WOE IS ME: SIN AND SUFFERING IN THE HUMAN FAMILY When God created Adam and Eve, He gave them sanctifying grace, that is, they were able to partake in the Divine Nature – they had a share of the Divine Life in their souls. They had no right to this grace; it was freely given to them by God. They also were granted what is referred to as the three preternatural gifts - 1) bodily immortality 2) integrity and 3) infused knowledge. We were created freely by God, out of His infinite goodness, to live and love freely as He does. Made in His image and likeness, we too were given free will. God allowed temptation in the world, not so we would choose evil, but so that we would choose the good. Without free will we would not be creatures in Gods image and likeness, nor would our love for Him or for each other be a free and authentic exercise. Our first sin was not a given, it was a choice we made in our God-given freedom. Thus we come to a principal truth about evil – it is primarily the absence of good. When our first parents lost, by sinning, the grace and (preternatural) gifts God had bestowed on them, we lost them too. After all, we could not inherit from them that which they themselves no longer possessed. It is through sin that death entered the world. So it is now our condition that every one of us will one day die. We lost the first preternatural gift - bodily immortality. The loss of the second preternatural gift – integrity - has resulted in our inclination to sin; what we now refer to as concupiscence. There are two types of sin. The first is Original Sin which we inherit by generation; by the fact that we were conceived by our parents, who were conceived by their parents… in a line that stretches all the way back to Adam and Eve. Original sin will not directly send anyone to Hell, but it will keep us from Heaven unless we are cleansed from it. Properly understood, original sin is not an act committed by us, Adam’s descendants, but rather a deprivation of holiness in our natures. “Adam and Eve transmitted to their descendants human nature wounded by their own first sin and hence deprived of original holiness and justice; this deprivation is called original sin. As a result of original sin, human nature is weakened in its powers, subject to ignorance, suffering and the domination of death, and inclined to sin (this inclination is called concupiscence).” (CCC # 385-386) Thus, original sin is called sin by the Catholic Church only in an analogical sense: it is a sin contracted and not committed — a state and not an act. We do not inherit guilt of sin from anyone (i.e., original guilt from Adam and Eves particular sin); rather, what we inherit is our first parents’ fallen nature – which is marked by a general condition of sinfulness. The second type of sin is Actual (or personal) Sin, which is sin we personally commit, either by acts of commission or acts of omission. The Church has traditionally taught that there exist Seven Deadly (or Capital) Sins. “Vices can be classified according to the virtues they oppose, or also be linked to the capital sins which Christian experience has distinguished, following St. John Cassian and St. Gregory the Great. They are called “capital” because they engender other sins, other vices. They are pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth…” (CCC 1866). Personal Sin can be mortal, that is, it can deprive us of the free gift of Heaven and merit for us Hell. These sins result in pain and suffering. And they do not affect only mankind; all creation is harmed by sin. The third preternatural gift - infused knowledge - allowed Adam and Eve, without personal study or experience, to know Who God is, who they themselves were, the “why” or relevance of creation, and their place in it all. The loss of this gift is as bad as the loss of the first two gifts, because it hampers our efforts to grow in the spiritual life and understand the presence of pain and suffering in the world. And it is precisely our failure to grasp this knowledge, despite God’s Divine Revelation lovingly given to us over the centuries, which facilitates the rise of so much personal sin in our lives. Priorities in our lives that arise from self-absorption (narcissism), indicate that this is so – we now have only an imperfect understanding of God, of who we are, and why we are. Of course this is our failure, not God’s. We are ourselves (both individually and collectively) the cause of suffering and this suffering affects us all, the righteous and the unrighteous. St Thomas Aquinas, the Church’s greatest theologian, distinguished the supernatural gifts of Adam before the Fall from what was merely natural, and said that it was the former that were lost, privileges that enabled man to keep his inferior powers in submission to reason and directed to his supernatural end. Even after the fall, man thus kept his natural abilities of reason, will and passions. However, all Christians accept that these abilities are not, of their own, sufficient to restore man to the level of his original communion with God. The reason God became man was to redeem us from our bondage to sin, to be our savior, to make all things new. This act of love can save us, it is the final victory over death. Death and evil and suffering will persist in the world as long as sin continues… but we are now equipped by the grace of God in Christ to overcome their effects on our souls. “God is infinitely good and all His works are good. Yet no one can escape the experience of suffering or the evils in nature which seem to be linked to the limitations proper to creatures: and above all to the question of moral evil. Where does evil come from? I sought whence evil comes and there was no solution, said St. Augustine, and his own painful quest would only be resolved by his conversion to the living God. For the mystery of lawlessness is clarified only in the light of the mystery of our religion. The revelation of divine love in Christ manifested at the same time the extent of evil and the superabundance of grace. We must therefore approach the question of the origin of evil by fixing the eyes of our faith on Him who alone is its conqueror.” (CCC 385)
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 14:03:56 +0000
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