Epistles to Ansgar: Letter 06 Sin
28 July AD 2024, Feast of Saint Innocent I
Dear Godson,
These letters shall discuss why we believe, what we believe, and how we are to live our belief.
Today is the Feast of Innocent I, who is remembered for having condemned Pelagianism, a heresy that denied the doctrine of Original Sin. Pelagianism held that a man by his own efforts, unaided by divine grace, could avoid sin and earn a place in paradise.
The Church teaches otherwise.
Even the most dark-minded cynic ever to despair at the woe of the human condition does not paint a scene as dark as this: we are all born to die, all condemned to hellfire and damnation eternally, merely for the sin of being born human.
The sin of our nature is built into human nature, and no human effort can efface this sin, nor even mitigate it. You cannot climb out of the grave under your own power. You cannot climb out of hell.
This is an alarming doctrine, and the one which most easily and effectively brings doubt to the soul of the faithful. Where is the benevolent God of whom the prophets sing?
When mother or wife dies, or child is snatched away, or nations fall and cities burn, or plagues and disasters bring floods and famines, where is God?
A benevolent lord could not wish evils on his subjects, nor a just king, nor a kind father.
If an earthly father fails to save his beloved children, it is because he is not strong enough to fight, or not wise enough to foresee and forestall every evil, or his eyes and attention are elsewhere. Mortal fathers can neglect or ignore their children, and their love can lapse. We are not perfect.
But Our Father in Heaven is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and infinitely benevolent. The divine nature cannot be otherwise than to will and decree what is best for us. He is perfect.
No evil came into His creation by overwhelming the strength, outsmarting the wit, or eluding the eye of God. And, once death and evil came into the world, no one and nothing can prevent God from undoing and curing that evil, which means, the evil persists by the permission of divine will.
One of the hardest doctrines for the modern mind to heed, the harshest thing to hear, is that the evils unleashed on this world, including the inescapable evil of death, which visits all men, rich and poor, great and humble alike, and smites the innocent as well as the guilty, is visited on man by the Curse of Adam.
Divine decree condemns us to this, and every baby born is born mortal, born doomed to die, due to our innately sinful nature. This is the doctrine of Original Sin.
And yet the Church calls this doom due and in keeping with the benevolence of God, divinely right and just. How is this so?
How did I earn the punishment of death before I was even conceived? The wrong is not my doing!
And if it were, why does God allow the craving for life to lodge in my breast? Why cannot I, as the stoics of old sought to do, be content to lay down my life with no hope of future life, cosigned to oblivion, as gently and as calmly as I might put a book aside once the last page is read, and story is over? Beasts die without regret, and live without fear and forethought. Not I.
Life is unfair, full of pain, and then we die. Yet we all crave fairness, happiness, and life.
We all crave health, success, contentment, and joy, and some men find these things for a season. But then winter comes, health fails, fortunes are lost, loved one depart, age and senility set in. Death ends life, and time erases all memories and monuments.
Earth itself one day will die, and be engulfed by the sun, which in turn will swell, and dim, and go dark. In time, all the stars shall fail.
Even if we lived in a quiet land, where winter never came, unvisited by disease or madness, calamity, storm or quake, and enjoyed lavish years of peace, warless and crimeless, death would come.
Even if in this quiet land, we heard no scolding tongue, touched no scalding flame, and bees without stings lit on roses without thorns in walled gardens of scented beauty, death would come.
Even if heartsickness were unknown, and all courtship ended in marriage, and all marriages were fruitful and happy ever after, still the cruel injustice of death would visit us, and no one be spared.
Death comes to one and all, after long life or short. Death spares no babe for its innocence, no maiden for her beauty, no wife for her faithfulness, no mother howsoever beloved and needed. Neither the hero for his courage, nor the sage for his wisdom, the scholar for his learning, nor the ascetic for his discipline, nor the statesman for his justice can escape.
Not even the saint for his saintliness is spared: their holy footsteps do not still walk the earth. Saint Peter sits not as Pope, nor Saint Louis as king, nor does Saint Thomas write, and Mother Theresa of Calcutta tends the sick no more. Apparitions appear, or voices speak, but this is rare miracle, and even the Church accepts not such reports unskeptically.
Death can be delayed, but not cured. Mortal men can murder, or judges execute, but neither human strength nor decree of law can return a dead man’s life to him, or bring back a loved ones once lost. Medical knowledge, hygiene, diet and exercise and salutary climate can often restore or preserve health, and perhaps add days or years to average lifespan. A reprieve of a season is possible. But the end is the same.
It was always thus. The earliest writings of history, preserved in stone or tablets of clay, repeat prayers for the dead, or tell tales of the futile search for endless life. It is not to be found on earth.
