Venial and Mortal Sin: Loving God Enough, Repairable and Irreparable Sin, and Analogical Division (Summa I-II, Q. 88, a. 1)

Orientation #

He begins directly at the prologue of q. 88, reading the list of six articles, and refers back to things “said above” in the treatise on sin (punishment remitted with the sin; sin as an infirmity of the soul) (prev. lecture). He closes mid-question: “that’s into that article… We got to stop now.” The neighbouring class continues in q. 88 on the venial/mortal distinction.

The class, in order #

1. The prologue and the six articles (“first, whether venial sin is suitably divided against mortal”) #

He reads the prologue: having treated sin’s character and the punishment due to it, one considers venial and mortal sin — first venial in comparison to mortal, then venial secundum se. The six questions: (1) whether venial is suitably divided against mortal; (2) whether they are distinguished in genus (as opposed to species — they have the same genus); (3) whether venial disposes to mortal; (4) whether venial can become mortal; (5) whether an aggravating circumstance can make it mortal; (6) whether mortal can become venial.

• Aside on processus (“to the first one proceeds thus”): the word goes back to the treatise on the Trinity, where the persons are distinguished by relations of procession; the logic professor distinguished the way of proceeding common to all sciences from that proper to one science; Monsignor Dionne’s joke, “you got two more to proceed.”

2. Objection 1: Augustine’s definition of sin (“said, or done, or desired against the eternal law”) #

Sin is what is said, done or desired against the eternal law (Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII); but to be against the eternal law makes a sin mortal; therefore every sin is mortal and venial is not divided against it.

• Aside: this shows why Augustine insists on the importance of heretics for the development of theology — it is a theological definition.

3. Objection 2 and the digression on loving God too much (“do all for the glory of God”) #

Objection 2: 1 Cor. 10 — whether you eat or drink or do anything else, do all for the glory of God; every sinner acts against this precept, since sin is not on account of God’s glory; to act against a precept is mortal; so every sin is mortal. Digression, prompted by “nothing too much” (mēden agan) of the seven wise men of Greece:

• Can you love God too much? No — you can never love God as much as He is lovable, so never too much. Same for knowing God.
• Can you love God enough? Also no. Whoever says “I love God enough, I need strive no further” is in a sense levelling his will and reason with God; that is pride in the bad sense. To say “I love God as much as He is lovable” or “I know God as much as He is knowable” would plainly attribute to will and reason an excellence they do not have.
• Contrast case: you can love candy or wine too much; there is no need to love wine more than one does. Of God, never enough, let alone too much.

4. Objection 3: enjoying and using (“to enjoy things that should be used”) #

Whoever adheres by love to something adheres either as enjoying (fruens) or as using it (De doctrina christiana I); no sinner adheres to a changeable good as something to be used, since he does not refer it to the good that makes us blessed, which is properly to be enjoyed; so every sinner enjoys the changeable good; but to enjoy what should be used (and use what should be enjoyed) is perversity (De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII); perversity names mortal sin. He notes: if you eat too much candy, “I wouldn’t say you’re perverse, but it’s too much.”

• He queries the title of the Augustine work (eighty-three, not eighty-eight; there is also a book of questions on the Gospels).

5. Objection 4 and the digression on precepts and counsels (“whoever exceeds to one term recedes from the other”) #

Objection 4: whoever approaches the one extreme recedes from the other; the sinner approaches a changeable good, therefore recedes from the unchangeable; therefore sins mortally.

• Reason’s ability “to look before and after” (Shakespeare’s definition, quoted from an earlier class) includes the ability to look for distinctions — which is what this whole article is testing.
• He recalls a man who doubted the distinction between commands and counsels. The Protestant move is to eliminate the counsels as presumption — built into the Anglican articles to this day: works of supererogation rejected, on the strength of “we have done no more than we were commanded.” Joke: then “thou shalt not kill” would be a counsel; Henry VIII treated it as merely a good idea.

6. Sed contra (“crimen is what merits damnation, venial does not”) #

Augustine, homily 41 on John: crimen merits damnation, the venial does not; crimen names mortal sin; therefore the division is suitable. “That’s a pretty big distinction, if you ask me.”

• Aside on crimen / “criminal”: five miles over the speed limit and robbing a bank both make you a criminal (“because that’s where the money is”).
• Anecdote: a man told Kasurik, “I don’t think God’s going to punish me for not going to mass on Sunday”; Kasurik told him he thought He would, and Berquist agreed. He is surprised how many Catholics think that way — the distinction is not much heard of these days. Second anecdote: someone said his Lenten resolution was to start going to church again; Berquist replied that going to church is simply being Christian, not Lent.

