292. How to distinguish true repentance from its counterfeit
292. HOW TO DISTINGUISH TRUE REPENTANCE FROM ITS COUNTERFEIT
Our own spiritual insides are mysterious, complex, and obscure to us. How can we know whether our repentance is authentic? Since our motives can be mixed, and often are, can our repentance also be mixed? Can we be partially repentant?
A man cannot be truly penitent if he repent of one sin and not of another. For if one particular sin were displeasing to him because it is against the love of God above all things (which motive is necessary for true repentance), it follows that he would repent of all (III,86,3).
The answer to the question is that indeed the motives of our repentance can be mixed—for instance, we may be motivated by both servile fear (fear of punishment) and filial fear (fear of offending the God we love) when we repent—but the objects of our repentance cannot. The reason for this is that if we repent of one sin and not another, we are not repenting of sin as such, that is, of the broken love relationship with God that sin consists in. And that is a single thing: it is our single summum bonum, greatest good, and final end.
The only reason why any sin is displeasing to God, and ought to be displeasing to us, is that it is contrary to, and harms, and dishonors, the love of God which is the ultimate end and good of all things, especially our own lives.
We habitually think of God in relation to something else (e.g., ourselves, our happiness, or our sins) rather than thinking of everything else in relationship to God. Thus our thinking is not really unified as reality is. That is why St. Thomas says that we cannot really repent of one sin and not another: because sin is relative to God, not God relative to sin.
To truly repent of any one sin is to repent of what sin essentially is—the broken relationship with God—and thus to repent of sin as such, and thus to repent of all sins. (This does not mean that we must be aware of all sins, or that our motives must be totally pure.)
But if our motives are not even mixed—if this right motive is not at all the reason sin displeases us—if we are displeased by sin not because it displeases God but only because of some other reason that has nothing to do with God—then our repentance is not really repentance for sin at all. If our motive is only a purely human motive, like shame before other human beings, or an affront to our own human self-esteem, such motives, since they are not at all because of God, are not really repentance to God at all. And therefore this is not repentance (penance) at all, not even the lowest, servile kind.
Our motive for repentance may be low without the repentance being false. The motive may be merely the purely selfish and servile fear of God, fear of divine punishments, whether in this life in time or after death in Purgatory for a time or in Hell for eternity. This is a true, though inferior, motive for repentance, and this is true repentance, even though it is from “imperfect contrition” rather than “perfect contrition”, for the objective reason that it really leads us back to God; but it is inferior subjectively or psychologically because it does not conform to what God essentially is, namely, love.
And if it is the true God that we return to, then this return to God, even from inferior motives (“imperfect contrition,” “servile fear”), will necessarily lead us to a better state, better motives, motives of love rather than fear. The reason this change will necessarily happen, however slowly or gradually, is because the true God, to Whom we really come in repentance, is love, and “love casts out fear” (1 Jn 4:18). This better motive of love can in turn either be mixed with servile fear or be pure filial fear.
But when we find ourselves apparently repenting of one sin but intending to commit another, we should go back and question our repentance.
This is not an obscure and technical point but crucial for the only thing in our lives that matters eternally, our soul’s relationship to God. That is the one war that is truly “total war”, the battle for our very selves. “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” (Mk 8:36)