Scrupulus is the Latin word for “a tiny pebble”—small at first but something that could become a great weight. In fact, ancient apothecaries used such a tiny rock to weigh out “a third of a dram” (1/24th of an ounce) on their scales. When applied to the spiritual life, a scruple is that which oppresses a soul chronically burdened by the weight of sin’s perceived inevitability.
The scrupulous person suffers from a chronic tendency to see sin where there is none and to be weighed down by an overly distrustful approach to life. It is someone who cannot help but question himself and thereby become paralyzed by the possibility that he might be doing something that offends God.
Obsessions of all sorts dwell in the layers of the human psyche. Always disguised as an “angel of light” (2 Cor 11:14), the enemy of our human nature will first tempt scrupulous souls to think of their unwillingness to commit sin as something meritorious, a motivation to be prized and protected. Yet in time the scrupulous person is revealed as the Pharisee he has unwittingly become: rigorous in keeping all the rules, perhaps, but interiorly cold, calculating, suspicious, and joyless.
He has become dedicated to an ideal, longing to be conformed to an image of who he thinks he should be, losing sight of the fact that Jesus loves him as he is. It is not sinning the scrupulous man hates but the semblance of committing a sin. It is precisely from this lack of freedom that scruples stem: the person who cannot delight in what truly is but is always in need of imposing his own private understanding of order on things.
Focus on the self
C.S. Lewis saw this move from desiring to demanding decency as the beginning of some Christian forms of piety: “From this buoyant humility, this farewell to the self with all its good resolutions, anxiety, scruples, and motive-scratchings, all the Protestant doctrines originally sprang. For it must be clearly understood that they were at first doctrines not of terror but of joy and hope” (English Literature, 33).
The terror Lewis describes is the Puritan ideal that was never about the Lord’s glorious face gazing upon mine; it was always about my face’s own unsullied appearance. As such, the scrupulous person is a person fixated on himself. His concern is not the Lord’s glory but his own repute.
In the 1984 movie Amadeus, Mozart’s musical nemesis, Antonio Salieri, lifts a prayer to God asking that he be gifted to compose the most beautiful sounds the world has ever heard. But at the center of Salieri’s plea stands not God but Salieri: “Lord, make me a great composer! Let me celebrate your glory through music—and be celebrated myself! Make me famous through the world, dear God. . . . In return, I vow I will give you my chastity, my industry, my deepest humility, every hour of my life.”
It is in this type of contractual religion that scruples begin: the concern is not the praise of God but one’s own standing—my piety, my work, my ritual observances, my sinlessness, and my salvation.
What a Salieri needs to learn is that the true lover of music revels in the brilliance of a Beethoven or the harmony of a Handel, never in himself. In this depiction of Salieri, we meet a man who sought not the beauty before him but the fact that those around him would become cognizant of his encounter with that beauty. He placed not the music but himself at the center of what was to be celebrated.
Similarly, the eyes of the scrupulous person are not gazing outward on the splendor of God, his Church, and the beauty of his world; instead, they are always inward seeking, scrutinizing the self to see where one stands in relation to where one thinks one should be. This man or woman is devoted to a plan, not a Person. In this inward stare there is thus a chilled unwillingness to surrender truly to Christ and thereby risk the needed remedy of relationship.
Scruple is not a biblical term, but it is surely a scriptural reality. Think, for example, of those who refuse to invest their talents in case something goes askew (Matt. 25:14-30). An improper understanding of the Master enslaves his servant and keeps the servant from even trying to do something with the gifts he had been freely given. The servant’s overweening thought is not on his Master’s industriousness but on his own estimation.
The antidote to such self-absorption is to reorient our eyes on Christ and those who flourished in him, his saints: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith” (Heb. 12:1).
St. Ignatius’s spiritual rules
Many in that holy cloud have taken up the problem of scrupulosity because many of them struggled with it. At the end of his famed Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola provides six notes on what he calls “perceiving and understanding scruples and persuasions of our enemy.” In the first three rules, Ignatius expresses the classical notion that scruples is the constant tendency to “decide that something is sin which is not sin” (Spiritual Exercises, 346).
While this may be simply “an erroneous judgment” and “not a real scruple,” those prone to scruples will have a difficult time letting this worry go, pestered by the lingering doubt that they have in fact offended our Lord (SE 347). And while God can use this space of doubt to purify the soul (SE 348), it is here that the wise person will be able to distinguish between a delicate soul—the beauty of wanting to please God in all things—and the scrupulous soul who does not really understand what sin is and is therefore fixated and frozen in his own unwillingness to make a mistake.
For Ignatius, therefore, growing in holiness is simultaneously growing in self-awareness. We must ask God to show us who we truly are to be able to name and understand one’s own proclivities and personality traits. The Christian story is all about the supernatural entering the natural, and consequently to understand one’s own nature in all its depths is indispensable to spiritual maturity.
For the devil, endowed with the intellect of an angel, knows us all too well. He knows how to drag us down, perceiving whether we have a lax or a delicate conscience and attacking accordingly. To the lax, the enemy will seek to open up all sorts of thoughts and actions without the least pang of conscience or concern for even a venial sin; but he will nag and pester and bombard the scrupulous soul with thoughts of inadequacy and supposed lack of ingratitude (SE 349).
We must therefore always detect and act against our fallen nature. Without slipping to the other extreme, the careless should become more vigilant, while the overly scrupulous must learn to relax and trust in God’s goodness and love (SE 350).
