How Do We Know What Is Good?

Callout:
‘Sin is very real. Saint John the Evangelist wrote, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” ( 1 John 1:8).’

“Whoever fears God does [what is] good”, we are told in the Book of Sirach (15.1). That sounds reasonable, but, what is good? How do I know that what I do is morally good, or morally evil?

The popular notion is that whatever I decide is good for me is morally good. But that is not always true. The early Church Fathers spoke of sin in terms of missing the mark – we aim at doing good, but miss when we do what we erroneously judge to be morally good. For instance, having sufficient money to provide a secure home and life for my family is something that is good. But, if I decide to obtain that by stealing, then I miss the mark, having erroneously judged that sin – stealing – is a morally justifiable means to obtain a good.

Sin can be described as the doing of something that is objectively evil which offends God. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines sin as “an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is a failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity” (#1849)

The first example of sin in the Bible is Original Sin, the first sin of Adam and Eve (Gen 3:5). They were forbidden by God from eating fruit from the tree of good and evil. They broke that command. Their sin was more grievous than simply eating the forbidden fruit. “It is disobedience, a revolt against God through the will to become ‘like gods’, knowing and determining good and evil” (Catechism, #1850). Sin is “love of oneself even to contempt of God” (Saint Augustine, De civ. Dei, 14). Sin is our attempt to live without God, and to make ourselves divine in His place.

It is natural to desire whatever is good in life. But that desire does not permit us to use any means to obtain the good, or to abuse that which should be used for doing good to satisfy inordinate desires. We ourselves are not the legislators of what is morally good or evil. God is, and He reveals this in the natural law and in Divine Revelation, as seen in the teachings of the Church, in Scripture, and Tradition. When we decide we want something and decide we will have it at any cost, no matter if contrary to God’s law, then we make an idol of the thing we want, setting God aside.

 

Original Sin

Callout:
‘Adam’s Original Sin was not a matter of picking fruit, but of turning away from God, making himself the legislator of what is good and evil.’

“O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, that merited for us so great a Redeemer.” These words from the Easter Vigil hymn, the Exsultet, express the history of salvation: God’s creation of man in His image, Mankind’s fall in Adam’s sin, which begins Mankind’s history of sin, suffering, and death, and the coming of the Savior, Jesus Christ, who alone redeems us.

Adam’s sin, the first or Original Sin of Mankind, affects every human person. Its effects are the reason people act so badly. The sin of Adam, his choosing to eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil, “symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust. Man is dependent on his Creator and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #396). The Catechism continues, “Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command.”

This is the substance of man’s original sin. All subsequent personal sin “would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness.” We misjudge that the goods of the earth, sex, power, wealth, can substitute for God who alone can bring true happiness (#397). Adam’s Original Sin was not a matter of picking fruit, but of turning away from God, making himself the legislator of what is good and evil. “In that sin man preferred himself to God and by that very act scorned Him. He chose himself over and against God . . .” Man, created in holiness and destined to share God’s eternal life, preferred to make himself God without God. (#398)

Once mankind attempts to make itself God, the grace of original holiness and close friendship with God is shattered, and personal unhappiness begins. The harmony with God, with ourselves, and with creation is destroyed, and, as Genesis tells us man will “return to the ground”, out of which he came (Genesis 3:19). In other words, Adam and all his descendants, who sought to make themselves God without God, harvest death, since without God we are nothing. (Catechism, #399-401) Saint Paul expressed it this way: “Sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned . . .”(Romans 5:12, 1)

Adam’s Original Sin affects everyone. The Church teaches that “the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination toward evil and death cannot be understood apart from their connection with Adam’s sin and the fact that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted, a sin which is the ‘death of the soul’. Since there is a unity of the entire human race, all are implicated in Adam’s sin. Original Sin does not have the character of a personal sin, but is rather the deprivation of original holiness and justice which wounds human nature. We are, therefore, “subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death; and inclined to sin--an inclination to evil that is called ‘concupiscence’”(Catechism, #403-405). This is why the Church baptizes, to erase original sin and to turn the human person back toward God.

The results of Original Sin, however, remain: we remain weakened and are inclined to evil. Reinhold Neibhur, the Protestant theologian, wrote that “Original Sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of Christianity.” We see it in operation every day: people doing bad things.

