legal sanction may be applied (e.g. the lawbreaker may be excommunicated or denied certain privileges), but the legal order should not be confused with the moral. The two orders simply do not coincide. People who have been excommunicated lose their standing in the community, but it does not necessarily follow that they have lost their standing with God. No human authority can deprive us of divine grace or interfere with our relationship with God. If the relationship is strained or broken, we alone are responsible, because God is the ever‑faithful, infinite lover who never goes back on his word. The Church ignores the agony of conscience suffered for years by thousands of faithful Catholics because of ‘Church teaching’ which in fact was simply the declaration of a single pope, Humanae vitae.
Divine paradox
The question: ‘how far can I go before it is a mortal sin?’ is too much like the attitude of a husband who would ask his wife: ‘how much can I play around before you consider me definitely unfaithful?’ or: ‘how far can I stretch our relationship before it breaks?’ A more Christian attitude is ‘How much can I give? How much can I love? How do I show my love?’ Our conversion and commitment to the Lord must be continually renewed, and from time to time we need to look into our hearts and take stock of our position. But in evaluating our response to God, whether positive or negative, we should not look for more clarity and security than is possible. A relationship cannot be measured in quantitative terms. It is the quality that counts. Of course, the quality is shown in action, as Jesus makes clear in his description of the final judgement (Mt. 25:31‑46), but the quality itself is not subject to material measurement. We need to beware of false security and the lust for certainty. The spiritual tension we experience can be a healthy safeguard against the dangers that flow from over-concern with measurement, and it is something we must learn to live with. It should certainly warn us against judging by appearances and measurable results. The divine quality that God expects to see reflected in our action may be present even at very low levels of achievement. The neurotic or psychologically crippled person may be very close to God although the expression of that person’s love is hindered and blocked by disabilities for which he or she is not responsible. On the other hand, the divine quality flowing from ‘that mind which was in Christ Jesus’ is never fully present even in the activity of the saint, because only God himself is totally good. There must be millions of saints far higher in heaven than the ones we have been able to measure and canonise. God’s ways are not our ways, and Jesus himself warns against the dangers of measurement with his paradox about the first being last, the last being first, and the weak confounding the strong.