This is the second half of a booklet first published in 1921 by the Catholic Truth Society of London. The first half was reprinted in the August 1993 issue of This Rock magazine. Read Part I here.
Sin
Whatever you believe or don’t believe about it, one thing is certain about sin, that it doesn’t enter into the province of any of the natural sciences. But all this loosening of the direct faith our great-grandfathers had in the special creation of man, in his free will, in the story of his Fall, all this uneasy feeling which has got about, that the doctrines which are taught to us as children are only taught to us because a child can be made to believe anything and are quite out of harmony with what thinking people are saying nowadays—all that has resulted, even among professing and practicing Christians, in a sort of vagueness about religious dogma which is perilous to the most central and the most practical articles in our creed.
We use the old language, but we shrink from inquiring too closely into the exact meaning of its terms, for fear of finding ourselves up against a controversy. In that way, subtly and unobtrusively, the directness of the Christian message is becoming endangered. Let us think quite straight. Knowing what we do of man’s soul, man’s free will, man’s fall from grace, what do we understand to be the central idea which the word “sin” ought to convey to a Christian? And what aspect of sin is it that all these modern people, the philanthropists, and the reformers, and the medical men, and the gentlemen who write science for the millions in the Sunday papers, are all the time trying to leave out of sight?
Sin is voluntary violation of the law of God. What do we understand by a law? Law, says St. Thomas, is a certain ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by one who has charge of the commonwealth. That is the old and the literal sense of the word “law,” and it’s easy to transfer that definition of ordinary human laws so as to apply to the eternal law of God.
But remember, since we all took to talking science, law has another meaning for us as well. Commonly, we understand law to involve a command imposed on somebody by somebody else, but in matters of science we use it as meaning simply a statement—a statement of some principle which is always operative and which infallibly produces, in our experience, uniform results—Newton’s laws in physics, Grimm’s law in philology, Gresham’s law in political economy, and so forth. A law, in this sense, is not what tells you to do something, but simply what assures you that something will happen. It does not need to be asserted by rewards and penalties; automatically it asserts itself.
Now, in speaking of human morals, it’s very easy to get mixed up between these two senses of the word “law.” If I say, for example, that the sinner is false to the law of his being, what do I mean? Do I mean that he is disobeying a law, in the sense of a command, imposed upon him by the author of his being? Or do I merely mean that, in behaving as he does, he is neglecting the scientific principles which will make for his health and happiness and calling into play the scientific principles which will involve him in unhappiness or in disease?
To us Christians, law is of two kinds, the natural and the positive. To us the laws of nature, insofar as they affect human conduct at all, are part of the law of God and have his sanction behind them. If the effect of drinking whisky all day long is to turn a man into a helpless, degenerate, degraded being, that is enough for us as proof that his excesses, since they entail such a consequence, are contrary to God’s will. We do not need any express command given us by an angel to warn us against imitating such an example. The scientific “law” that excessive drinking has such and such effects on the system is evidence of a divine law which forbids drunkenness.
But we have also to reckon with the positive law of God—commands issued to us in the pages of Holy Scripture, or, in matters of detail, by the regulations of the Church. We know, for example, that it is wrong to receive Communion when not fasting. But nature never told us that. The scalpel and the microscope could never have brought to our notice such an obligation as that. Yet, because we believe that God’s natural law and his positive law proceed from the same source—that is, from his infinite wisdom–we hold ourselves bound as much by the one as by the other.
For the malice of sin consists precisely in the aversion of the soul from God. You may commit a sin which primarily regards yourself, as, for example, if you ruin your health by a career of intemperance or take your own life in a fit of despair. You may commit a sin which primarily regards your fellow men, by robbing them, by defrauding them, by oppressing the widow and the stranger. Or you may commit a sin which concerns God alone, by blaspheming, for example, his holy Name or his Blessed Mother’s. But in the first and second cases, just as much as in the third, the malice of your sin consists in your aversion from God—”To thee only have I sinned.” In the first case, you have neglected the plain warnings of experience, you have defied nature, run counter to the principles of your constitution; but that is not the point, the point is that you have broken the law of God.