Life is a spiritual battle, avoiding evil and striving to do good. A balance is sought within ourselves, with God, and with His creation. By ourselves, relying only on our natural powers, we can never succeed in doing what is really good. But, on the other hand, our natural goodness and free will are not so annihilated by Original Sin that even temptation ia sinful. Rather, by God’s grace through Christ, men and women can choose to do good and avoid evil, and be transformed by grace to be more like Christ. By responding to God’s grace and doing what is right and pleasing to God, we become truly human – as God originally intended (Gaudium et Spes, 37, 2).

Through Christ we return to the great plan God had at the beginning of the world, to share His divine life with us. By God becoming a man in Christ, mankind has the actual possibility to share God’s divine life forever . Where mankind failed in Adam, and continues to fail daily, Christ, the second Adam, succeeded, by His obedience to the Father, by His humility, by His Sacrifice on the Cross that paid the price for humanity’s sins.

In short, by His succeeding in doing the will of the Father where Adam and all of us fail, Our Lord not only makes up for the Original Sin of Adam, but pays for our daily sins that have their origin in our first parents’ fall. (Gaudium et Spes, 22)

 

Love The Creator, Not Things

Callout:
‘The avaricious person trusts not in God, only in wealth. While “In God we trust” might be the motto on the greenback, the avaricious person believes only in currency it’s printed on.’

Avarice is the excessive appetite for wealth. “The love of money is the root of all evils” (I Timothy 6:10), Saint Paul tells us, quoting classical wisdom. Aristotle and other ancients ranked avarice high on the list of human faults, and judged reckless hoarding and reckless spending as two extremes of the same sin, since by both the individual is consumed by preoccupation with earthly possessions.

Avarice secures the material means by which the individual satisfies pride: I am the center of the universe, I am god in my world, and all exists to satisfy ME. The preoccupation with wealth and the accumulation of material goods becomes high on my list of daily priorities, as does the prodigal spending of that wealth, to satisfy my desires.

Dante places the avaricious with the prodigal in the fourth circle of Hell. It is interesting that most of the denizens of that circle are priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes, whom Dante judges as having squandered the treasure of the Church in search of vainglory or to satisfy themselves (Canto VII, 30-48).

For Saint Paul, as well as for Dante and other writers, avarice is the sin whereby man vainly attempts to dispose of the world’s wealth for his own aggrandizement and satisfaction, instead of seeking to subject himself to God’s Providence. The avaricious person trusts not in God, only in wealth. While “In God we trust” might be the motto on the greenback, the avaricious person believes only in currency it’s printed on.

 The traditional image of the avaricious person is the miser. A superb image of avarice is by the Flemish painter Hieronymous Bosch (1460-1516) in his work, “The Death of the Miser.” Bosch gives us a double image of the avaricious man, showing his daily business life and his death. The scene is the miser’s beautifully appointed bedroom with wooden barrel vault, leaded glass windows, and Corinthian columns, reflecting the miser’s obvious wealth dedicated to his own personal comfort. The room has no religious symbol. The largest pieces of furniture are the money chest and his bed. The chest is opened, and the miser drops coins into a sack of gold, held by a demon. The chest is filled with I.O.U.’s, referring to the source of the miser’s wealth, the exploitation of the poor. At the same time, he nervously fingers a Rosary, hanging from his money belt. He is a man who practices religion – but not in his business dealings. Religion and God belong in church, not in daily life.

Behind the chest we see the miser on his deathbed. A skeletal figure of Death enters by the door. An angel sits on the bed next to the miser, pointing to a Crucifix that miraculously appears in the window. But the miser ignores both the angel and the crucified Lord, turning his attention to a sack of gold offered by a demon. His last act is to prefer money to God. “For many . . . are enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is ruin, their god is their belly, their glory is in their shame, and they mind the things of the earth” (Phil 3:18-19).

Avarice is the disordered love of the things of this world. Saint Augustine tells us that we are all drawn to love. But what must we love? How do we choose? Augustine, echoing Saint John the Evangelist, wrote, “If you ask, then, how a man can love God, the only answer is that God first loved him. God gave Himself to be loved, and He also gave the power to love Him” (Sermon 34).

