A Theological Chronicle: Sin

Extract

Philosophers have measured mountains,

Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings; Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains: But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove;

Yet few there are that sound them—Sinne and Love.

(Herbert, The Agonie)

I cannot remember ever having seen an article in blackfriars on sin—not sin and Mauriac or Graham Greene, or sin and homosexuality or sin and Jung: just sin. This may very well be due to my own pre-occupations; it is easy enough simply not to notice an article which doesn’t seem to offer anything to one’s immediate structure of interests. But even then, it may be, this inadvertence would not I feel be untypical. If the Catholic intelligentsia today is very conscious of having moved, and having to move still further, from a Catholicism almost wholly turned in on itself, psychologically and sociologically, almost wholly ‘interior’, it is hardly surprising that the Catholic themes which excite and hold attention are ‘exterior’ ones: liturgy, the lay apostolate, ‘the Bible’ (the Bible as proclaiming a message, kerygmatic, and not as ‘devotional’). Again, it isn’t easy to write about sin or to think about it, to make it an object of serious contemplation, to hold it before the mind’s eye. One’s own crude and violent experience of sin interferes with the peaceful contemplation;