7. The corpus: mortal said metaphorically, and the irreparable beginning (“if mortal is taken metaphorically”) #

The argument as Thomas gives it:

1. Some things not opposed when taken properly are opposed taken metaphorically: to laugh is not opposed to drying up, but a field said metaphorically to “laugh” on account of its flourishing is opposed to drying up.
2. So too “mortal”: taken properly of bodily death it has no opposition to “venial” and is not in the same genus; taken metaphorically of sins, mortal is opposed to venial, as mortal to immortal.
3. Sin is an infirmity of the soul (said above). A sickness is called mortal when it brings an irreparable defect by taking away some beginning (principle).
4. The beginning of the spiritual life according to virtue is the order to the last end. Whoever is destitute of it cannot be repaired by any inward beginning, but only by divine power — because disorders in the means are repaired from the end, as error about conclusions is repaired through the truth of the premises. What is more principal than the first beginning cannot be repaired by something else. (Aristotle: the end in practical matters is as the premises, the first premises, in speculative; and if a man is mistaken about the principle of contradiction, the alternative is to turn into a plant — “my aunt Margaret thought that was very funny.”)
5. Sins disordered only about the means, the order to the end being conserved, are repairable — and these are called venial, as having forgiveness, the debt of punishment being taken away. Conclusion: mortal and venial are opposed as repairable and irreparable by an inward beginning — not by comparison to divine power, which can repair every sickness, bodily and spiritual. “Well, I’m convinced by that.”

• Aside on dividing into two: Plato in the dialogues (the Sophist and others) always divides into two, and Aristotle criticises always dividing into two; but there is good reason for it, since one divides by opposites, and opposites are two. You can divide human beings into good and bad, or male and female — not “good and white.” For three: three is the first number of which we say “all” (you and I are both going; a third makes us all going); and Pythagoras’ beginning, middle, end is complete. He calls the argument from “all” much weaker, only a sign.
• Aside: when Christ cures a body there is sometimes, besides the sense of the letter, a spiritual sense — what the letter signifies in turn signifies something else, e.g. leprosy signifying sin; see the commentary on Matthew.

8. Reply to objection 1: not a division of a genus into species (“they don’t equally partake of the idea of sin”) #

Species divide a genus only when they partake equally of the genus’s ratio. Examples: odd and even number; scalene, isosceles, equilateral triangle; square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid, trapezium; dog and cat — neither is more an animal. Striking case: three is before four and four is more than three, yet four is not more a number, since number is a multitude composed of ones and three is just as much such a multitude. Mortal and venial are not like that: this is a division of an analogous term, said of things secundum prius et posterius (Shakespeare’s “before and after” again). Augustine’s full definition of sin belongs to mortal sin; venial is sin secundum rationem imperfectam and in ordine ad peccatum mortale, as accident is called being in order to substance, according to an imperfect ratio of being. Parallel: habit divided into virtue and vice — vice is not as much a habit as virtue.

• Boundary illustration of “being” said with qualification: leave this room and you cease to be — in this room; stand up and you cease to be sitting. But if a terrorist shoots us for admitting the Trinity, then you will cease to be, though your soul will still be.
• He notes why venial sin is not against the law: the one sinning venially does not do what the law prohibits, nor omit what the law obliges by precept, but does something beside the law, because he does not observe the mode of reason the law intends. Is there a law against eating too much candy?
• “Now you learn some real logic”: the genus is before the species, but one species is not before another — a dog is not an animal before a cat. Aristotle discusses in Metaphysics X (he corrects himself from XI) why male and female do not differ in species — “he must have had a lot of fun with his wife.”
• Aside: Monsignor Dionne said you must read Thomas’s other works to get a full understanding of logic, since it belongs to logic to distinguish kinds of division and distinction; and he cited Dionne on whether logic is an art — “art” is not used in one sense, not an art as carpentry is, and is not a genus. Also: sometimes Thomas answers an objection by naming the kind of mistake, referring you back to the thirteen kinds of fallacy.