Avarice leads us to love-created things, instead of loving the Creator. Since God has first loved us in Christ, our response is to forget ourselves, to depend upon God. God gives us good things, like human love, money, fine food, a beautiful day, friendship, and families, to lead us to Himself, the Creator of all good things.

The virtue of charity is the opposite of avarice, the perfect example of which is Our Lord. What did Christ gain from sacrificing Himself on the Cross? His was a pure love: charity, laying down everything, even His life, for us with no thought of repayment. He laid down His life for love of us and for love of the Father.

The basis for all morality, therefore, is the conversion of self-love to love of God, manifested in charity toward one’s neighbor. This is the meaning of Saint Augustine’s famous saying, “Love, and do as you will” (Sermon on the Epistle of Saint John, 7:8). Our charity is only an imitation of the divine charity toward us. True love asks for nothing in return; it exists only for the benefit of the beloved. Our beloved is God, and we should live to please Him first.

 

Fight Envy With Kindness Gratitude

Callout:
‘The envious person is saddened by the happiness of others, and rejoices in any harm that befalls another person, especially an enemy. There is a real meanness to envy.’

The third capital sin, envy, is sadness at the well being of others. Envy is more pernicious than mere jealousy. The jealous person senses that he or she is deprived of that which rightfully is theirs. A matter of justice is involved. Jealousy, therefore, is not necessarily evil, so long as the person has a well-founded right and the expression of that right is not excessive or sinful. For example, a husband may be jealous of the attention his wife gives another man, since the husband has a just claim on the exclusive love of his wife.

Envy, however, is not based upon justice or right. It is a displeasure bordering on hatred of one toward another simply because the other has succeeded. The envious person is saddened by the happiness of others, and rejoices in any harm that befalls another person, especially an enemy. There is a real meanness to envy.

The effect of envy, like that produced by pride and avarice, is a palpable sadness and the isolation of the individual from everything morally good. Cain’s envy of Abel, for example, led him to murder his own brother, making him an enemy of his own family and of God, terrified of those whom he should have loved. The envious person sits alone, seething as he looks out at a world filled with people who enjoy the life God has given them. Everyone is perceived by the envious as an enemy, since the envious see everyone else as having robbed him of that which should be his for no other reason than that he has determined such. Being a capital sin, envy fosters other malevolent behavior, such as hatred, calumny, and detraction. Envy is the militant arm of pride.

Saint Augustine saw the first four capital vices, the more spiritual sins — pride, avarice, envy, and wrath — as the more serious sins. The effects of these on the human person are three:
1) The privation of the vision of God
2) The replacement of spiritual joy resulting from love of God by a lower, sensual joy from love of self
3) Man’s self-degradation by sin replacing his nature as the image of God with that of the image of a beast.

This deformation of one from being an image of God to an image of a beast is a slow process. Augustine writes, “For as a snake does not creep on with open steps, but advances by the very minutest efforts. . . so the slippery motion of falling away from what is good takes possession of the negligent only gradually, and beginning from a perverse desire for the likeness of God, arrives in the end at the likeness of beasts” (On the Trinity, Book XII).

The remedy for envy is charity, which for begins with basic human kindness and then to an appreciation of God’s generosity, beginning with creation. God sensed no need to create us, but did so in order to lavish His love upon us, and He did so granting us an undeserved dignity, as His image and likeness. We are no brute beasts, existing simply to satisfy instinct and urge. He grants to all of us, no matter who we are, the splendor of creation.

Virgil, in Dante’s Purgatorio, observes that God’s generosity is manifest in the light of the sun that He “maketh to rise on the evil and the good” (Canto XIII). This divine generosity is not completed at creation. For no reason save love, God sent His only Son to humiliate Himself by becoming a man, and further, by sacrificing Himself on the Cross paid for the innumerable sins of mankind.

Shakespeare echoed this in The Merchant of Venice, in Portia’s soliloquy about mercy: “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth like a gentle rain from Heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed. It blesseth him that giveth and him that takes: . . . It is an attribute of God Himself, and earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice.” (Act IV, Scene I, 180ff).

God’s overabundant charity led Him to create us, and then that same love urged Him to save us from ourselves. More than merely created in His image and likeness, through Christ we are raised up further to share in His divine life as His adopted sons and daughters in the Church. In light of such divine charity, none can think that God owes him anything. Portia, herself, stated as much, as she continued: “Though justice be thy plea, consider this, that, in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation; we do pray for mercy. And that same prayer doth teach us all to render thy deeds of mercy.” None should envy anyone, since everything we have is an undeserved gift from God.

