Newman on sin and habit
From a discourse titled “Neglect of Divine Calls and Warnings”:
[E]very sin has a history: it is not an accident; it is the fruit of former sins in thought or deed; it is the token of a habit deeply seated and widely spread; it is the aggravation of a virulent disease; and, as the last straw is said to break the horse’s back, so our last sin, whatever it is, is that which destroys our hope, and forfeits our place in heaven…. And that last sin need not be a great sin, need not be greater than those which have gone before it; perhaps it may be less. There was a rich man, mentioned by our Lord, who, when his crops were plentiful, said within himself, “What shall I do, for I have not where to bestow my fruits? I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and I will say to my soul, Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thy rest, eat, drink, make good cheer.” He was carried off that very night. This was not a very striking sin, and surely it was not his first great sin; it was the last instance of a long course of acts of self-suffiency and forgetfulness of God, not greater in intensity than any before it, but completing their number.
All very true, but I like very much the words “Remember not past years!” in “Lead Kindly Light”. It is never too late.
Rilke had the godsend of the completed Duino Elegies and the spontaneous Sonnets to Orpheus in a week of blazing inspiration in 1922. Suddenly he had “caught up on himself” and found his life-work miraculously completed in one fell swoop.
Similarly, the Lord can put our lives right overnight and pass over the wasted and misspent years.
I agree with this reflection. I would like to write a little about prayer and virtue. Prayer and virtue are different from each other. Virtue of whatever kind is an acquired habit that needs care and maintenance throughout one’s life. It is hard to acquire virtue, however, it is relatively easy to maintain and keep it. Prayer is not like that. Prayer is work. It never stops being work. The desert monks tell us, “prayer is warfare till the last breath.” Feeling good or feeling bad, normally feeling bad, can be an obstacle to prayer.
The American anchoress Sister Nazarena taught that we can always begin again now.
C.S. Lewis also had some pithy things to say about sin and habit. For example, Screwtape, a senior demon in the “Lowerarchy,” counsels his nephew Wormwood about the value to “Our Father Below” of prodding humans to commit small sins on a regular basis. One of my favorite passages in “The Screwtape Letters” is this excerpt from Letter XII:
“You will no doubt say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”
I love the moment in a fairy tale where the “turn” comes, and there is suddenly the possibility of redemption, happiness, fulfillment. It may be a weakness, but all I can say is there is life in that moment for me. And so I very much appreciate Fr. O’Leary’s reminder that it’s not over till it’s over. There is always the hope of that impossible last minute turnaround. Maybe that is why one of my favorite poems is Hopkins’s “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.” It is a giddy look into the abyss, with everything in transition, beaten level by time, blurred by vastness, until:
“Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.”
The major change in the fourth century continued unabated in Christian history. All of a sudden being rich became more important as there were riots in the streets as to which bishop would rule certain jurisdictions and who would benefit from the largesse of all these new buildings the emperor was giving away. And the opinion of the emperor became more important than that of one’s co-religionists. Today the rich are courted and become Knights of this and that while bishops vie for their attention. Cardinal Hayes isolated the new bishop Spellman for meddling with Hayes placement among the privileged. Even tho Spellman was the good friend of Eugenio Pacelli, Hayes insisted that Spellman stay away from the Cardinal’s reception. The legendary Spellman used the power and the wealth of the rich and famous to control practically everybody. City officials openly referred to the New York Archdiocese as the “Power House.”
Today people argue over who will attend or could attend the Alfred E Smith Dinner. Cardinal Law’s Lawn Party was among the top five events of the year in Boston. It always amazed (and appalled) me the way Catholic officialdom catered to the rich. Not that Catholics have a monopoly on this. Robertson, Falwell, Roberts and others flaunted their wealth.
Now Jesus talked about this problem of accumulating riches and seeking the first place often. He did not seem as obsessed with sex as many leaders are. So there is major meat here to chew and a most neglected area as we constantly applaud wealth and fame and blame the poor for their sloth. This is certainly a low priority even in Catholic periodicals whereas it is certainly prominent with the Lord.
But it is still fashionable to point out how many nasty poor people there are and how detachment is the criteria and not possession. What is this story about anyway?
Newman’s continuity point seems to apply here as the norm. The last minute might be substantially misunderstood. After all the elect in Matthew 25 ask Jesus when it was that they fed him, clothed him, visited him ..
Susan Gannon, thanks so much for the Hopkins poetry. I didn’t know this piece and, as you say, it’s magnificent. Again, thanks.
Michael,
I would like to recommend an author to you: Ruth Burrows. Ruth is a British Carmelite cloistered nun, who has served as Novice Mistress and Prioress of her convent, and is now in her 80s, I believe. She has written a number of books on prayer, but her latest, THE ESSENCE OF PRAYER, is especially apropos to what you wrote in your post about prayer-as-struggle.
Burrows believes that prayer is something that GOD DOES in us–the Spirit crying out “Abba”–and our job is to “show up” each day, rain or shine to spend quiet time in His presence. In this, she is akin to her fellow Discalced Carmelites, John of the Cross and Teresa Avila, as well as to such modern spiritual writers as the Trappists, Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating. I think you will find her not only challenging, but enjoyable to read. I wish I had discovered her a long time ago!