9. Reply to objection 2: an affirmative precept does not bind always (“it suffices that someone habitually refers all his things to God”) #

The Pauline precept is affirmative, hence not obligatory ad semper. It suffices that one habitually refer himself and all his things to God, and so he does not always sin mortally, even if some act is not actually referred to God’s glory. Venial sin excludes only the actual ordering, not the habitual, because it does not exclude charity, which habitually orders us to God — part of why charity must be a habit and not merely an act.

• Jerome’s word comes to mind whenever one eats or drinks: venit ad iudicium. One need not think it at every drink, though it is not a bad thing to do; especially one refers things to God at Mass.
• Parallel: one should always thank God for everything good — but did you thank God for the chair, the bed, the heat in the house today?

10. Reply to objections 3 and 4: using, not enjoying (“he does not constitute his end in it”) #

Reply 3: the venial sinner adheres to a temporal good not as fruens, because he does not constitute his end in it, but as using it, referring it to God — if not in act, then in habit. If a man picked up the glass and said “this is my purpose in life, this is what life is all about,” that would be mortal sin. Reply 4: the changeable good is not taken as contrapositus to the unchangeable except when the end is constituted in it, for what is toward the end does not have the notion of the end.

• Closing asides on power as an end: a biography of Chairman Mao (burying people alive), who was reportedly saddened when a fellow power-holder resigned, since losing power was for him the end of everything; Nixon after the pardon from President Ford saying that to lose all that power was punishment in itself; and Malcolm Muggeridge’s remark that the press’s self-vaunting reaction was worse than anything Nixon did.

His words #

• processus — “the proceeding”; the way of going forward in an article, tied to the processions in the Trinity.
• crimen — Augustine’s word in the sed contra, taken here for mortal sin: what merits damnation.
• “repairable and irreparable by an inward beginning” — his formula for the opposition of venial and mortal.
• “beginning” [ed.: principle] — used both of the order to the last end and of premises/first principles.
• secundum rationem imperfectam, in ordine ad peccatum mortale — how venial is called sin.
• secundum prius et posterius — the mark of an analogous, not generic, division; he glosses it with Shakespeare’s “before and after.”
• fruens / using — enjoying versus using a changeable good.
• ad semper — an affirmative precept does not bind at every moment.
• “the ability to look before and after” [ed.: Shakespeare's definition of reason, quoted from an earlier class] — includes the ability to look for distinctions.
• venit ad iudicium — Jerome’s phrase he recalls at eating and drinking.
• “the wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics] — book ten, on male and female.
• “the thirteen kinds of mistake” [ed.: the fallacies of the Sophistical Refutations].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 88, prologue and a. 1 (objections 1–4, sed contra, corpus, replies to 1–4).
• Augustine, Contra Faustum XXII — definition of sin (in obj. 1).
• 1 Corinthians 10 — “whether you eat or drink” (obj. 2 and reply).
• Augustine, De doctrina christiana I — enjoy and use (obj. 3).
• Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII — perversity (obj. 3).
• Augustine, Tractates on John, homily 41 — crimen and venial (sed contra).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics X (he corrects “eleventh” to “tenth”) — male and female not a difference of species.
• Aristotle — one who denies the principle of contradiction is reduced to the state of a plant; end in practical matters as premises in speculative; criticism of always dividing into two.
• Plato, the Sophist and other dialogues — division always into two.
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (inferred) — “the thirteen kinds of mistake.”
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Matthew — spiritual sense of bodily cures.
• Pythagoras — beginning, middle, end.
• The Anglican articles — rejection of works of supererogation.

His questions #

• Can you love God too much? Can you know God too much? No — you can never love or know God as much as He is lovable and knowable.
• Can you love God enough, so as to stop striving? No; to say so is a kind of pride, levelling your will with God.
• Is it a mortal sin not to go to mass on Sunday? He and Kasurik both hold that God would indeed punish it; he is surprised how many think otherwise.
• Is the distinction of mortal and venial sin a good distinction? Yes: taken metaphorically, mortal and venial are opposed as irreparable and repairable by an inward beginning.
• Why must one divide into two? Because one divides by opposites, and opposites are two; three is defended only by the weaker sign that three is the first number of which we say “all.”
• Is four more a number than three? Is a dog more an animal than a cat? No — species partake equally of the genus; and that is precisely why mortal and venial are not species of a genus.
• Is venial sin against the eternal law? No: it neither does what the law prohibits nor omits what it commands, but acts beside the law, not observing the mode of reason the law intends.
• Must one actually refer every act to God’s glory? No; the precept is affirmative and does not bind ad semper — habitual reference, through charity, suffices.