Abstract
Sin has infinite variety, but is also a unified phenomenon. As a way of displaying both these aspects, the vice-lists of the New Testament explore patterns by which sin unfolds in a sequence of diverse but connected forms. The eschatological vice-list of 2 Timothy 3 treats this as an unfolding of the sin of pride from an immanent form (love of self) to a socially concrete one (love of pleasure). Exploring this train of thought in further detail, we find room within the progress of pride for the love of money and the love of war.
A formal definition of sin must be negative. Whether we say, with Plato, that it is ‘ignorance’, or with the Johannine epistle (1 Jn.3:4) that it is ‘lawlessness’, the defining force in each instance lies with the negative prefix or suffix. Sin is the failure of human action to correspond to and realise the good, and it falls under the general principle that governs all Christian thought about evil. Maximus the Confessor wrote:
Evil never was, never is and never will be a subsistent with a nature of its own. It has nothing by way of substance, nature, subsistence, potency or operation among things that really are; it is not a quality, quantity, relation, place, time, purpose, effect, motion, disposition or experience observable within the nature of things that have being; nor in the totality of things does it subsist in its natural identity as beginning, middle or end, but, to offer a summary definition, evil is a failure of operation in any nature’s immanent powers to attain its ends; apart from that it is nothing at all.
1
And if we observe, correctly enough, that Christian thought in this instance bears a Hellenistic philosophical stamp, we do not have to go far back to discern a Jewish influence behind it: ‘the gods of the peoples are worthless idols’ (Ps. 96:5). Athanasius in the Contra Gentes put his finger very clearly on the link between moral dualism and idolatry. All reality is grounded on the one who is real, and there can be no alternative reality.
From which it follows that committing sin is not so much a deed as a failure in doing. In English philology the adjective ‘naughty’ is formed from the word for nothing, ‘naught’. This does not mean that there are no sins of commission, or that we cannot form a positive purpose that we know to be wicked. It is simply that behind the most strenuous commissions of sin there lie things not seen, not felt or not understood, and that wilful wickedness is, at the deepest level, caught in the logic of self-subversion.
But about nothing, what is there to be said? If sin has no substance, it would seem to have no dimensions, and therefore to offer no scope for ordered enquiry. Yet neither in the philosophical nor in the theological tradition of reflexion did that conclusion seem self-evident. Sin could have no definite form of its own. This gave it an absolute character: all sins were alike, equally grave. As the seventh-century Athenian legislator Drakon was credited with saying, while minor offences all deserved death, he could think of no graver penalty for major ones. St James comments that failure in one point makes one guilty of everything (2:10). Yet this indeterminacy also invited thought about what Aristotle called sin’s ‘multiplicity’. 2 Without form of its own, sin is formed by its negative relation to definite and differentiated forms of virtue. Any exercise of virtue is complex and structured, open to error at more than one point. Telling the truth, for example, depends on knowledge of the matter of the proposition, knowledge of the hearers’ right to be informed, knowledge of the linguistic forms in which communication may occur, knowledge of the good of communication as such. It may fail at any one of these points. So differentiated description of failure is possible, shadowing the complex variety of possible accomplishments. We know not only the shapelessness of darkness, but also the formed outline of shadow. Sin is always ‘against’ something else. All sins are against the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of good reality, but as our relation to the Creator, Sustainer and Redeemer is mediated by forms of nature and time, so are our failures to relate to him. Abelard’s notorious principle that nothing is sin except direct contempt of God, is wrong, not because our sins do not evince contempt of God, but because we are not capable of contemning him outright. We are capable only of forgetting him, and forgetting what he has made and done, in one specific respect or another. So St. James, for all his assertion of the total lawlessness of every sin, pursues descriptions of different kinds of sin made possible by different kinds of power, reflecting on social divisions, unbridled talk, over-confident planning, ill-used wealth, and so on. The absolute and the differentiated accounts of sin are, it appears, compatible. We may focus attention on the single negating principle, or we may spread it out like a fan to explore its ramifications.
