Grace & Peace!
Coptic, I know what the terms mean, and I accept them as useful and important. As useful and important as they are, however, I do not accept that they must
always be the
only ways to talk about and understand sin, nor do I believe the RCC makes this demand as you do.
Perhaps I’m just revealing my preference for the English spiritual tradition, but I’m thinking of Martin Thornton’s classic work
English Spirituality: An Outline of Ascetical Theology according to the English Pastoral Tradition in which he writes:
…]medieval scholastic and modern Roman systems regard the confessional primarily as restorative and juridical. William [of St. Thierry] and Anglicanism see confession primarily as an act of worship, an expression of penitential love. The first deals with carefully graded juridical distinctions, issuing from the mortal-venial classification, the second makes a generous prostration at the foot of the Cross; if there is any question of reinstatement to a lost position, it is the reconciliation of husband and wife–who have remained “married” during estrangement–rather than the acquittal of a prisoner.
This means that self-examination by meticulously graded lists of question, and carefully classified penances applicable to carefully classified confessions, have little place in traditional English pastoral practice.
Also, your understanding of hierarchy seems a bit odd. A hierarchy’s purpose is not to de-legitimize the people, things or ideas that are not at the top of the hierarchy, but to show how the various parts of the hierarchy receive light, goodness, authority, what-have-you from those above in order to transmit it clearly and beautifully to those below. The deacon is not worthless because he is not a Bishop. The laity are not worthless because they are not cardinals. A Throne is not rejected because he is not a Seraph. Likewise, a traditional way of looking at sin is not worthless simply because it is not the prevailing way of looking at sin. See Dionysius the Areopagite’s influential tract
Celestial Hierarchy for more info, specifically Chapter 3, from which this comes:
Hierarchy is, in my judgment, a sacred order and science and operation, assimilated, as far as attainable, to the likeness of God, and conducted to the illuminations granted to it from God, according to capacity, with a view to the Divine imitation. Now the God-becoming Beauty, as simple, as good, as source of initiation, is altogether free from any dissimilarity, and imparts its own proper light to each according to their fitness, and perfects in most Divine initiation, as becomes the undeviating moulding of those who are being initiated harmoniously to itself.
The purpose, then, of Hierarchy
Find it all here:
tertullian.org/fathers/areopagite_13_heavenly_hierarchy.htm. His
Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is also illuminating.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!