Can a Venial Sin Become Mortal? (Q. 88, Articles 4–6): Circumstances, Anger, Drunkenness and the Imperfect Act

Orientation #

He begins in mid-reading: “Okay, the article four here,” and ends “I suppose you stop there now before the start of another question.” Articles 4, 5 and 6 of the same question are read straight through, objections, body and replies. The neighbouring classes treat q. 88 on venial and mortal sin and then q. 89.

The class, in order #

1. Article 4, the objections (“It seems that venial sin is able to become what mortal”) #

He frames the question at once: is it that the same sin becomes mortal, or only that it disposes me to a further act which is mortal? He insists the article is about one and the same sin. Objections as read:

1. Augustine on John 3:36 — even the least sins, i.e. venials, if neglected, kill; but to kill the soul spiritually is what mortal sin means.
2. The motion of sensuality before consent of reason is venial; after consent it is mortal.
3. Venial and mortal differ as curable and incurable sickness; a curable sickness can become incurable.
4. A disposition can become a habit; venial sin disposes to mortal. Sed contra: things differing in infinitum are not changed into each other. Asides: admiration for the medieval trained mind — the De veritate-era disputations in Paris, “twelve fifty six, twelve fifty nine,” eighteen arguments on a side; a student adds “they didn’t have distractions like TV and phones,” and he answers that the gadgets are now blamed for Alzheimer’s because the mind is not active enough — “got to keep reading my Euclid.” He notes Thomas resolves by a distinction, “which is included in the idea of looking before and after.”

2. Article 4, the body: three ways it could be meant (“venial sin to become mortal can be understood in three ways”) #

1. The same act in number, first venial then mortal — impossible. Reason: sin consists chiefly in the act of the will, as does every moral act; so if the will changes it is not one act morally, though the action according to nature may be continuous; and if the will does not change, there is no change from venial to mortal. Attached: virtue in Aristotle is a habit of choosing — whether you are accustomed to drink moderately or to excess; you may have learned moderation with your parents, or “let’s get drunk this weekend” with your high-school friends.
2. What is venial in genus becomes mortal — possible, insofar as one makes it his end, or refers it to a mortal sin as to an end (treated in the previous article).
3. Many venial sins constituting one mortal — false if meant as a whole made of parts. Not all the venial sins in the world have as much guilt-debt as one mortal sin. Proof from duration: mortal sin has the debt of eternal punishment, venial only temporal (purgatory, possibly to the last day); and from the punishment of the damned, the loss of the divine vision, “to which no other punishment is able to be compared,” as Chrysostom says; and from the worm of conscience — though as regards the punishment of fire they may not be disproportionate. But if meant dispositively, it is true, by the two ways of disposing shown above (on the part of the agent, and per existentis [ed.: the second mode as he renders it]). Aside on Chrysostom: his pagan teacher of rhetoric, asked who would succeed him, said Chrysostom would “if the Christians had not stolen him from me.” He is struck by how many great churchmen had rhetorical training — Augustine was a teacher of rhetoric; Jerome’s dream, “Ciceronian, not Christian.” Rhetoric is a disposition for the mind: “can go from rhetoric to dialectic to demonstration.” “Chrysostom” means golden mouth; Aristotle treats style in Rhetoric III.

3. Article 4, the replies (“Likeness is the great cause of deception”) #

1. Augustine means many venial sins dispositively cause mortal sin, not that one and the same sin becomes it.
2. The motion of sensuality preceding consent never itself becomes mortal; the act of reason consenting is the mortal sin.
3. Bodily sickness is not an act but a permanent disposition, which remaining the same can be changed; venial sin is a transient, passing act which cannot be resumed — so the comparison is not similar. “Likeness is the great cause of deception.”
4. A disposition that becomes a habit is something imperfect in the same species (imperfect science perfected becomes a habit; likewise the moral virtues); venial sin is a disposition of another genus, as accident to substantial form, into which it is never changed — “the accident never becomes a substance, as true philosophers” hold.

4. Article 5, objections: can a circumstance make a venial sin mortal? (“this great terrible topic of circumstance”) #

1. Augustine (sermon on purgatory): anger held long, and assiduous drunkenness, pass into the number of mortal sins; but anger and drunkenness are not mortal from their genus. That drunkenness is not mortal in genus is shown by Christ turning water into wine. (Aside: a Spanish town with free wine on tap every year at its festival; Rose’s uncle in Italy and the carts of wine.)
2. The Master (Peter Lombard, Sentences II, d. 24; he notes the Master was bishop of Paris and his was the standard theology text until the Summa): delectation, if morosa, long-lasting, is mortal; if not, venial — and morositas is a circumstance.
3. Good and bad differ more than venial and mortal, which are both bad; yet a circumstance makes a good act bad — alms given for vainglory. A fortiori for venial into mortal. Sed contra: a circumstance is an accident, and its quantity cannot exceed the quantity of the act, which stands to it as genus — “always the subject is preeminent to the accident”; and mortal sin exceeds venial in infinitum. He restates it: no number of venial sins adds to a mortal sin — “no amount of fish can add up to one steak,” and “salmon steak is a contradiction in terms.”