In the New Testament the differentiation of sin is sometimes treated by means of a distinctive literary form with a certain currency in contemporary Jewish literature, the list of vices. Of this form there are, on a reasonable if not uncontestable count, six examples. 3 The function of these lists has sometimes been supposed to be mnemonic and catechetical, which strikes me as unlikely, for they have no uniformity and are difficult to memorise. They present a variety of ways of mapping the field of sin. Each list is different from the others. They do, however, have a considerable rhetorical force, and we can well imagine that to deliver a string of deprecatory nouns and adjectives could have been an admired accomplishment in an early Christian preacher. They often allow no precision over the demarcation of one sin from the next, and having no common pattern, they present no standard scheme by which we may organise the varieties of sin. But they do convey very strongly the conviction that one sin leads to another. They are shaped to convey the idea of progress, piling up their vocabulary in impressionistic ways to build up tension, and arranging their contents in idiosyncratic, exploratory sequences. This is not simply spreading the fan and displaying the variety; it maps out the channels down which the flood of sin may flow.
Simply for illustration, I glance quickly at three of these, preparing the way for a more extended discussion of a fourth. The sole example from the Gospels, the list of ‘evil deliberations’ in Mk 7:21, is comparatively simple: ‘Out of the heart of man come sexual sins, thefts, murders, adulteries, expropriations, malpractices, trickery, sensuality, envy, malicious talk, pride, folly’ – twelve items, all nouns, six in the plural followed by six in the singular, the orderly character of which is explained by the parable the list illustrates, contrasting the innocuousness of ‘what goes in’ from the uncleanness of ‘what comes out’. Actions give expression to what lies within. The plural nouns refer, then, to performances, the singular nouns to dispositions; by going from the one to the other the list draws our attention back from what we do to what we are.
In Gal. 5:19-21, the only instance in which a vice-list is paralleled by a comparable virtue-list, we find a list of fifteen ‘works of the flesh’ which unfold as follows: ‘sexual sin, uncleanness, sensuality, idolatry, magic, hatreds, strife, rivalry, rows, quarrels, party divisions, gangs, killings, drinking bouts, orgies and such like.’ Here the distinction between singular and plural is not so orderly as in the Marcan example, but there is a clear direction from an erotic focus to violence, passing through corrupt religious practice en route. The failed relation to the self effects a failed approach to God, and yields a failed relation to others.
Romans 1:28-32, our third instance, outlines the ‘debased mind’ which results from idolatry with an outsize list of twenty-one sinful qualities, the construction of which is interestingly complex. It falls into five sections, of which the first, introduced by the adjective πεπληρωμένoυς, ‘filled with’, contains four abstract nouns of very general dispositions: ‘every unrighteousness, malice, acquisitiveness, wickedness’; the second, led by the synonym μεστoύς, ‘stuffed with’, contains five further abstract nouns representing social dysfunctions: resentment, murder, strife, deceit, deviousness. The third section quickens the pace, shifting from abstract nouns to adjectives, and naming six evils of speech, beginning soft and ending loud: ‘whispering, defaming, God-cursing, contemptuous, overbearing, boastful’. After these sections of four, five and six items respectively, the fourth section has only two; but with two words apiece, they have additional emphasis: ‘deep in evil schemes, irresponsible to elders’. Then the list rounds off with a galloping coda of four adjectives with initial alpha privative, expressed in English by the suffix ‘-less’: ‘mindless, faithless, heartless, ruthless’. So the list has begun with personal dispositions, gone through antisocial behaviour, corrupt patterns of speech and forms in which social cohesion is undermined, and has turned full circle to end up with personal dispositions again.
In general we can see in these lists explorations of the capacity of sin to progress within the dynamics of a historical society vulnerable to conflict and of historical agents liable to corruption. And so they can offer ways of connecting sin as multiplicity to sin as a single principle. It is not simply that there are two complementary modes of speaking about sin, which jostle conceptually like wave and particle. The single principle can be accommodated within the sequence as a beginning or an end, a source from which the stream flows out, or an ocean into which it debouches.