Neither can the evil of death be ignored. The earliest traces of prehistory show paleolithic cavemen burying their dead with weapons and flower wreaths, as if in hope of resurrection, when the dead might rise and have need of spear, or might smile the bouquet his loved ones wove about his brow to honor him.
Death is an evil all men know comes to all.
Death at least is evenhanded. If death were the only woe of man, this would be intolerable and unjust, but it would at least be equal.
It is not the only woe.
There is injustice, untruthfulness, and ugliness.
All the other injustices we would wish away from the quiet land imagined above visit men: pestilence and psychosis, wildfire, typhoon and flood, tumult, riot, raid, and war, slander, gossip, mockery, arson and vermin, heartbreak, ruin, misfortune, loneliness.
This world is also ugly. Few and happy is he who never sees stinking ghettos sweltering under the sun, crumbling buildings coated with senseless graffiti, sewage in the streets, or bogs black with pollution, sights worse and more shocking: harlots and dope addicts bathing in their own filth, starving children with bloated stomachs, and whatever else sin and malice engender in dungeons and torture cells, but also in town squares, halls of power, in the privacy of the home, in the privacy of the heart.
The natural evils that fall on men by ill fortune are the least of his sorrows.
Far worse issue from the indifference or malice of his brothers and neighbors and leaders. Man is wolf to man.
Men prey on men both singly and in groups, near and far. The great and powerful in distant hemispheres arguing over boundaries on a map or some nuance of trade law can doom generations to war and slavery, poverty and despoilation by the countless multitudes, or her own mother might abandon one single girl to starve if the one-child policy of Peking compels her to prefer bearing a boy.
And the untruthful tongue is a more venomous weapon yet, for reputation, rank, fortune, fellowship, friendship, livelihood, liberty and life itself can be reaved away by secret whispers and public accusations.
All our massive and unimaginably complex lawbooks and legalities, institutions and traditions of elections and campaigns, courtrooms and parliaments, inspectors and detectives are meant to protect us, not from nature, but from human nature.
For threats from chaos and tumult, we elevate emperors and crown kings, inaugurate Caesars and presidents, seat parliaments and senates, and arm the magistrate.
For threats from neighboring nations, we establish arsenals and shipyards, fortresses and field guns, militias and mercenaries, armies and navies, and employ spies. For threats from neighboring streets we build and man all police stations, forensic labs, and locks and alarms, the entire system of federal and civic law, juries and prosecutors, jailor and executioners.
For threats from business partners, all the body of commercial law, contract law, tort law. And for threats from family, trusts and estates, divorce courts and child protective services. For threats of one man to himself, the suicide hotline or straitjacket.
From the mightiest armada to the loneliest nightwatchman, all these efforts are necessitated by the evils man visits on man by his own deliberation.
The evils perhaps are less woeful than death, but, unlike death, are uneven. It is not as if only warmakers men suffer in war, or only thieves are robbed, or adulteresses are betrayed. The innocent are crushed by calamity of whose making they had no part while the guilty die in bed, fat and full of years, surrounded by well-wishers and grandchildren.
The sheer injustice, disproportion, and unfairness with which natural evils and manmade evils are visited indifferently on the guilty and innocent alike is part of the Curse of Adam.
Even Abel was not protected by his righteousness from the hand of his brother Cain. Indeed, if tradition is true, Cain prospered, built a city, and lived for many hundreds years more, until slain by Lamech, the great-grandson of his grandson.
Such are the evils that rule and reign over our world: natural evils, manmade evils, and evil fortune, which unevenly distributes misfortune to the just and unjust alike without sense or proportion.
Of all doctrines of Christian teaching, the doctrine of Original Sin, the doctrine that man is born to do and suffer evil, is the only one which need not be taken on faith. It is obvious. It is self evident. One need only open any newspaper to see that no nation, no race, no man is free of sin. One need only open one’s own heart to see the love of sin is there.
Children below the age of reason, no matter how innocent at law, are naturally selfish and intemperate, cowardly and imprudent. Virtue simply does not arise from human nature. It is a matter of experience, discipline and training, obedience to elders who learned in turn from harsh experience.
Men are naturally born as barbarians, and we must be domesticated before we can be trained, and must be trained before we can be educated.
Any father can tell you that children do not need to be taught how to lie.
As soon as Junior knows how to talk, he knows how to lie. It comes naturally. It is natural. To lie convincingly might require practice, but lies spring from the human heart without tutoring.
How pleasing it is to do some wrong, and by blaming another, or finding a ready excuse, to escape penalty!
Likewise with pride and wrath and lust and greed and envy, and other passions and impulses, which, if unchecked, lead naturally to arrogance, murder, adultery, theft, and perjury.