St. Ignatius’s final rule here teaches that our desire to please God is real and that we must deeply realize how we exist and act only in God’s merciful love. We are therefore free to move ahead even if we are having some doubts (SE 351). Here Ignatius is deeply aware that we can never let the minor setbacks and even less than perfect motives impede our desire to labor in Christ’s vineyard.
Learn to live with mixed motives
Ignatius concludes this short guide against scruples by quoting St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who yelled at the devil whenever he detected any sinful proclivity creeping into his holy desires and actions: “I did not undertake this because of you, and I am not going to relinquish it because of you!” Mixed motives are of course not ideal, but neither can they become the source of our stagnation (see sidebar).
This is Ignatius’s concluding point: never let the perfect become the enemy of the good. There have been and only will ever be two perfect humans, and the rest of us must mature in accepting that we are all stumbling saints-in-the-making. Ignatius’s final rule therefore offers us a renewed sense of freedom: while truly a sinner, my inadequacies are never greater than God’s mercy.
Whereas most people in the world lean toward a lax conscience, rarely seeing wrongdoing in themselves but frequently blaming others, systems, and structures, the rules for detecting scruples belong to the other end of the spiritual spectrum: those who are careful and discerning and truly desirous of pleasing the Lord.
The first group of people the enemy continues to lull into moral complacency, constantly downplaying the seriousness of sin while emphasizing the power of their own eternal autonomy. Yet in the more pious and in those who have set out to follow the Lord’s ways, the enemy rejoices in these four marks of scrupulosity:
- An irrational fear of sin as that which is unknowingly and so easily committed
- A theology of sin as that which extinguishes God’s loving care for me
- An obsession about one’s own
(inevitable) imperfections - A fixation on the precision of rituals and the externals of religious practices
Therefore, let us conclude our discussion with four antidotes against these spiritual dangers.
Four antidotes
First and foremost, serious sin has to be conscious and deliberate: “Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God’s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice. Feigned ignorance and hardness of heart do not diminish, but rather increase, the voluntary character of a sin” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1859).
If there is not absolute and deliberate consent, something which is easy to pinpoint, I did not commit a serious sin. When staunch Lutherans were negotiating peace with other German Reformers, a phrase arose in the early seventeenth century (often erroneously attributed to St. Augustine of Hippo) that proves helpful here: in necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas (“Unity in things that are necessary, liberty where there is doubt, but in all things charity”).
Facts must trump doubts. Did you intend to offend God? If so, get to confession; if not, ask the Holy Spirit to teach you from this experience and move on. Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
The second antidote is a tough theological truth: God loves us not because we are lovable but because he is love (1 John 4:8). The princess kisses the frog not because he is handsome but, in allowing his ugliness to be embraced, the frog becomes the most stunning of all. That is our story too: so many of us think of God as one who rewards our good actions, when in truth our good actions are nothing other than God’s unconditional presence within the baptized soul.
This is why the scrupulous have to realize that God delights in them, and when we allow the Lord to draw near, our sins and shortcomings melt away. “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you? . . . Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin anymore” (John 8:10-11). Surrender, not sinlessness, is what the Lord asks of us. Our perfection is demanded (Matt. 5:48), for sure, but it is a perfection paradoxically rooted in the humble Christ and not in our own supposed successes and achievements.
Thirdly, the spiritually mature know that weeds always grows with the wheat (Matt. 13:24-30). Isn’t it intriguing to see how the Great Master insists not on the perfect harvest but that his workers trust him to work as he wills? We should take great solace that the Master is content letting the weeds grow for now, knowing that if we try to root them out in our own way and in our own time, we shall make a mess of things. Patient trust that the Lord is at work even when we doubt our own levels of faith and commitment is a key practice in realizing where true holiness lies.
Fourthly, it is the divine Person of Jesus Christ who alone can forgive us and heal us. Do not ever forget that the ones who kept the Law perfectly were also the ones who crucified Our Lord. Do not be concerned about anything that is not a person—that is, only loving God and loving neighbor saves our souls (Matt. 22:36-40, Gal. 5:14). No rule, no discipline, no plan of prayer can do this.
Christ alone can heal
Of course, rules, disciplines, and prayers can be magnificent ways unto the face of God, but the scrupulous will tend to gauge their growth in holiness by external religiosity, “Did I say my rosary today?” “Did the priest say that word correctly?” “Did I say my Divine Office?”, and so on. We can all think of a time we “said our prayers” but did not really talk to Jesus or Our Lady at all.
Scruples are real, and they are something we must detect and offer to Christ’s victorious wounds. He alone can heal; he alone can free us from the imprisonment that we are never enough. These are lies and not what the Father wants for his beloved children, stumbling, bumbling saints-in-the-making.
Sidebar: Sway or Snap
Consider a loving mother who rightly insists on good behavior from her children. She invites company to the house one afternoon, and the kids use the opportunity to act up. As their mother is correcting them, she has a pang of guilt that she is chastising her children in part so that she looks like a responsible parent in front of her friends. At this moment, deep within her psyche, she must draw on the conviction that it is her moral responsibility to mother her children and so ignore that twinge of self-importance, knowing that correcting the little rascals is in fact the right thing to do.
Living in the shadow of the St. Louis Arch (above), as I do, provides another example. This magnificent structure was built to sway up to a foot and a half when the strong Midwest winds come rushing across the plains. If the metal were not built to move, it would snap. The spiritual person too must learn to “sway” in carrying out the Lord’s will with joy and fidelity, even amidst the storm of his own imperfections and less-than-ideal motivations.