Darkness, silence, and sin
In “The City of God” (Bk 12, ch. 7), Augustine famously argued that it is a mistake to look for the active, effective cause of the will’s consent to evil. Moral evil occurs, he argued, because of a defective will, not an effective one, and he said that it made no more sense to look for an intelligible cause of sin than to desire to see darkness or to hear silence. But Augustine also set out the same view in at least three other places.
The Apostle’s comment, “That which I work, I do not know,” can seem to those who don’t understand to be contrary to his other statement, “Sin, that it may appear sin, by that which is good, wrought death in me” (Rm 7:, 15 and 13). For how can it appear if it is not known? But “I do not know” here means, “I do not approve.” Just as darkness is not seen but is felt by comparison with light, so that to sense darkness is not to see, so also sin, because it is not illumined by the light of justice, is discerned by its not being understood, just as darkness is said to be sensed by its not being seen. That is the point of the Psalmist: “Who can understand sins?” (Ps 18:13). (Augustine, Expos. on Romans, 43: PL 35, 2071)
“From my secret things cleanse me, O Lord.” For “who can understand sins?” When you can see darkness you’ll be able to understand sins. (Augustine, En. in Ps 18, sermon 2, 13; PL 36, 162)
“Who understands sins” (Ps 18:13). What sweetness can there be in sins when there is no understanding of them? How can anyone understand sins when they close the very eye to which truth is sweet, to which God’s commands are desirable and sweet? Just as darkness closes the eyes, so sins close the mind and do not allow it to see the light, nor to see itself. (Augustine, Enar. In Ps 18, sermon 1, 13; PL 36, 156)
Hmm. This passage surprises me. For starters, iff darkness is nothing, and we can’t see nothing, then we can’t see a dark chair — it must be invisible. But we do see the darkness of many things. They are not invisible.
Augustine is famous for saying that evil is an absence of good, but that wasn’t original with him, and this passage makes me wonder what he meant by it and if he’s sometimes misinterpreted. As I understand Aquinas, he took Augustine to mean that evil is the absence of a due relation to some good that ought to be. But for Thomas even though the relation does not exist, sin is an actual choosing by the will, and that act does exist. (Augustine seems to be denying this when he says there is no effective cause of sin.) So for Thomas there is not a total absence of being when we sin. On the contrary, some sins/choices and their objects are indeed posiitvely sweet.
“Nothing” is, of course, one of the great philosophical problems.
Darkness is defined, isn’t it, as the absence of light, and in the absence of light, I don’t know how it can be seen. We see things that are dark in color because light enables us to see them. But we certainly don’t see darkness.
The basic sin is the failure to do what reason tells us to do or the failure to avoid what reason tells us to avoid. This is where the unintelligibility lies. We resort to rationalizations to justify ourselves, but we also know the difference between offering rationalizations and having reasons.