When we speak of a beginning of sin we may mean several things. There are narratives of origin, suggesting how sin entered the world, such as that in Genesis which dramatises the definition of sin as disobedience, or the anterior narrative which later reflection added to supplement it, guided by the saying of Jesus ben Sirach (10:12-13) that pride, or ‘overweeningness’, ὑπερηφανία, was the beginning of sin, about the pre-mundane sin of Satan and his angels. A narrative of origin is different from a definition: it is a simple idea, but positive, not negative. It proposes a psychological state which is apt to admit sin in the absence of other conditions. But protological narrative is not the only way that sin can be presented as having a beginning. Ben Sirach himself had no such narrative of pride, and Philo of Alexandria frequently names ‘self-love’, φιλαυτία, as the core psychological disposition, the ‘stubborn passion’ giving rise to every other evil of conduct, without protological pretentions. 4
In the New Testament we also find a place for sin in eschatological expectation. If world-history has a climactic disclosure, so does sin. In an age when all that is hidden will be made plain, sin, too, will be made plain. We are to expect an ‘abomination of desolation’, the appearance of a ‘man of lawlessness’, an Antichrist gathering forces to war against God in the wake of the triumph of Christ’s resurrection (Mk 13; 2 Thess. 2:3; Rev. 13). This eschatological clarity is not the same as the clarity of a simple, irreducible idea such as pride or disobedience. It is not a notional simplicity, but a moment of historical appearance. Yet the meaning of the appearance is plain, and it bears the recognisable stamp of the first sin in its last complex appearance as outright warfare against God’s will to bless. What is to be disclosed in the last days is already present concealed in the world, and so it is in eschatological sin that the unity of sin is to be discovered. This is made explicit in the fourth of the lists we shall consider, 2 Tim. 3:1-5, which introduces a catalogue of eighteen moral evils with the words, ‘Understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty’.
There are nineteen items in the list that follows, eighteen vices and one negated virtue, all expressed as masculine plural adjectives. The two first and the two last, beginning with the prefix φιλ-, form a framework: Men will be ‘self-lovers, money-lovers’; they will be ‘pleasure-lovers rather than God-lovers’. There is a chiastic structure here: self (at the beginning) corresponds to God (at the end), and money (in the second place) to pleasure (in the penultimate). But the pairs are not synonymous. As there is an evident progression from self-love to refusal of God, so there is a progress from love of money to love of pleasure. The intervening fifteen items describe that progress. Of these, four form an inner framework: two pairs of personality features in third, fourth, sixteenth and seventeenth places, separated by eleven terms describing a variety of relational failures. In third and fourth place are two synonyms for pride – ‘boastful, overweening’, balanced in sixteenth and seventeenth place by two that suggest loss of rational control: ‘precipitate’ and ‘intoxicated’. Here, then, is pride’s progress, as ‘arrogant and overweening’ attitudes at the outset acquire a dynamic and dangerous energy through the eleven failures of relational engagement. These begin with abusive speech and disobedience to parents – educational failures, one might suppose – which are followed by four negative epithets with initial alpha describing wider anti-social hostility: ‘ungrateful, irreverent, unaffectionate, implacable’. After one positive term referring again to evil speech the next three are negative, contrasted with the previous four, perhaps, as forward-looking rather than backward-looking: ‘uncontrolled, unfeeling and ungenerous’. The inner list concludes with ‘treacherous’, which with its prefix πρo- prepares for the character-term (‘precipitate’, πρoπετεῖς) that follows it.
The beginning and end of this list is neither protological nor eschatological; it does not begin in Satanic pride nor end in the ultimate confrontation with the Antichrist. Yet in sketching an unfolding of sin from an immanent to a more explicit form, it places it within the general framework of what will emerge in ‘the last days’. We become aware, through the changing face of sin, not merely of the multiplicity of error, but of the pressing pace of history which leads to ever more concrete expressions of rebellion and obedience. Its beginnings and endings are not absolute beginnings and endings, but neither are they chance beginnings, merely possible points of entry and exit upon the path of sin. They are forms of sin that are themselves pregnant, and so reminiscent of the absolute beginning of sin in pride; they are forms of sin that are of themselves embedded and immune from challenge, and so forewarnings of the absolute end of sin in the prideful warfare of evil upon good. There is a final note, expounding the last phrase, ‘lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God’, which is accounted for as ‘holding an outward form of godliness while denying its power’. This explanation is significant: the ‘pleasure’ referred to is not a purely sensual or immanent pleasure, but a destructive presence that can take form as a kind of religion – which is, indeed, the ultimate polemical target of the whole section of text. Eschatological disclosure of evil results in its clothing itself in order, structure and organisation, even to the extent of incorporating a pseudo-transcendence into its wholly self-oriented approach to the world.