To be sure, children and barbarians have some natural sentiments, love of parents or queasy reluctance to shed blood, sentiments of pity or a natural sense of fairplay which may, from time to time, curtail our various lusts and appetites. We all have a conscience, stronger in some than in others, fully dead in some, overactive in others, or a sense of shame seen reflected in the eyes of peers, which incline the heart toward virtue.
That these sentiments are too weak and uncertain to govern our behavior is the lesson of the human condition. It can be seen in the opening chapters of Genesis, in the temptation of Eve, the Fall of Adam, the murder of Cain, the boasting of Lamech, the Flood of Noah.
Those who claim these evils arise from miseducation or the lapses of the social order are absurd, and their vaporing need not be discussed seriously. Only an intellectual would believe such folly, and only then if his heart were corrupt and had lost the simplicity known to the innocent.
Every man in his heart knows himself to have fallen short of the good and loving nature he naturally knows himself to be obligated to fulfill.
The simple answer is that the evils of Original Sin spring from disobedience to God, a treason against virtue and goodness, and our own imperfection that renders us unclean, unholy, impure. Studying one’s memory, you or anyone can readily find wrongdoing and shortcoming, both in what one has done or has failed to do, in thought, word, and deed.
The mystery of how it is that we participated in the Sin of Adam before birth is answered by a pragmatic answer, plain as potatoes: you and I partook in disobedience to God when we last did something or failed to do something that offended the conscience, that still small voice of moral goodness all men carry in their souls, and all men wish to smother.
I need not give reasons to explain that the conscience condemns us. Your memory, or mine, or your observations of friends and family, the history of our people, or of our world, is eyewitness enough.
Why is Original Sin punished as it is? It cannot be otherwise. As mentioned in my first letter, on the Curse of Adam, God is the source of life and light, pleasure and joy. To disobey is to flee. Depart from God, one departs from life and light, pleasure and joy, and therefore enters death and darkness, pain and woe.
Why is sin natural to us? Why did not God make Adam unable to afflict his son with his disobedience?
It is not logically impossible for such beings to exist. They do. They are not us.
God did indeed create a race of beings who do not spring from parents, and do not share any species with each other: these are called angels. When they fall, not tempted by any serpent, no salvation nor redemption is possible for them. Their nature cannot be darkened by any parental wrongdoing.
But if we live in a universe where one man’s sin can afflict his heirs, then becoming the heirs of Christ is open to us as a loophole, so one man’s salvation can affect the salvation of all who follow him.
Consider: if a man is exiled, and justly so, from a land where he has committed crime against the sovereign there, and he needs must dwell elsewhere, in a cursed land, in a valley of darkness, in a vale of tears. Any sons he fathers will be born in the valley. How can it be otherwise? Should God have sterilized Adam, so that Cain, Abel, and Seth would never be born? We can be glad that did not happen. Should God have destroyed mankind for our evil ways? Well, He did, in the time of Noah, but Noah was upright enough to be spared, and his family was spared with him for his sake, as were we, who sprang from them.
It is better that we live, and sin, and be saved from sin by Christ, than that we never had been born.
Why is the punishment so harsh? Surely we could live in a world where only natural evils afflict us, and the misrule of man over man could be prevented? One can imagine a world where murder is possible, but rape is not, or where no theft can take place, or where a murderer could be drained of blood by a court of law, and his victim restored to life by some alchemy or strange technology we do not have on Earth. Why could not God have made the world a better place?
He left it to us to make the world a better place. We are sovereign here. We have the right and free choice, as the lords of creation, to rule our world well or badly. The dominion of man over beasts, over fish and fowl, over the natural world, was not taken away from Adam during the term of his exile.
By the same logic which makes us born into the world of Adam’s exile, we are born into the world he rules. If he gave the rulership of Earth over to the devil by abdicating his responsibilities through sin, it is up to us to break fealty with the devil, renounce all his works and all his ways, his false pomps and the glory of the world, and vow fealty to Christ.
Howsoever harsh is life in this valley of tears, please recall that this is an exile, not a banishment. It will last for a season, not forever. A path back to Eden was established by Christ. Thus both the mercy and the justice of God is perfect.
As for Adam, Christ brought him out of Hell when he descended there. For the three days Christ was dead, he conquered Hell. Adam now he dwells in the beatific vision in perfect bliss unending. To us, the sojourn in the outer darkness might seem long. But to Adam? Now that he dwells with his Lord, in whose image he was made, in perfect light?
Adam’s death was temporary. It would be like a disobedient child being stood in the corner for several silent minutes. A time out penalty.
Our death can likewise be temporary, not eternal. We need only choose life.
Yours,
John Charles Justin-martyr Wright
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