5. Article 5, the body: when a circumstance stops being a circumstance (“then it loses the notion of a what circumstance”) #

A circumstance as such is an accident of the moral act; but it can take on the specific difference of a moral act, and then it loses the character of circumstance and constitutes the species. This happens in sins when the circumstance adds the deformity of another genus. Example: intercourse with one not one’s own is deformed against chastity; if she is another’s wife, a deformity against justice is added — taking what belongs to another — and the circumstance constitutes a new species, adultery. Applied: a circumstance cannot make a venial sin mortal unless it brings in a deformity of another genus — because venial sin has its deformity as a disorder about the things towards the end, mortal sin as a disorder about the last end itself. He glosses with a question: if a philosopher gives up the pursuit of wisdom, he is no longer a philosopher, since he no longer has that ultimate end. So a circumstance remaining a circumstance never does it. Repeated warning: “See what a treacherous thing there it is to talk about circumstances” — “circumstantial evidence, that can convict you sometimes.” Asides on superfluous laughter turning toward blasphemy or sacrilege: an Italian man idly mimicking a blessing over the Blessed Sacrament; children “playing mass” with wafers — which he does not think blasphemous; a student recalls playing mass in the basement with rag vestments, her sister as altar boy (“I was ahead of my time”), done seriously and with admiration.

6. Article 5, the replies: anger, drunkenness, prolonged pleasure (“length of time is not a circumstance drawing something into another species”) #

1. Length of time, and likewise frequency, do not draw an act into another species, except per accidens if something else supervenes — disobedience, contempt, or the like — since nothing acquires a new species by being multiplied or prolonged. Anger: it is a motion of the soul toward harming a neighbour; if the harm intended is mortal in genus (homicide, theft), such anger is mortal in genus, and is venial only from imperfection of the act, as a sudden motion of sensuality — if prolonged, it returns to its own genus through the consent of reason. If the harm intended is venial in genus — wishing to say something light and jocose that saddens him a little (“You know how to do it.” / “Takes one to know one.”) — the anger is not mortal however long it lasts, unless per accidens, e.g. grave scandal arises. Drunkenness: of its own ratio it is mortal, because a man without necessity makes himself incapable of using reason, by which he is ordered to God and avoids sins, out of love of wine, expressly against virtue. (Illustration: the judge does not excuse you — “I went through the red light, your honor, because I was drunk”; “I blacked out and I killed him. Was responsible.”) It is venial only from ignorance or infirmity — not knowing the power of the wine or his own weakness, not thinking himself drunk; then only the excess of drink is imputed, not the drunkenness. Noah is offered as such a case. But frequent inebriation cannot be excused by ignorance: his will chooses rather to undergo drunkenness than to abstain from excessive wine, and it returns to mortal.
2. Prolonged pleasure is mortal only in matters mortal by genus, where brief pleasure would be venial from imperfection of the act, as with anger; if prolonged through the approval of deliberating reason, it becomes something else.
3. A circumstance makes a good act bad only by constituting another species of sin. Aside: “my wife and I joke that we regard marriage as a dead end — all we mean is, there’s no way out.”

7. Article 6, objections: can mortal sin become venial? (“It seems that a mortal sin can become venial”) #

1. Distance is equal both ways; venial can become mortal, so mortal can become venial. (Student digression, welcomed: Senator Moynihan’s essay “Defining Deviancy Down” — society’s level of tolerance; when you cannot prevent deviant behaviour you either get tougher or redefine it downward; very big in the ’60s and ’70s, legalising drugs, marijuana.)
2. The two differ in that the mortal sinner loves the creature more than God, the venial sinner below God. But one may do what is mortal in genus while loving the creature below God — e.g. one who does not know simple fornication is mortal and contrary to divine love, and would forgo it if he knew. (Aside: a doctor always pro-life who nevertheless prescribed contraception until Humanae Vitae struck him; contraception is subtler than fornication, and pro-life people in other churches favour it without knowing it is serious.)
3. Good and bad differ more than venial and mortal; yet an act bad in itself can become good — homicide becomes an act of justice in the judge who kills the thief. (He notes “homicide has a more precise meaning,” anticipating the reply.) Sed contra: the eternal never becomes temporal; mortal merits eternal punishment, venial temporal.

