Apart from God, there is nothing in ourselves for action to proceed from. But it is part of the con-sequence of the freedom God willed us to have, that God will concur in the actions our will chooses, even if these actions are not the best for us. If the will insists, God will give it the energy which will allow it to damage itself. In other words God treats us as grown-up.
He will lend our will the energy to act against His will if that is what our will chooses.
This choice is sin.
It is an interesting list that the Church gives of the seven capital sins, the sins from which all other sins flow. They are Pride, Envy, Avarice, Anger, Sloth, Gluttony and Lust. Note that all are in the will.
For sin is always a defect of the will.
Its act may be in the intellect, or in the body; but the sin itself is in the will. No action whatsoever, merely as action, can damn us, but the will with which we do it. And the will can damn us without any action at all save merely willing. For by the will our deepest relation of harmony or disharmony with reality, that is to say with God, is established.
We see that sin is always assertion of self as against reality.
Pride is the worst sin, for it is positive assertion of self, positive choice of self in place of God as the supreme object of our love and our actions. Being the worst sin, it is also the most ridiculous. In order to set oneself up in place of God, one must borrow from God the energy to do it: if we insist upon defying God,
God lends us the energy to defy Him with.
No sin is its own contradiction more instantly and obviously, no sin therefore means a more total break with reality.
The other six sins avoid the crowning folly of Pride.
Where Pride is a positive assertion of self as against God, these others choose creatures in place of God, without necessarily making any explicit assertion at all about the nature of God or themselves.
But there is always an assertion of one’s own desires as against the reality of things.
And it is always an assertion that negates. It always involves choosing less than we might have, less than we need. And it never pays full dividends.
Why then do we sin?
For the sins of the mind, there is the plain uncomplicated pleasure of egoism.
There is an appearance of autonomy in asserting self with the appearance of impunity. Indeed there is a disease in the will which can find some sort of pleasure in the assertion of self, even where the appearance of impunity has vanished away and the wretched inadequacy of self in the face of reality is altogether obvious.
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