Chapter 3: Sin, Conscience, and Responsibility — Part 1

Part 1 of 3 — The nature of sin: original sin, personal sin, and the anatomy of temptation.

Three People in One Afternoon

A priest hearing confessions on a Saturday afternoon met three people in the space of two hours.

The first was a boy of fifteen. He was shaking. He had had a thought — a violent, obscene thought, arriving unbidden during the Liturgy of all places — and it had horrified him, and it had come back, and now he was convinced that he had committed an unforgivable sin and that God had left him. He had not slept properly in a week.

The second was a woman in her thirties. She had spent six years with a man who monitored her phone, controlled the money, decided which of her relatives she was permitted to see, and told her regularly that everything wrong in his life was her doing. She had done things in those years that she was ashamed of, including things that hurt other people. She had finally left. And she had come to confess, she said, because she needed to be forgiven for having wrecked her marriage.

The third was a man of fifty-two. He had been sober for nine days. He had been sober for nine days perhaps thirty times. He said, without self-pity, that he no longer knew whether he was a sinner or a patient, and that this was not a theological question for him but a practical one, because if he was a patient there was a clinic and if he was a sinner there was only trying harder, and trying harder had not worked since he was twenty-eight.

Three people. One had committed no sin at all and believed himself damned. One had been sinned against for six years and had arrived to apologise for it. One was asking the exact question this chapter exists to answer.

What Is Actually at Issue

We need to distinguish two questions that are constantly confused, in pulpits and in people's own heads.

Was the act wrong? This is a question about the act. It has an objective answer, and the answer does not change according to how the person felt about it.

How responsible is this person? This is a question about the agent — about knowledge, freedom, pressure, capacity, and habit. It admits of degrees.

Keeping these apart is the single most useful move in practical moral theology. Collapse them in one direction and you get harshness: every wrong act treated as equally damning regardless of circumstance, so that the coerced and the calculating are handed the same verdict. Collapse them in the other and you get dissolution: so many mitigating factors that nothing is ever anyone's fault, which sounds compassionate and in practice abandons people, because a person who is not responsible for anything cannot change anything either.

The Christian tradition holds both. It says plainly that some acts are wrong. It also says, with a precision that surprises people who assume religion is crude about these things, that guilt varies enormously with circumstance, and that only God can finally weigh it.

Original Sin: What We Inherit

Christian ethics has to begin its account of sin before the individual, because something is wrong with us before we do anything.

The narrative is Genesis 3: a command, a temptation, a choice, and consequences that spread outward — shame, blame, alienation from God, disorder between the man and the woman, hardship, and death. St Paul reads this as the entry point of death into the world (Romans 5:12) and contrasts Adam, through whom death came, with Christ, through whom life comes.

Where East and West differ

This is one of the few places where the Coptic Orthodox understanding differs noticeably from the Western Christianity most English-language readers will have encountered, and the difference has large pastoral consequences. It should be stated carefully and without polemic.

The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox tradition generally speaks of ancestral sin rather than original sin, and teaches that what we inherit from Adam is mortality and a corrupted nature — a nature subject to death, to disordered desire, and to a will that no longer runs true — but not personal guilt for Adam's act. You are not guilty of what Adam did. You are, so to speak, born into a hospital ward with a condition you did not contract by your own choice, and the sins you commit are your own.

The Western tradition, following St Augustine, developed a stronger account in which the guilt of Adam's sin is in some sense transmitted to his descendants. Part of the reason lies in translation: the Greek of Romans 5:12 says that death spread to all because all sinned; the Latin version Augustine used could be read as saying that death spread to all in whom all sinned, that is, in Adam. Modern Catholic teaching is careful to say that original sin in the descendants of Adam is a deprivation of original holiness rather than a personal fault of their own, which narrows the gap considerably. Classical Reformed theology, by contrast, maintains a robust doctrine of inherited guilt and of the total corruption of human faculties.

I state the Coptic position and I do not think the Western view is monstrous or stupid; it was constructed by serious people wrestling with real texts. But the practical difference matters. If a newborn is personally guilty, then a great deal follows about infants who die, and about how one thinks of oneself. In the Orthodox account, an infant is baptised not because the baby is guilty of anything but because the baby has inherited a nature that needs healing and is being united to Christ, who is the healing. Baptism is not the erasure of a criminal record. It is transplantation into a new life.