What should the envious do? Begin with simple kindness toward others: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 19:18). Then develop a sense of gratitude toward God, and, by grace, graduate to charity, the willing self-sacrifice for the benefit of the other person, regardless of personal cost, in imitation of Christ.

 

The Consuming Futility of Wrath

Callout:
“The antidote to wrath is mercy toward those who offend us. Our Lord’s admonition is to be applied to our everyday lives: turn the other cheek. He means this; He’s quite serious, that we are to forgive those who wrong us.”

Wrath or anger is the next capital sin. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that, “Anger is a desire for revenge.” It continues, “If anger reaches the point of a deliberate desire to kill or seriously wound a neighbor, it is gravely against charity; it is a mortal sin” (#2302). Our Lord taught, “Everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment” (Matt. 5:22). By anger, Jesus means much more than simple annoyance. Anger that is sinful is true hatred of neighbor, and is so grave a sin against charity that the individual desires serious harm against another.

Saint Thomas Aquinas taught, “The cause of anger is always some slight, regarded as unjust. We are especially outraged when we believe the injury to have been deliberate and done out of contempt; but if the injury was done in ignorance or from passion we are more inclined to be forgiving. Anger is aroused by painful injury to which satisfaction offers a remedy” (Summa Theologiae,Ia IIae, xlvi,2,1).

Anger is not always sinful; it can be justified. For instance, when Our Lord cast the thieves from the Temple, his anger was ordered to divine justice, and not sinful. It was a justifiable anger. A serious wrong was being committed repeatedly by those selling and changing money within the Temple precincts. Our Lord was justifiably angered by this outrage. A crime, a violent action, a betrayal by a friend, an actual injury by an enemy, any intentional action that is truly harmful to ourselves, to our family and friends, or to our reputation can bring about a response that might be justifiable and not necessarily sinful.

Sinful anger or wrath denotes a true hatred of another simply because the other does not satisfy one’s expectations or one’s self-promoting plans. Pride, envy, and wrath go hand in hand. For example, the pride of Cain led him to envy his brother Abel, simply because Abel was a good man who won God’s favor. Cain became unjustifiably angry and murdered his brother. Had Cain any reason to be angry? No. Cain decided to give God his leftovers as an offering, while Abel sacrificed his best. If he had imitated Abel’s desire to serve God first, he and all he did would have been pleasing to God, just as was Abel.

There is a consuming futility and bitterness to wrath or resentful anger that is destructive of all human order, as is all sin. The wrathful person’s energies are turned to revenge, and the result is neither satisfaction nor justice, but pain and nagging evil memories.

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is the most famous literary example of the fruit of wrath and revenge. Romeo and Juliet are young lovers in Verona, Italy. Prevented from marriage because of the continued hatred of their feuding families, the two marry in secret, and plan to escape the tyranny of their familial vengeance. Their plan fails and both die tragically. At the end, the families finally see the futility and tragedy of their mutual hatred:

“Where be these enemies? Capulet, Montague,
See what a scourge is laid upon your hate,
That heaven finds means to kill your joys with love! All are punished” (Act V, Scene 3).

It is not God who in revenge seeks to destroy the families of Capulet or Montague. It is their continued vengeance and wrath which, seeking to destroy others, destroys themselves, and even that which is good, their children, and their children’s love.

During Mass, the priest prays, “Deliver us, O Lord, from every evil, and grant us peace in our day.” While one might interpret this as a prayer for a lasting political tranquility, it is actually a prayer for interior peace, brought about by a right relationship with God and neighbor.

Wrath does not lead to interior peace. It is a perfect example of sin and the resultant anxiety and turmoil, both interior and exterior, which sin brings about. There is no peace where sin exists, for the primordial relationship with God is broken, and all other relationships in our lives, with ourselves, with others, or with things, is necessarily affected.

The antidote to wrath is mercy toward those who offend us. Like all virtues, mercy is based on Christ’s charity toward us. Our Lord’s admonition is to be applied to our everyday lives: turn the other cheek. He means this; He’s quite serious, that we are to forgive those who wrong us. The person who can forgive another is stronger than the person who can exact revenge.