*
I wish now to take a broader view of the progress described in this longest of the vice-lists in the New Testament, beginning from the clue afforded by the two chiastic oppositions that frame it: love of self to love of God, love of money to love of pleasure. In these terms we cannot fail to hear echoes of Philo of Alexandria. This is not to assume anything about the knowledge of Philo’s texts in the early church, merely to propose that since Hellenistic Jewish writers of the period moved in similar thought-worlds and deployed similar concepts, we may learn from their differences without speculating on their genetic relationships. This list is strung out between two very Philonian poles, self-love and the love of God. Prima facie, however, it differs from a Philonian exercise in two respects. First, where the Philonian rhetoric always comes back in the end to simple and radical opposition between vice and virtue, here opposition is qualified by a progressive depiction. Secondly, it differs in the unexpectedly forward position given to the love of money, and its distinction from the love of pleasure.
What is important for Christians in the claim that ‘the love of money is the root of all evils’ (1 Tim. 6:10)? That famous assertion of origin, a Greek proverb which was at least five centuries old when it was quoted in the First Letter to Timothy, continues to echo around other early Christian writers. On the face of it, this pagan account of sin’s origins locates the source of corruption in exposure to the world, and is thus in tension with the Jewish tradition of Sirach and Philo, which locates it in self-immanence. The vice-list of 2 Timothy 3 looks like a conscious undertaking to bring these two competing perspectives together, situating the love of money within the Philonian emphasis on self-immanent pride. Love of money, second in the list, is flanked by self-love and arrogance. It is thus interpreted as spiritual failure, and its relation to more worldly and social manifestations of sin is seen as that of root to fruit.
And so, for the apostle as for his contemporary Philo, the most immediate expression of the progress of pride is self-love. That is to say, self-immanence, withdrawal into a preoccupation with one’s own life, holding apart the precious self from the harsh light that the encounter with others might shed upon it, declining to find peace in the community that others offer. Pride takes initial form as an individuality that would be independent of community, its only peace to do its own thing uninterrupted. That others should, by their simple presence, offer a broader and better peace than it can offer itself, lies beyond its comprehension. John Donne writes of ‘the selfe-tickling proud’. 5 It is a state typified in drama by Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, who, while intensely interested in honour, cannot bear to hear his achievements publicly praised, ostensibly for the modest reason that what he has done is what any loyal Roman should do. But his modesty barely conceals a belief that no achievement could be of use to Rome which was not a replica of his own. Having pictured himself as the paradigm Roman, all other Romans are an embarrassment to Coriolanus. That he should have to canvass their good opinions to achieve the honour he believes his due, is humiliating. Coriolanus is a social being; he needs human approbation; but he is not prepared to pay the price of sociality, which is mutual communication. This is what pride amounts to.
There is a formal representation of public honour without mutuality – the burghers’ version, one might say, of Coriolanus’s military self-consequence, which is wealth. We can name this as the first of three symbolic objectifications of pride. In warning us against the love of money, the New Testament has in view precisely the power of wealth to offer us a dignified but wholly false projection of ourselves. Not all dealings with money are love-of-money, not even all wrong dealings, and sins in relation to money can be of many kinds, as can sins in relation to other objects; timidity, folly and anxiety can have money as their focus, just as they can have learning, building, political decision-making, and so on. But there is an always-beckoning possibility for pride in relation to money, as attractive to those who do not have it as to those who do, trading upon its isolating and elevating power, and it is for this reason that we can come to love money for itself, rather than as an instrument for achieving other things. In Jesus’ parable of the rich fool who hoarded up goods and was not rich towards God there is a striking rhetorical effect where, at the climax of his deliberations, the rich man makes up his mind to address himself: ‘I shall say unto my soul, “Soul…”’ (Lk. 12:19). We feel an elemental narcissism at work here. Reality will prove that it does not lie within the rich man’s power to pamper and protect from the world this ‘soul’ to which such loving promises are made.