Two errors to avoid

Denying the wound. The modern assumption is that human beings are basically fine and would behave well given better education and circumstances. The evidence for this is thin. Every generation discovers that decent, ordinary, educated people will do terrible things under the right pressure, and that the capacity was not visible beforehand. Anyone who has honestly watched their own reactions in a week of ordinary provocations knows that something in us is not aligned.

Exaggerating the wound. If human nature were wholly corrupt, with nothing good left, then the image of God would be gone, the moral perceptions of unbelievers would be worthless, and the human capacity to respond to grace would have to be created from nothing. Orthodoxy does not teach this. The image is defaced, and it is still there. This is why the tradition can be simultaneously very severe about sin and very hopeful about people.

Personal Sin: What We Do

Beyond the inherited condition there are our own acts. Scripture uses a family of words for these, and the differences are instructive.

The commonest New Testament term, hamartia, is an archery word: missing the mark. Others carry the sense of transgression, of stepping across a line; of debt; of lawlessness; of falling aside. Together they describe sin as failure to hit the target of what we were made for, as violation of a real boundary, and as a deficit that must be met.

The Orthodox tradition, as noted in the Introduction, prefers the medical register. Sin is what is wrong with us, working itself out. This is not a softening. A doctor who tells you the truth about your liver is not being lenient. But it changes the question from how much punishment does this deserve to what is happening here, and what will heal it — which is a far more useful question when you are actually sitting with the man who has been sober for nine days.

Scripture also distinguishes categories of act by degree. Numbers 15 distinguishes unintentional sin, for which atonement is provided, from sin committed defiantly, with a high hand, which is treated with far greater severity. Christ says that the servant who knew his master's will and did not do it will receive a heavier beating than the one who did not know (Luke 12:47–48). St John refers to sin that leads to death and sin that does not (1 John 5:16–17), a distinction whose precise meaning has been debated for two thousand years but whose existence is plain.

The Anatomy of Temptation

Here the Egyptian desert made its greatest contribution to practical ethics, and it is the answer to the fifteen-year-old boy.

The monks were the first people to observe the internal mechanics of temptation systematically, because they had removed everything else and had nothing to watch but their own minds for forty years. Evagrius of Pontus, who lived among the Egyptian monks, catalogued the eight principal thoughts — gluttony, lust, avarice, dejection, anger, listlessness, vainglory, and pride — and his analysis passed westward through St John Cassian, who studied in Egypt, and eventually became the seven deadly sins. St John Climacus later set out the stages by which a thought becomes a captivity. The stages, in the form the tradition transmits them, are roughly these:

1. The provocation (prosbolē). A thought or image simply arrives. It is not chosen; it may be triggered by anything or nothing. This stage carries no guilt whatsoever. The Fathers are unanimous. A thought that arrives is not a sin, any more than a bird landing on your head is a decision.
2. The coupling (syndyasmos). You begin to converse with the thought. You turn it over, examine it, entertain it. You have not consented, but you are now in dialogue. Here a small responsibility begins, because you can still walk away and are choosing not to.
3. Consent (synkatathesis). The will agrees. Inwardly, the thing is now yours. Christ's teaching about the lustful look (Matthew 5:28) is located precisely at this stage, which is why the tradition takes it seriously even when no external act follows.
4. Captivity (aichmalōsia). The mind is carried off; the thought now drags you rather than the reverse. Attention is no longer free.
5. Passion (pathos). Repetition has produced a settled disposition. The thing is now part of your character, and it operates without needing a decision. This is the state the third man in the confession queue was in, and it is what the monks meant when they said that a passion is far harder to uproot than a sin is to resist.

The pastoral value of this scheme is enormous, and it is mostly unknown outside monasteries.

It tells the frightened boy that the blasphemous or violent or obscene thought that arrived during the Liturgy is not a sin he committed. Intrusive thoughts are extremely common; they often arrive with maximum inappropriateness precisely because the mind flags what is most forbidden; and horror at the thought is evidence of a healthy conscience, not a corrupted one. What he does next matters. The thought itself does not condemn him.

It also tells everyone else where the real battle is. Not at stage four, where everyone notices it, but at stage two, where nobody does. Almost every serious moral failure in an ordinary life is decided in a conversation with a thought that felt entirely harmless at the time.

And it explains why the Fathers made so much of small disciplines. You cannot win at stage four. You can very often win at stage two, and only if you have practised.

Continued in Part 2: what changes our responsibility — ignorance, habit, coercion, intention, and degrees of sin.