There is no honor or nobility to revenge, except in popular fiction. The true nobility is that of Christ and His Cross. Our Lord was an innocent man, yet he accepted the Cross in order to pay for our innumerable offenses against God. The innocent died for the guilty. Christ is our example, whom we must follow if we wish happiness here on earth, and eternal happiness in the life to come.

 

Sloth: Apathy Towards God

Callout:
‘What are some signs of a slothful spirit? Do we habitually arrive late at Sunday Mass, or fail to pray daily, or not at all? Do we think of God only when tragedy or necessity arise? Are we habitually annoyed when others ask for our help?’

Sloth is the next deadly sin. It is a spiritual laziness about doing good and a refusal of the joy that comes from God to the extent of being “repelled by divine goodness” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2094). Sloth is not merely laziness about doing work, but an apathy towards God and His mercy. I simply do not care about God, and find myself totally uninterested in Him, His grace, or His Church.

The Church Fathers of the first four centuries saw sloth as a vice particular to monks and hermits who, after long fasting and prayer, would experience a spiritual dryness. By the early Middle Ages, Pope Saint Gregory the Great observed this vice in many people, manifesting itself in the lazy and slipshod performance of one’s religious duties toward God.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologiae, expanded on this, and saw sloth or spiritual apathy as opposed to charity. God has been so good to us, he wrote, that we should respond to His love in a like charity, and with joy. This spiritual apathy saddens us in the presence of God, and leads us, not to the joy that is the end goal of loving God, but to an interior sadness that can affect our entire life (IIa IIae, 35, 1)

Saint Thomas continued, “In the same way every vice breeds sadness and depression at the spiritual good of virtuous acts; but apathy [sloth] is a special vice saddened by the very goodness of God in which charity rejoices. Sins that by definition exclude the love of charity are of their nature fatal. Since joy in God necessarily follows on charity, and apathy [sloth] is sadness about spiritual good as a facet of God’s goodness, apathy is of its nature fatal” (IIa IIae, 35, 2).

God created the human soul to love, and he created all things to lead us to the Creator. We are fully human when we love God; that’s why we exist. The passage from the book of Baruch, read during the Easter Vigil, has a marvelous image of all creation obeying God: “He has set the earth firm for ever and filled it with four-footed beasts, he sends the light -- and it goes, he recalls it -- and trembling it obeys; the stars shine joyfully at their set times: when he calls them, they answer, ‘Here we are’; they gladly shine for their creator” (Baruch 4:4).

If created things respond to God, then why shouldn’t we, who have reason and free will? Christ is our beginning and our end -- the Alpha and the Omega. We were designed to love God, and by loving Him, God we become fully human. Sloth robs us of this dignity, because by it we allow our natural desire to love God to grow cold. Love tends to what is good; true love tends to the Author of all goodness, God. We who love God only a little disable ourselves, and find ourselves distracted to love-created things rather than the Creator.

What are some signs of a slothful spirit? Do we habitually arrive late at Sunday Mass, or fail to pray daily in the morning or evening, or not at all? Do we think of God only when tragedy or necessity arise? Are we habitually annoyed when others ask for our help? When temptation comes, do we not even consider God or the Church and Her teachings? These may be outward manifestations of the spiritual sin of sloth -- I really can’t be bothered with God -- I’m too busy, or too important to bother with God. Religion is only for the weak minded and superstitious; anyway, God doesn’t give me what I ask for; the Church is hypocritical; a priest once was nasty to me. These are excuses to justify one’s spiritual sloth.

Sloth is closely related to the sins of envy and anger. The slothful person does good things with annoyance, with resentment, and without spirit. The result is an unhappiness that pervades the entirety of one’s life, resulting in anger, sorrow, self-pity, and despair. God created us to be happy, by loving Him. He invites us to love Him. Sloth urges us to forget God in our daily lives. By not loving God enough, we lead disordered lives, loving created goods instead of loving the Creator. There is no happiness in that.

The virtue of Fortitude is the remedy to sloth. Fortitude, a gift of the Holy Spirit received in the Sacrament of Confirmation, urges us to despise harmful things and to persevere in loving God with joy. This virtue raises and fortifies the soul, while sloth lowers it and enfeebles it. Fortitude leads one to be magnanimous -- noble in spirit, and to faith in God, hope in salvation, and charity towards God’s image, one’s neighbor.