Saint James, in a paradox that hardly gets the notice it deserves, invites the poor to boast in their exaltation and the rich in their humiliation (Jas 1:9-11). That is to say, the thing we should all appreciate about money, whether we have it or whether we don’t, is that it comes and goes. As a politician who clings to power at any price has actually lost the power that he was interested in, the power to carry through some concrete policy he had in view, so the rich who accumulate wealth lose the power that it should confer. They shrivel up, Saint James adds, in pursuit of their affairs. The moral question the New Testament poses to wealth, then, is precisely the question of its use. Money is the purest instrument, the indeterminate representation of the power to act determinately, conferring power to do something, but without specifying what that something is. And so the Apostle tells those who are rich to be rich in good works (1 Tim. 6:18), putting their resources at the service of practical reason. Love of money begins when the notice we pay it exceeds the instrumental purposes we frame for it, and terminates in acquisition and retention. Unbespoken financial resources offer us a fantasising self-reflection. We come, as the First Letter to Timothy has it, to ‘hope in the indeterminacy of wealth’ (1 Tim. 6:17, ἐπὶ πλoύτoυ ἀδηλότητι). In clinging to the indeterminate, we become indeterminate in our purposes, hoping merely to be sufficient for anything. We overreach the objects of action that world and time afford, and venture upon empty imagination.
Turning away from reality to imagination is a destabilising move, and the aloof, self-tickling proud has no ground on which to stand. So it is that at the end of pride’s progress he has taken the world substantially into himself. Not in the form where it is positively available to him, in materials for work or in the communication of social gifts, but in a self-referential form which constructs an engagement with the world around personal experience, as ‘pleasure’. We might have anticipated that the train of thought would end in oppressiveness, in which the proud imposed his own terms for coexistence upon others. This feature is expressed in the sequence of socially disruptive attitudes at the centre of the list, but the list does not end with these, but as it began, with a focus on the subject. The subject has not remained unchanged: the self-abstraction expressed in love of money has been converted into a form of dependence upon the world as the condition of satisfactory experience. An unexpected turn, perhaps. We think of the love of pleasure as a soft sin rather than a hard one, a sin of underdeveloped character in contrast to the rigidified surface of pride. Yet disdain must make terms with the world, and it ends up by being taken hostage by it. The proud are brought low in this respect, too, that they cannot do without a world to afford them a satisfactory experience of themselves. And so there emerges from this list of vices the curious figure the apostle has had in mind from the beginning, the religious entrepreneur with his following (but no intimates, to be sure), for whom the command of ritual and dogma affords the social form he needs to mediate the world as a pleasing experience.
Let us pay closer attention to the sense of the term ‘pleasure’, with the aid of an interesting and difficult passage from St. James which speaks of ‘pleasures’ as the source of wars and fighting (Jas 4:1). English translators of the Bible go to great lengths to wrap up James’s plain term ἡδoναί, in swaddling-bands of paraphrase: ‘bodily desires’, ‘appetites’, ‘passions’ are a sample from well-reputed modern versions, with ‘lusts’ and ‘covetousness’ prevailing in the Reformation era. 6 The reason for this wayward tradition, which goes right back to the Vulgate’s concupiscentiae and is replicated in other European languages, is clear enough: the meaning of James’s two assertions, that the origins of war are found in pleasures, and that pleasures conduct military campaigns within the bodily members, is not at all apparent. In their puzzlement the translators have fallen gratefully upon the verb ‘desire’ in the next verse, as though it were a kind of self-correction on the author’s part. But ‘pleasure’ in the philosophy of the ancient world carries distinct echoes of Epicurus, who was emphatic in his denial that pleasure could involve agitation or excitement. ‘Pleasures’ are enjoyments and satisfactions, not wants and dissatisfactions; they are states of mind we rest in, not strive in. They are not necessarily sensual, but consist in whatever blessings of creation and preservation we do in fact find pleasant. Their danger, as the apostle sees it, is that they ‘encamp’, taking control of our instinctual reactions. To relate to created and providential goods rightly, the tradition tells us, we must learn to ‘pass through’ them, or (in the classical formulation) ‘use’ them in the service of transcendent good. If they become the controlling fixed points of our universe of values, shaping our unreflective sense of what we may expect, they create, as James goes on, desires that can yield no purposeful prayer, but only be frustrated, since they aim at the preservation of a zone of pleasantness which must, for better or worse, prove transitory. This is what James, in a close echo of the 2 Timothy text, calls ‘friendship with the world’, otherwise, ‘enmity to God’ – ‘the world’, here, not the world of reality, but of the imagination. As love-of-money mirrors back to us a self clothed in honour, so love-of-pleasure mirrors back to us a self invested with power over the world, shaping it to our liking.
