Sin

Sin is a free refusal of the love of God. It consists in preferring one’s own will to the divine will and in transgressing the law of God, which expresses that love: “Whosoever committeth sin committeth also iniquity. And sin is iniquity.” 1 John 3:4 Saint Augustine defines it thus: every word, every act, every desire contrary to the eternal law. Every sin thus carries a twofold movement: man turns toward a lesser good and moves away from God, who is his end and his good. The very word says it: the Greek of the Gospel names sin hamartia (ἁμαρτία), a term from archery that means “to miss the mark,” and the Hebrew of the Old Testament carries the same image. To sin is to miss the goal for which man is made, and that goal is God. It is committed in thought, in word, in deed, and by omission: “To him therefore who knoweth to do good and doth it not, to him it is sin.” James 4:17

Original and personal

One same word covers two realities. Original sin is the state of privation into which every man is born, inherited from the fault of the origins. Personal sin is the act that each one commits by his own will, once the age of reason has come. All are subject to it: “For all have sinned and do need the glory of God.” Romans 3:23

Mortal sin

Personal sins do not all weigh the same, and Scripture itself marks this: “There is a sin unto death. All iniquity is sin. And there is a sin unto death.” 1 John 5:16-17 The gravest, mortal sin, breaks friendship with God and causes the loss of sanctifying grace, that divine life set in the soul. Three conditions, gathered together, constitute it. First there must be grave matter, an act that gravely contradicts the law of God, such as the transgression of the great commandments of the Decalogue: murder, adultery, serious theft, false witness, contempt of God. Then there must be full knowledge of this gravity, knowing that one does a serious wrong. Finally there must be full consent, willing it freely, without being constrained. Should one of these conditions be lacking, the fault no longer reaches this degree: an ignorance that could not be overcome, a freedom impaired by fear or passion lighten its weight. Its mortal gravity holds to this: in choosing a good against a grave commandment, man turns his whole self away from God, his last end, and rejects the love that held him united to him. Where the three come together, sin gives death to the soul, which loses charity and the life of grace: “The wages of sin is death.” Romans 6:23 Man remains cut off from his end; and this rupture, persisted in without repentance, becomes the eternal separation from God.

Venial sin

Venial sin wounds charity without destroying it: friendship with God remains, weakened. Even the just one falls into it: “in many things we all offend.” James 3:2 Its matter is light, or else the knowledge or the consent are only partial. Repeated and consented to, it cools love and disposes little by little to grave sin; it also leaves in the soul a debt to be purified, as does every fault even once pardoned, which purgatory finishes paying.

Its root

Every fault is born of one same movement: to prefer oneself to God. It rises from the heart: “For from the heart come forth evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false testimonies, blasphemies.” Matthew 15:19 At the deepest point stands pride, the movement by which man makes himself his own centre and his own god. “The beginning of the pride of man, is to fall off from God.” Sirach 10:12 It is the disposition from which all the other sins come forth, and for this reason it reappears at the head of the capital inclinations it commands. From it are born three concupiscences, in which man seeks outside God what God alone gives: “the concupiscence of the flesh and the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life.” 1 John 2:16 From these concupiscences rise the seven inclinations called capital, because they are the heads from which the other faults spring: pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth, presented one by one in the article devoted to them. Sin thus impoverishes man, by cutting him off from the very source of his life.

Its wounds

Sin wounds first the one who commits it. By dint of yielding, man loses mastery of himself and becomes captive to what he covets. “whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” John 8:34 Judgement grows dim, the will weakens, and the taste for true good withdraws; repeated, the fault carves out a slope, the habit called vice, in which evil is committed ever more easily.

The wound reaches others as well. Every fault overflows its author. “none of us liveth to himself.” Romans 14:7 Sin wrongs the neighbour, by the harm it does him and by the example that draws him along, and it impoverishes the whole Church, that body in which the members hold to one another. “if one member suffer any thing, all the members suffer with it.” 1 Corinthians 12:26 Repeated, faults inscribe themselves into customs and institutions, forming what the Church calls structures of sin: social situations, born of personal faults, which in turn push toward evil those who live in them.

Its forgiveness

God never ceases to offer his forgiveness to whoever returns to him. Christ bore the sin of the world to deliver men from it, and he entrusted to his Church the power to forgive sins: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.” John 20:23 Mortal sin is lifted in the sacrament of penance, which restores to the soul the grace it had lost and reconciles it with God. Already perfect contrition, that sorrow born of the love of God more than of fear, restores grace before confession itself, to whoever keeps the firm will to have recourse to this sacrament as soon as he can. Venial sin is wiped away by many paths: contrition of heart, prayer, almsgiving, the sacramentals, and above all the Eucharist, which strengthens charity. To the one who acknowledges his fault, mercy is always promised: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins.” 1 John 1:9

The sin against the Spirit

One sole fault escapes pardon, and Christ names it before the Pharisees, at the moment when they attribute to the demon what he accomplishes by the Spirit of God. Having just delivered a possessed man before their eyes, he hears himself accused of casting out demons by their prince. “This man casteth not out devils but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils.” Matthew 12:24 They are not in ignorance: they have seen the signs multiply and cannot honestly deny the force of what they see. Their mind is already set against him. “And the Pharisees going out made a consultation against him, how they might destroy him.” Matthew 12:14 Rather than yield to the evidence, they ascribe to the demon what their conscience shows them comes from God: not an error, but a settled refusal. It is to this that Christ responds. “Therefore I say to you: Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven men, but the blasphemy of the Spirit shall not be forgiven.” Matthew 12:31

He distinguishes at once two refusals. “And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but he that shall speak against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world, nor in the world to come.” Matthew 12:32 Not to recognise God under the features of this man can come from ignorance, and ignorance is excused; but to call diabolical the work one knows to be divine is no longer a mistake. It is to close one’s eyes to the light recognised, and knowingly to push away the very one through whom pardon would be received.

The sin against the Spirit is therefore not a blasphemy that God would refuse to absolve, as if he met there a limit to his mercy; it is the sin that closes itself to pardon, by pushing away the grace through which it would be remitted. Tradition recognises in it hardening under its various forms, the despair that no longer believes in pardon, the presumption that no longer asks for it, and above all final impenitence, the refusal held to the end to be converted. As long as this refusal lasts, it bars the door from within, for God saves no one against his will. Whoever fears having committed this sin has not committed it, for the very desire for pardon is its contrary.