In the second case, you have brought undeserved misery on others, you have dissolved, as far as in you lay, the bonds of justice and of equity which hold human society together, you have forfeited your right to enjoy the protection of human laws; but that is not the point, the point is that you have broken the law of God.
Turn which way you will, there is but one voice of command which is peremptory, which admits of no excuses. And whether that voice breathes from the happy soil of Paradise, or comes down in thunder from Sinai, or goes forth to Christendom from the City of the Seven Hills, it is the same voice, the voice of God.
I don’t think you will be disposed to disagree with me if I say that modern public opinion–and by that I mean the atmosphere of our time in political, in literary, above all in journalistic circles—does not come anywhere near that point of view. It does not deny that point of view; I doubt if it has ever considered it seriously enough to give it a denial, but it does proceed on the silent assumption that sin is, in the first instance, not sin against God, but sin against the law of your own nature or against your fellow men.
It is a threadbare subject, but it seems inevitable to refer for an illustration to that set of problems which is being so much aired nowadays, I mean the problems of sex and of married life. In the ordinary divorce-court case, modern opinion will be prepared to agree that the co-respondent sinned, since he infringed another man’s rights: It will, perhaps, be prepared to agree that the respondent sinned if she left her children as well as her husband—that was unnatural, they say, in a mother; that was sin.
But if the petitioner secures a divorce and goes through the form of a second marriage in flat defiance of the positive law of God—”Oh, I don’t know, why shouldn’t he? You see, he was not to blame; you can hardly expect a contract to be kept so one-sidedly.” That is the root of all the trouble: God’s law comes in only as an afterthought, and when God’s law has no considerations of public interest or of natural decency to reinforce it, God’s law is forgotten.
Let a man drink himself into delirium tremens, and we shall all agree he is a bad man. Let a man commit murder, and we shall all admit he is a bad citizen, and the priests whose undue influence has been criticized for a century past will suddenly be asked why they didn’t stop him. But if a man cares, without doing himself or others an injury, to indulge himself as he pleases, the doctor shrugs his shoulders, and the politician strokes his chin, and the journalist winks and passes by. In all that, modern opinion is suffering from a threefold forgetfulness. And the three things it forgets are—man’s place in creation, man’s free will, man’s fall.
It forgets (I will not say it denies) that however much our bodies are part of the natural order around us, our souls are, from the very beginning of our history, and in the life of every individual human being, a special creation, the breaking in of another world upon ours: that, consequently, man is in a special position as a rational creature and must not expect to have his sailing orders given him by mere instinct or by mere habit, as the dumb brutes do.
Being rational, he is capable of receiving, is privileged to receive, is responsible for receiving attentively, a positive law enjoined on him by the expressed will of a personal Creator. God spoke to Moses as a man speaks face to face with his friend—that is the charter of humanity.
They forget, in the second place (for I will not say that they deny) that man is a free agent. Their heads are so buzzing with statistics, about how men in general will behave on an average in a given set of circumstances, as to be unable to realize that this individual man is here and now about to make himself responsible for an act freely chosen by his own will.
In God’s eyes, we are so many men; in the statistician’s eyes, we are so many guinea pigs: That’s half the trouble of all our modern talk about morals.
Our public opinion forgets, in the third place, that man is a fallen creature. When the beast obeys the instincts that prompt it, however cruel, however rapacious, however incontinent its habits may seem to us, we know that it is only obeying the law of its own nature. But if it be true, as Christian theology asserts, that man as he is now is not man as he was meant to be at the time of his creation, then it is obvious that he cannot plead, in defense of the morality of his actions, the fact that he behaved as it seemed natural to him to behave.
For who shall tell us whether the instinct which prompted him was part of the healthy instinct of the human animal or part of the perverted instinct which belongs to a soul Satan has tempted from its first innocency? Only God’s law can tell us that; often enough, only God’s positive law can tell us that.