8. Article 6, body and replies (“the imperfect through some addition can come to perfection”) #

Body: venial and mortal differ as imperfect and perfect in the genus of sin. The imperfect by addition can come to perfection — so venial, by adding to it a deformity of the genus of mortal sin, becomes mortal (an idle word said in order to fornicate). But the perfect cannot be made imperfect by addition: adding an idle word does not lessen the fornicator’s sin but aggravates it. What is mortal in genus can, however, be venial from imperfection of the act, when it does not perfectly reach the ratio of a moral act, being not deliberate but sudden — a subtraction of deliberating reason; and since the act has its moral species from deliberating reason, by that subtraction the species is dissolved. Aside on “perfect”: people use the word loosely — “my house is totally wrecked, completely wrecked; it’s very incomplete now.” Replies: (1) Venial differs from mortal as imperfect from perfect, as a boy from a man: a man can come to be from a boy, not the reverse; so the argument is not cogent. (2) If the ignorance wholly excuses the sin, as with the madman, the fornicator sins neither mortally nor venially; but if the ignorance is not invincible, the ignorance is itself a sin and contains a defect of divine love, since the man neglects to learn what would keep him in divine love. He adds St. Alphonsus: a man who neglects the good of his soul for more than a month, that itself is mortal sin — and many Catholics do not take the time to learn the Church’s position. (3) With Augustine (De mendacio): what is evil in itself can by no end become good. But homicide is the killing of an innocent, which can in no way be done well; the judge who kills the thief and the soldier who kills the public enemy are not committing homicide (Augustine, De libero arbitrio).

His words #

• “in infinitum” — the distance between mortal and venial sin; things so differing are not changed into each other.
• “the same act in number” — numerically one act, as against one act morally, which requires an unchanged will.
• “dispositive” / “sic verum est” — true if taken as disposing, not as composing.
• “worm of conscience” — the punishment of sin in the damned, besides the fire.
• “magister” — Peter Lombard, “the Master,” bishop of Paris, whose book was the standard theology text until the Summa.
• “morositas” / “morosa” — long-lastingness of delectation, treated by the objection as a circumstance.
• “in quantum huiusmodi” — a circumstance as such is an accident of the moral act.
• “ratio” — as in “drunkenness according to its ratio is mortal”; the notion or account of a thing.
• “subito” — suddenly, undeliberately; with “extinctis passionibus” [ed.: his rendering; probably ex impetu passionis] as the mark of an act falling short of full moral species.
• “imperfection of the act” — the way a sin mortal in genus can be only venial.

Texts #

Read in class: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 88, a. 4 (whether venial sin can become mortal); a. 5 (whether a circumstance can make a venial sin mortal); a. 6 (whether mortal sin can become venial) — objections, body and replies throughout. Mentioned: Augustine, on John 3:36; Augustine, sermon on purgatory; Augustine, De mendacio; Augustine, De libero arbitrio; Peter Lombard, Sentences II, d. 24; Chrysostom, on the loss of the divine vision; Aristotle on virtue as a habit of choosing, and Rhetoric III on style; Paul VI, Humanae Vitae; St. Alphonsus (Liguori, inferred); Moynihan, “Defining Deviancy Down.”

His questions #

• Is it that a venial sin of yesterday turns mortal today, or that it disposes me to a further act which is mortal?
• Only the second; the same numbered act cannot change species, since sin lies chiefly in the act of the will.
• Can many venial sins add up to one mortal sin?
• No — not all the venial sins in the world have the guilt of one mortal sin; but dispositively many venials do cause a mortal.
• Can a circumstance make a venial sin mortal?
• Not while it remains a circumstance; only by bringing in a deformity of another genus, and so constituting a new species.
• Is anger mortal if it lasts long?
• Only if the harm it intends is mortal in genus; length by itself does not change species.
• Is drunkenness mortal from its genus?
• Yes by its ratio, since a man without necessity disables his reason; venial only through ignorance or infirmity, and not for the habitual drunkard.
• If a philosopher gives up the pursuit of wisdom, what would you say?
• He is no longer a philosopher — he no longer has that ultimate end.
• Can mortal sin become venial?
• Not by addition, since the perfect is not made imperfect by adding; but a mortal-in-genus act can be venial from imperfection of the act, or wholly excused by invincible ignorance.
• Can homicide become an act of justice, as in the judge who kills the thief?
• No — homicide is the killing of an innocent; the judge and the soldier are not committing homicide.