It seems to me the rich man did not commit a “sin” in this instance. Apparently we are to believe he has been storing up treasures on earth rather than storing them up in heaven, and consequently he is a fool (not an evil man), because he wasted his time storing things that he will derive no benefit from.
I think too much emphasis is put on individual acts called “sins” and not enough on ideas like the “fundamental option.” Newman is trying to force-fit a theory of individual sins into a story in which, it seems to me, the rich man’s last act was not the straw that broke the camel’s back, but rather something consistent with the way he had chosen to live his entire life.
By the way, to return to an earlier area of disagreement with Matthew Boudway, I was taking a look at this parable in Luke 12 in the online version of the New American Bible, and the chapter has the following notes:
If Jesus himself was not mistaken about the immanence of the end time and the Second Coming, his followers somehow got the wrong impression.
Ken,
I am familiar with Ruth Burrows. I didn’t know about her new book. Thanks for the recommendation and your insights.
Susan Gannon,
Thanks for what you posted and what you have quoted. I have read it several times. It keeps getting better.
…his followers somehow got the wrong impression.
What else is new!
David,
I think you may be missing Newman’s point here. Particular sins, even small ones, are serious precisely because they are expressive of a “fundamental option.” Sin leads to a habit of sin which leads to more sin. And each new sin goes down easier than the last, undermining the soul’s immune system — the conscience. So something may be both the straw that broke the “horse’s” back, and consistent with the way one chose to live one’s entire life; that, I take it, is exactly Newman’s point. The rich man is both a fool and a sinner because his calculations and concerns prescind from what should be his first concern. His “acts of self-sufficiency” had led to — and then entrenched — a “forgetfulness of God.”
Just want tosay that I agree with David’s point about not focusing on individual sins but on value approaches, if I can use that phrase. I mean how are we to practice the necessary virtue(s) to not be avaricious?
I think you may be missing Newman’s point here. Particular sins, even small ones, are serious precisely because they are expressive of a “fundamental option.”
Matthew,
It’s possible I am missing Newman’s point, but I would like to think I am disagreeing with him. I admit to being annoyed with Newman and predisposed to disagree with him because Gabriel Austin has referred two or three times to this Newman quote:
It seems to make sin into a “thing,” rather than a personal turning away (slightly or wholly) from a personal God. It is as if there world were set up with a list of rules that may not be broken, and it does not matter how arbitrary those rules are.
It makes me thing of one of my favorite paragraphs, which is from Luke Timothy Johnson’s Commonweal article A Disembodied “Theology of the Body”
Methinks the Cardinal must have been scrupulous. ‘There is no first sin’ ? Of course are are first sins. I commit fresh little ones often, sins with no history at all. Sometimes they are inspired by odd, even unique little temptations. And I need to ne on the look- out for them.
I agree with David Nickol that the the rich man’s single little sin won’t send him to Hell. A little sim us still a little sin’. Sure, they can be very destructive cumulatively because the weaken virtue. but to over- emphasize them is to minimize God’s mercy – and our friends’ patience with us.
Ann,
Newman does not write, “There is no first sin”; he writes that every sin has a history, which is not quite the same. Every sin is different, of course, as is every temptation. But I’m not sure how one could be “on the look-out” for a sin totally without precedent — how one could even recognize it as sin apart from its resemblance to other sins and temptations.
The question of whether Newman was scrupulous is a good one, but I think you will have trouble convicting him of scrupulosity on the strength (or weakness) of this quote. Newman is not Aristotle; he is not even Thomas Aquinas. The language of virtue and vice is far less important to him than the language of sin and grace. Both before and after he crossed the Tiber, his psychology of faith had more in common with Kierkegaard’s and Pascal’s than with that of the schoolmen. Having been a very catholic Protestant, he became, in some ways at least, a very protestant Catholic, and part of his value to Anglo-American Catholicism is his slightly alien sensibility.
This sermon was not written by Cardinal Newman, but by the young Anglican vicar John Henry Newman. It is one of his Parochial and Plain Sermons.
I myself don’t see how it either quote Newman turns sin into a “thing”; he regards it as personal choice, which is certainly not a thing. Individual choices, of course, help to form and to alter a character, and what is a life’s history but a succession of choices? How would one discern what a person’s “fundamental option” is escept by reference to the concrete choices that define one’s daily life. If the option isn’t embodied in them, one has reason to doubt that the option has been made. I think Newman makes a very acute psychological point in the quote with which this thread began.
The eight volumes of these sermons constitute one of the great classics of English-language spirituality. Volume 6 is particularly good for the Lenten and Easter seasons. All of them, in fact all of Newman’s works (except for the “Letters and Diaries”) are available on-line at http://www.newmanreader.org/ which also has an excellent search-engine.