The End of Man
You will remember, perhaps, the little girl in Punch who asks, “Mummy, what’s that?” “That, dear, that’s a cow,” and the little girl says, “Why?”—a thoroughly philosophical question, and Aristotle might have been proud of it. Our minds cannot rest content with asking How? We must go on to ask Why?
Suppose I were traveling and, on landing in some strange country, saw a man working his arms this way and that above his head, and suppose I ask a bystander, Why does he do that? “Oh, well,” says the bystander, “the muscle of the arm is a most interesting anatomical affair and illustrates very well the principles of leverage. Suppose, for example–” . . . “No, no,” I interrupt, “I didn’t ask how he did it, I wanted to know why.” “The nerves,” replies the bystander, “form a most fascinating subject of discussion; their office is to telegraph, as it were, to all the limbs the orders of the organizing brain. You would hardly believe . . .” But by this time I have gone off in despair: I have been asking questions in teleology from a scientist.
Science doesn’t know why, and has no right to care. But all this business of evolution has, since it passed into the hands of the philosophers, inspired them with the hope of finding out more about the meaning of the world and the meaning of human existence in particular.
For if we are assured that nature presents to our view not a fixed set of types, but a set of types that differs from one age to another, and if these types do not merely change backwards and forwards, but move onwards with a kind of progress, so that we can say of the elephant that it is not merely different from the mammoth but more highly developed than the mammoth, more highly organized than the mammoth, better suited than the mammoth to survive in this queue that struggles for existence, our minds cannot but form the idea of evolution from the lower to the higher, evolution which is progress, not merely process.
I am afraid that so far as the little girl’s question is concerned, we don’t know, and never shall know in this world, why the thing should be a cow. We feel sure that behind all the marvelous order in which creation develops there is, somewhere, a purpose; but what it is we can’t even guess. Except in one single department; there we not only can but must guess: So long as we are men and not vegetables we cannot stop guessing about it.
As a great Catholic poet has told us, “the proper study of mankind is man”; and when the question is raised, “Why is man here; why has he developed as he has developed; what is he developing and what ought he to be developing into?” then the guessing competition does become fast and furious, and we aren’t going to be kept out of it. For man desires knowledge not merely for the sake of knowledge; he desires to know how to shape his life; his right or his wrong development is an issue which is practical to him, for it is his business to make or to mar the decision of it.
If you take it for granted, as most modern thinkers do, that man has evolved, is evolving, and has got to evolve, not merely from something into something else, but from something less perfect into something more perfect, then there are three ways of going about your investigation. You may go to biological science and ask how and by what weapons man developed (if he did develop) from the brute.
Or you may go to history and try (it’s a very thorny process, but you can try) to read impartially in that record the story of man’s development in the last (shall we say?) three thousand years, with a few guesses about a period still further back, and you may then take it for granted that the way man has gone is the way he ought to be going, and the sooner he gets on with it the better.
Or (and this is far the commonest method of the three) you may take your own pet theory about what man ought to be like, and you may sit down and wrestle with history until you succeed in convincing yourself that man has, all the time, been becoming more and more like that, whatever facts seem to point to the contrary—more moral, or more socialistic, or more vegetarian, or whatever you will. And then you publish that in serial form on all the railway bookstalls and label it “history.”
And what are the results of those three processes? If you stick to the first method and try to prove that the development of the human race is in a strict line with the principles which govern, and the instincts which inspire, the struggle for existence in the brute creation, the upshot of your meditations will certainly not be encouraging to morality. You may, if you will, think of the ideal man as a perfect physical type, strong, patient, highly endowed with all the pagan virtues—and yet, even so, you are false to biological theory, for cunning, not brute strength, is man’s weapon; and your ideal man, if you think of man as an individual, will be the crafty, unscrupulous, selfish, cringing, bullying creature that was long ago exposed, in all his nakedness, in the first book of Plato’s Republic.
Or, if you prefer to think of man as essentially gregarious, hunting not alone but by the pack, you must still admit that the strongest nation, by however foul means it may have gained its ascendancy over the rest of mankind, is the dominant and therefore the highest type, and if anyone is proposing to revive that doctrine after all Europe has bled for four years in disproof of it [Knox refers to World War I, this essay having been written in 1921], he is welcome to his opinion, but he is not likely to make converts.