Sloth, as all the deadly sins, turns us in toward ourselves, to lead a life of disordered love -- I love myself first and foremost. We become authentically human only by loving God first, manifesting that love in charity, love of neighbor. This is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, leading to happiness here on earth and life in the world to come.

 

Beware Gluttony, The Devil’s Work

Callout:
“The remedy for gluttony is abstinence and fasting, which is the most practical method of penance. There is a real spiritual value to fast and abstinence, which is often overlooked simply because most people cannot imagine denying themselves anything.”

“Their end is ruin, their god is their belly, their glory is in their shame, they mind the things of earth.” (Phil. 3:19)

“Their god is their belly” describes perfectly the next deadly sin, gluttony. Saint Thomas Aquinas writes, “The vice of gluttony does not lie in food as such, but in unregulated and unreasonable desire of it. . . . Gluttony is knowingly eating too much pleasurable food for pleasure’s sake” (Summa Theologiae, IIa, IIae, q. 148).

Gluttony is an inordinate desire for the pleasures of food and drink, and the pursuit of those pleasures to excess, sometimes to the detriment of one’s health, always with disregard for rules of sobriety. Dante situates the gluttonous in the third circle of Hell, comparing them to dogs that, while alive, could not control their pursuit of pleasure. Their torment is eternal: Cerberus, the mythological and repulsive canine guardian of Hell, tears the souls, barking in their ears ceaselessly; bitter, pelting sleet torments them, and they live in rank filth. Their punishment is an eternal assault upon their senses, which the gluttonous pampered while alive (Inferno, Canto VI, 1-36).

Pope Saint Gregory the Great (540-604) described five ways in which one can be guilty of gluttony: constantly eating at times other than meal times; eating more sumptuously than one’s means permit; eating and drinking excessively; voraciously shoveling food in simply to fill one’s gullet; and being too fastidious about what one does eat (Moralia, II, 76). In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the Parson describes virtue and vice in his Tale, calling the five types of gluttony “the five fingers of the Devil’s hand, by which he draws men to sin.”

The nature of this sin, as all Capital Sins, is that it leads to graver sins. A desire for and appreciation of good food and drink is not morally wrong. It is the excessive desire for them, and the graver vices stemming from them, that are sinful, leading to the practice of satisfying all desires, or the philosophy that one should never deny oneself anything.

In our culture, pleasure is an end in itself. The pursuit of all pleasure is seen as a right, so long as no one is hurt. For a consumer society, that makes sense. Pursuit of pleasure sells goods and commodities. However, pleasure in itself is not good, because pleasure exists only as a means to come to know God. Whatever is good, true, and beautiful, is given to lead us to the source of the good, true, and beautiful -- God. Pleasure that comes from sinful actions is self-destructive and reduces us to Dante’s image: more brute beasts than human beings.

Some might view Gregory the Great’s five divisions of gluttony, and Chaucer’s description of them as the Devil’s fingers, as quaint and not applicable to us 21^st century sophisticates. In reality, we are still morally the same as Adam, just more technologically advanced. We tend to be self-centered. We should turn away from seeking the gratification of our every want, and turn our attention more to pleasing the God who loves us. After all, we are not mindless brutes seeking to satisfy instinctual urges. We are the image of God!

The remedy for gluttony is abstinence and fasting, which is the most practical method of penance. There is a real spiritual value to fast and abstinence, which is often overlooked simply because most people cannot imagine denying themselves anything. Self-denial is good, since it turns us from worshiping ourselves to the worship of the true God. By fast and abstinence, we say that pleasing God is so important in our life, that we permit Him to influence our every action. Saint Paul says as much, “Whatever you do, in word or in work, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus.” He isn’t simply speaking about some type of ministry, but of God affecting and forming every action we do, every desire we have.

Instead of eating non-stop, why not fast or abstain from your favorite food and offer the money used to feed yourself to come to the aid of the hungry -- how about the poor and suffering and Afghanistan!? Compassion for those who are hungry, charity for those who lack the basics of life, ought to be a force in our lives stronger than our hunger for the best food and drink. Gluttony, as all the Capital Sins, leads to graver sins, the most grievous being Pride -- we become the god of our lives instead of the true God.