I think it dangerous to start telling Our Lord what He meant. I believe Our Lord was not so much concerned with the general End Time – but rather with the End Time for each of us. Suppose the End Time is scheduled for 27 August 2075. How are any of us concerned? What should concern us is the simple fact that anyone might, say, leave the office and be run over by a bus this evening. That it seems to me is the simple point of Our Lord’s message about the man who died in his sleep.
“Watch ye therefore, because you know not the day nor the hour” [Matthew 25:13].
And as between Newman and Luke Timothy Johnson, I think there is not much to choose. Newman knew how to think; logic was a forte; try reading THE GRAMMAR OF ASSENT. And how to write.
Off subject, but I saw Rilke mentioned and remembered this poem of his …
The Angels
They all have weary mouths
and bright souls without marge.
And a yearning (as for sin)
sometimes haunts their dream.
They all seem so alike;
in God’s garden silent they remain,
like many, many intervals
in his power and melody.
Only when their wings spread out,
they are the awakeners of a wind:
as if God with his broad hands
of a sculptor went through the pages
of the beginning’s dark book.
I think it dangerous to start telling Our Lord what He meant. I believe Our Lord was not so much concerned with the general End Time – but rather with the End Time for each of us.
Gabriel,
Why is it “telling Our Lord what He meant” when I attempt to understand what Jesus was saying, but not when you do?
Matthew-
Ivsee your point about Newman being a Protestant Catholic. However, i think that the typical scholastic understa ding of sin in the fullest sense of thectsrm is far superior to one which emphasizesconly the turning away from Hod. In the fullest sense sin also included the decision go sct against the best interests of someone (usually someone else), plus the decion to carry out the act, and the sct usually hss consequences which affect someone else.
What I’m trying to get at is that sin is usually s communal matter, but I don’t think that comes through in the Newman. It also doesn’t come through in other Catholic moral theologians. May e the’be been influenced by the Protestants too. Or not. Sigh
Matthew –
Mindfulnees meditation has the benefit of establishing a habit of attention which can and usually does make one better aware of just what is going on in our minds when we are being tempted. This acute attention allows us to “take a closeer look” at what is really going on within us. It allows us to be on the look- out for temptations and just why we are attracted to this sin or that. Very humbling.
Also, Newman does say that all sins are preceded by prior sins, which imlpies that there is no first sin. Poor man.
This probably is off topic but I thought but I thought it might be helpful to mention afflictions as understood in the monastic tradition. We learn from the monastic tradition that there are three types of afflictions: afflictions of the body, afflictions of the mind, afflictions of the soul.
Within this monastic model, the afflictions of the soul are acedia, vainglory, and pride. I thought I would write a little about acedia.
Acedia is a weariness and affliction that is lodged deep. The word has been translated variously as dreariness, melancholy, boredom, apathy, indifference, and sloth. It comes to the serious seeker of the spiritual life. It comes to the person who has actually developed a certain amount of spiritual discipline. Acedia produces a profound distaste for spiritual things. Acedia shrivels our vision of God.
The best way out of acedia is to reverse all the tendencies that come to us from our acedia. This means doing what we don’t want to do while we are afflicted by acedia. In summary stay awake, get to work, and pray. In time it will pass but it will not pass on its own. We need to work ourselves out of this affliction. We need God’s grace. Often God’s grace comes to us through life’s interruptions and surprises.
Battling acedia teaches us to pay attention to our mind and our thinking. We learn that our thoughts come and go and we don’t need to let them ensnarl us.
Latin American theology has its own experience with sin and its own perspective about sin. The fall in Genesis is interpreted differently. In this tradition “sin is the immeasurable greed of
people who want to possess something, and everything else follows from this desire to possess.” (Dorothee Solle)
Poor people read the Bible with different eyes than ours. In a situation of exploitation and under the fearful pressure of those who possess everything at the cost of the exploitation of the masses, it is easy not to read the story of the fall as simply a father-child relationship with prohibition and transgression, “but in terms of greed, covetousness, avarice.” (Solle) It is astonishing how differently the same biblical story can be read in different ways. For the poor the story is about greed, about basing life on having which then leads to economic and social injustice.
In our Western theology there really is never any reflection about the apple, at best it is a jest. When the discourse and reflection is burdened with just a personal orientation, “God and the human couple, creator and creature, authority and freedom, prohibition and disobedience stand in the center of this story.” (Solle)
Latin American theology extracts a very different side from this web of symbols: covetousness as what separates human beings from God.
Sin is injustice, and God is understood as justice within the biblical tradition.
Suppose the End Time is scheduled for 27 August 2075. How are any of us concerned?
I don’t know how old you are, Gabriel, but it’s certainly possible that some of us will live to see 2075! I’m not counting on it myself, but stranger things have happened.
August 27, 2075, will be my older sister’s 132nd birthday. We may have to plan the party for the 26th.
Michael –
Thanks for your point about the difference between Latin American and North American spirituality. It illustrates perfectly what I was trying to get at– that recent Western spirituality seems mainly concerned with the subjective part of sin’, while Latin American Spirituality is mainly concerned with its objective parts.
It seems to me that an adequate kind must be acutely aware of both. I suspect that one reason Thomss Merton remains so popular is because he saw the necessity of both.