It is a silly mistake to talk as if, the doctrine of the Fall once discarded, it would be easy to bring human progress into line with biological evolution. As Huxley pointed out long ago, you cannot bring human progress into line with strict biological evolution unless you are prepared to throw over moral standards and moral judgments altogether.
If, on the other hand, you take human history as far as we can trace its records and try to read it as an impartial document, you will find development in it, I admit, process in it, I admit, but whether it be in any true sense progress I see no ground for determining. You can say with some certainty that the spread of civilization has made the human animal into a more complicated being, with his sensibility increased in a thousand ways (music and the arts alone will bear witness to that) and his nerve fibre correspondingly less tough; a higher price set upon human life, a more resolute determination to eliminate physical pain; less importance attached to the group, more to the individual; and there is, of course, much more to be said.
But whether we approve or disapprove of such symptoms depends entirely on our own ethical standards, and those ethical standards we do not read in the record, but bring them with us, ready formed, to the discussion. Civilization has spread; so do the mumps. A civilized man is more highly developed than a savage; so is pneumonia more highly developed than a cold on the chest. I am not decrying civilization; I am merely saying that, so far as we admire it, we admire it not simply because it has developed, but because it has developed on lines which seem to us good ones—we are using a standard of our own to judge it by.
But the moment you allow people to read history in the light of their own prejudices, you must despair of finding any agreement of opinion as to what is higher and what is lower in the scale of development. One believes that our international politics are tending towards world peace and world brotherhood; another sees a progressive and a salutary growth of the sense of separate nationality going on all around us. One holds that our psychic gifts are the latest flower of our civilization, and through them lies the gateway to all further human advancement; another (one of the greatest of contemporary Oxford philosophers) will tell you that these psychic gifts are a mere survival of the beast in us and that the ordinary horse or dog is far more sensitive to uncanny spiritualistic impressions than is the ordinary man.
And as to the very widespread neglect of organized religion in our day, you will find some writers who regard it as merely the backwash of an intellectual movement, others who hail it as the beginning of a purer, more spiritual conception of religion, others, again, who take it as evidence that the whole Christian superstition is tottering to its downfall. It’s odd, isn’t it, that we all agree in proclaiming that man evolves, yet no two of us can agree how, or since when, or into what? It’s odd, and it’s worse than odd, it’s tragic. For the world is full of young men who go about wanting to evolve as they ought to evolve (though why they shouldn’t let the world evolve without them, if they think it gets better every day, is sometimes a puzzle to me), and to them it is a life-and-death question, ” Where is all this progress of the human species leading to?” And when, wearied of debate and baffled by a thousand unanswered questions, they cease to worry about the remote future and determine to let civilization go its own way and save itself or damn itself as it pleases, what is left to them?
There is left to them one movement still which remains untried, a movement so purposeful that it is easily mistaken for a conspiracy, yet so sure of itself that it needs no program and no platform, begs no support from the presumed approval of a shadowy posterity. Such is the Catholic Church, which has no theories as to whether mankind is moving and if so in what direction, nor, if it were assured that there were any such tendency, would swerve aside for one moment from its appointed path.
For the message which the Church of God preserves is a message not to the human race in the aggregate, but to each solitary, individual soul. Its hero, God’s hero, the character in the world’s drama which holds the angels breathless with expectation, is not mankind but man—this man or that man, you and I, with our hopes and ambitions, our difficulties and strivings, our falls and recoveries.
“Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is all man.” The human race exists to make heaven populous, and that end has to be achieved by us singly, in the dreadful loneliness of our dual destiny. Whether Christendom is marching forward to fresh world conquests, or whether the Son of Man, when he comes, is to find but little faith on the earth, the end of man will be achieved–is daily being achieved, according to the plan of his creation. The end of man is realized whenever the gates of heaven open once more, and one more pardoned soul struggles to the feet of its Creator.