We were not created brute beasts, but the image of God. Everything we do and want, therefore, should lead us to Him, even what and how much we eat and drink.

 

There Is No Love In Lust

Callout:
“In contrast to the person who is in constant agitation of soul, tossed about by uncontrolled desires and passion, the lover of God enjoys an inner peace because of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.”

The final Capital Sin is lust, which “is the disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive [physical union of husband and wife] purposes” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2351). It is related to the sin of gluttony, because both are the disordered desires for physical pleasure.

The Parson in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales calls lust the devil’s second hand of the devil: “Truly, the five fingers of Gluttony the Fiend puts into the belly of a man, and with his five fingers of Lechery he seizes him by the loins to throw him into the furnace of hell.” In both gluttony and lust, reason is subdued by the desire for physical pleasure as an end in itself.

Dante puts the lustful in Hell’s second circle, tossed about in a perpetual storm of suffering, just as they were tossed about by the tempest of their own uncontrolled passions in life: “The hellish storm, never resting, seizes and drives the spirits before it; smiting and whirling them about, it torments them. . . . and there they blaspheme the power of God; and I learned that to such torment are condemned the carnal sinners who subject reason to desire” (Inferno, Canto V, 31-39). Their sexual wantonness threw their relationships into confusion, from uncontrolled passion to heartbreak and self-reproach and back again. For Dante, these souls wasted their lives on disordered self-serving passions, and now their lack of peace continues for all eternity. Disordered in life, they know no peace in death.

From a human point of view, sexual relationships outside marriage do real harm to the individuals. For a sexual relationship is more than a mere biological function. It involves the entire person. Those involved invariably leave a piece of their heart with the other.

From a Christian point of view, sexual relations outside marriage between a man and a woman are offensive to God because they reduce the individuals to the status of objects of pleasure. No longer the image of God, the partner exists for the moment as a thing for the pleasure of the other. The dignity of the person is unimportant, compared with the pursuit of self-gratification and pleasure. There is no gift of self, as in marriage, but only the taking for self, debasing the other.

As a Capital Sin, lust leads to other grave sins, all of which are based upon the sin of Pride -- I am god, and all exists for me. The true God is inconsequential to me, with no actual impact upon my daily life, thus I can pursue my own ends. This sounds like freedom, but is really slavery to sin, because sin, in reality, controls me.

Saint Ambrose wrote of this: “Persecutions are many, and so are martyrdom. You are daily a witness to Christ. You are tempted to fornication, but you fear the future judgment of Christ and decide not to risk purity of mind and body -- you are a witness to Christ. What better testimony to the coming of Christ in the flesh than to obey the gospel precepts? If a man hears but does not do, he denies Christ; he confesses in word but denies in action . . . Realize what kings you set up over yourself if sin reigns in you. As many sins and vices, so many kings. But if a man confesses Christ, he immediately turns king into captive and unseats him from the throne within the mind” (Commentary on Psalm 118, Sermon 20: 47-50). Saint Paul encouraged the early Church in Colossae to “mortify your members, which are on earth: immorality, uncleanness, lust, evil desire and covetousness (which is a form of idol-worship)” (Colossians 3:5).

“The body is not for immorality,” Saint Paul also wrote. “Every other sin a man commits is outside his body, but the fornicator sins against his own body” (I Corinthians 6:17). Sin leads to an interior disordering of the person because sin is self-destructive, breaking one’s fundamental relationship with God.

In contrast to the person who is in constant agitation of soul, tossed about by uncontrolled desires and passion, the lover of God enjoys an inner peace because of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. One faithful to God does not deny the existence of one’s passions or desires, he controls them. He is master of himself. A moral life leads to peace with God and with oneself, and expresses itself, not in a desire to use others as objects, but in a life of charity, seeing others as the image of God. The result is a supernatural generosity towards others.

Lust, like gluttony, subjects reason to physical desire. By this, we separate ourselves from God because we act, not as the rational creatures we are, but as brute beasts. Human reason, enlightened by revelation, formed by faith, and strengthened by the merits of Christ’s Cross, leads us to be fully that which we were created to be -- the image of God, whose citizenship is in heaven.