Love of pleasure is the form in which the list touches on the seductiveness of power. These two notions lie very close to one another. Love of pleasure begins when power is conceived self-referentially, in the service of self-maintenance and self-protection. The symbolic representation of the pleasure-lover is tyranny, which was understood by medieval political thinkers as the inability to conceive of a public realm as distinct from a private one. The tyrant rules the city, whether for its weal or woe, without conceiving of the peace of a city as a political good apart from his own private good. He never imagines himself a participant in something greater than himself, and has no sense of being subject to the logic of shared agency, where his own role subserves the life of the whole. The tyrant may be magnificently generous to those whose welfare and promotion he makes a project of, but it is in the service of his own self-satisfaction. Much of this idea of self-reference is retained in the modern discourse of ‘power’.
All engagement with the world involves the exercise of some power, both over nature and, socially and politically, over one another. To refuse power would be to refuse existence. On the other hand, it is given to us to exercise power for others, through the communication of gifts, and not only self-referentially. As God’s purposes for history approach their fruition in the disclosure of the City of God, the form and goal of all human communication, so does the possibility of the perversion of communication by self-referring power. In speaking of an eschatological disclosure of sin the New Testament has in view the formation of collective identity opposed to and in conflict with the ground of community. The sin of the last days asserts an identity, individual or collective but always collective in ambition, over against the possibilities of communication in common tasks and blessings, and against the arbitrament of love, which is the readiness to find rest in the community of others without imposing our own terms on them.
In pride, then, human agency refuses mutuality. To borrow a resonant phrase from Hegel, it refuses the ‘I which is We, and We which is I’, the second discovery of the self in community, and the renewal of community in the self. Pride’s progress moves from a withdrawal of the I from the We, to a mastery of the We by the I. A refusal to treat the instruments of communication as instruments becomes an insistence on treating the subjects of communication as instruments. But talk of I and We does not take us far enough; it takes us only as far as ‘immoral man and moral society’, the understanding of pride as failure to integrate socially. The eschatological character of pride appears when the We is overcome by a false We, a collective tyrant such as we find at the centre of John the Seer’s visions of the Antichrist. Every I carries its imagined We with it, constructed in accord with its own self-image, and it is this imagined We that can be imposed on the hazards of encounter to ward off the real We that might emerge from encounter. The question, then, is not whether we can speak the word ‘We’, but whether we can speak it truthfully and effectively. The We that fulfils and completes the search for a second self cannot be imposed or constructed; it can only be discovered as a given reality brought to new clarity.
All this, supposedly, ‘in the last days’, although the dynamic described here is hardly unknown to any age of history. Yet under the shadow of the end, the New Testament suggests to us, its appearance hastens; it assumes a concreteness of form that will appal us by its obviousness. Pride marches with progress of every kind, and it would not surprise the apostolic author to learn that the technologically most advanced societies in the world have come to be at one and the same time the most controlled societies and the societies most systematically devoted to furthering pleasurable satisfaction. Yet there is room for a further horizon within the eschatological view, following a trajectory beyond the end of the vice-list in 2 Timothy 3. As the passage from James tells us, the pleasures that constitute an occupying force in our instincts end in war and fighting. In the last days, so runs the central stream of New Testament eschatology, there is war. The worlds of alternative meaning that have been built up around the proud consciousness must conflict with God’s meaning for the world. War is division, and division seems to offer a moment of clarity. It is often the longing for moral clarity that drives us into war. But any clarity war may offer can only be the work of God, a judgment made on us, not a judgment that we ourselves can make. Those who go to war for clarity’s sake inevitably have to make some compromise with war’s proverbial fog. Pride, the sin of the end-time, emerging in its full dimensions as the purposes of God draw nearer to completion, would vest itself in the irrefutable clarity of its own structure of meaning, in isolation from the meaning God has conferred upon the world and its history, requiring it to be asserted in the face of all denial by annihilation, if necessary, of the witness borne against it. The clarity God gives to the disclosure of his kingdom is given only to the humble, who know that they cannot summon it into being for themselves.
