R
Ridgerunner
Guest
This seems very persuasive to me. I am reminded of two things I have read.
Some historian, and I believe it was Alistair Cooke, said that as compared to people in prior ages, (he was talking about the Renaissance at that moment) moderns “neither sin well nor repent well”. What is it to “sin well”? It is to do it with a robust willingness and mental clarity. We know it’s wrong and choose it. We might intend it only temporarily, but there is no question in our minds what we’re doing. Moderns, on the other hand, temporize with evil. We invent excuses, even invent our own moralities, in order to deny that we’re doing anything wrong in the first place or, at minimum, deny its seriousness.
And so, in “repenting well”, we repent the reality of what we did, wholeheartedly and with clarity of mind and will. If, however, we temporized with the acts wrongfulness in the first place, we might not repent at all or do it lightly.
Artificial birth control is brought to my mind in thinking about this. The Church teaches that it’s wrong. So how do we react to that? Well, many of us find a way to think of it as not wrong after all. Some, even in doing it, accept that it’s wrong, confess it and at least struggle with it. The latter “sin well and repent well”. The same is true of many of our wrongful deeds.
Ste Therese of Lisieux asserted that at the point of death (whether right before or right after, isn’t clear) we see with utter clarity the true nature of everything we ever did. God’s love and forgiveness is there, and we accept it with painful humility or we reject it in our pride, choosing self-worship for all eternity. This might seem radical, but it is really just a view of the nature of “final penitence”. We either have it or we don’t, and the likelihood of our accepting it is likely related to the way we approached sin and repentence previously.
None of this is so very incomprehensible, it seems to me. We are told that the fallen angels had massive intellects and complete clarity of thought. In choosing to rebel, they were in no way deceived or confused. With intellects so very superior to our own, and without emotional impediments, they chose to be disconnected from God, knowing totally what that meant, then and forever. Hard to understand in a way, but perhaps not entirely beyond comprehension. They were magnificent, we are told, so magnificent that if we could have perceived one as it is/was, we would not for a moment doubt that it was God Himself.
We are told that the choice was to “not serve”. Perhaps all angels that did not reject God knew they were foregoing self-admiration and self-worship for all eternity, and perhaps there was much to admire and to worship. With, say, an intellect a hundred million times as great as our own, might a being choose to engage in its own intellectual achievements forever?
We know that people have done it, though we don’t know whether they persisted in it to the last. Take Lenin, for example. He was so brilliant that Soviet scientists kept his brain preserved so they could perhaps figure out why he was such a genius. He thought it of himself, certainly, and rejected not only religion but even his supposed ideological predecessors in the utter self-assurance that he out-thought them all.
It can be painful to accept love. It can be painful to accept forgiveness when we have wronged someone. It can be painful to accept kindness sometimes. Can a human being, when faced with the real nature of his wrongful acts (always worse than we think they are in the moment) refuse forgiveness out of pride? It’s hard to imagine when salvation or damnation are the alternative consequences, but we do see people (including ourselves) do it all the time when stakes are far less.
What, then, is damnation? We don’t know for sure, though there are lots of statements about it, including by Jesus Himself. But what is it like in practical terms? Some theologians have told us the worst part of it is eternal separation from God. (The nature of that being worthy of a thread all its own) Is it possible, then, that we might freely choose it? Again, it’s hard to picture, but if we think seriously enough about our own wrongs and our own pride and suppress all rationalizations and self-exonerations, we can picture it at least a little.
Is truth-seeking and clarity-seeking, then, perhaps the thing we must most assiduously seek in this life, along with acting on that clarity? It seems likely to me. Perhaps we all need to learn to “sin well and repent well” while the opportunity still presents.
But we then need to ask whether that is an act of the intellect or of the will. Well, seems it can’t help being both, but perhaps the “will” part of it is the more important. Do we actually try to know the Will of God? Is it more important that we try to know it and act on it than it is to intellectually understand the nature of good and evil? Inasmuch as there have been philosophers with very clear and cogent thoughts but who lived evil lives all the same, it seems the first is the more important.
I was speaking in generalities.