War, then, will stand as the third and last symbolic representation of pride, after wealth and power, because we cannot, in fact, absorb every You into a We that is merely a projection out of ourself, but can only enter into competition with others to construct a We on terms of our own projection. Here is the moment of truth which lies with those who speak of the Gospel as essentially bound up with the repudiation of war. But of this third and final representation of pride we must say again what we have said of the other two. Not everything that is done in war is love of war. War is a sign of the end; we may, and must, consider how we are to bear ourselves in love and faithfulness when war arises, and that is the question that the so-called ‘just war theory’ propounded an answer to. I have written sufficiently on that elsewhere. 7 For the meaning of the representation of pride as war is not that responsible armed conflict is unthinkable; it is simply that the idea of the people as a second self, demanding our assertion or defence at all costs, can become so immediate, so unqualified by ordinary practices of thought and action, that we fail to see it as the denial of God’s right that it actually is.
We began from the unity and diversity of sin, and have tried to discern how sins, in all their variety and fragmentation, can be talked about to some purpose as a unified phenomenon, Sin. A formal definition – ‘sin is lawlessness’, or whatever – can do no more than introduce the topic. It is with sin as it is with virtue and right action: because moral thought and action extends in life and time, it requires the recollection of goods past and the anticipation of goods to come if we are to comprehend the possible good acts of the present as a disclosure of the good. So, too, it is in recollection and projection that we can see the dimensions and coherence of sin as a historical reality. Eschatology is a form of thinking within which this dynamic tendency of sin can be projected and explored coherently. Ethics as a discipline cannot vouch independently for the faith in a God of history that makes Christian eschatology meaningful. But it can hear what it is told by Christian doctrine, and acknowledge that certain aspects of moral experience demand such a faith to make them coherent. And in adopting this attentive hypothetical position, ethics can guard itself against the reduction of its account to the dimensions of one or another simple point of reference (the good will, virtue as habit, the best consequence overall etc.) that can never accommodate more than a fragment of moral experience. (So much, at least, the novels of Iris Murdoch repeatedly tell us.) Just as we ought to spread out the living reality of moral experience in all its categorical wealth and complexity, instead of shrinking it to one of those abstract theories which we din into the heads of eighteen-year-olds to their great intellectual and moral harm, so, in speaking of wrongdoing, no one simple category (ill will, denial of others’ rights, ignorance etc.) will do. Any account of sin we dare to give must look widely enough to see the dynamic emergence of life in history and the hope of final disclosure.
Footnotes
1.
Maximus the Confessor, Quaestiones ad Thalassium, introduction (PG 90:253).
2.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 2.1106 b 28.
3.
Mk 7:21, Gal. 5:19-21, Rom. 1:29-32, 1 Tim. 1:9-10, 6:4-5, 2 Tim. 3:2-3. I confine the count to general lists with six or more items, uniformly catalogued. A less strict formal criterion would include the more rhetorically diffuse 2 Pet. 2:17-22, Jude 15-19. There are four comparable virtue-lists: Gal. 5:22-23, 1 Tim. 6:11, Jas 3:17, 2 Pet. 1:5-7. Galatians 5 offers the only instance of two lists, vices and virtues, juxtaposed in contrast. There are instances of both kinds of list in contemporary Jewish literature, e.g. Wis. 7:22 (virtues) and 14:25-26 (vices), while Philo of Alexandria, as well as being attracted to the double list (De virtutibus alone has two instances, 174, 182), can produce phenomenal vice-lists, including one of 147 items (De Sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 5.32).
4.
Self-love and the love of God are two opposed ‘resolutions’ (δόξαι) represented by Abel and Cain (De Sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 1.2-3; De Fuga et Inventione 15.81). Self-love is ‘generative of’ other sins (14.58). It is ‘the greatest evil’ (De Congressu Eruditionis Gratia 23.130). It is a ‘stubborn passion’ (De Iosepho 21.118). It is, however, sometimes displaced in this commanding position by the love of pleasure.
5.
Holy Sonnets 3, ‘Oh might those sighes and teares…’
6.
Tyndale and the Geneva Bible get closest, with ‘voluptuousness’.
7.
Oliver O’Donovan, The Just War Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).