26. Sins of the Flesh Take You Toward God; Sins of the Spirit Take You Away from God.
26. Sins of the flesh take you toward God; sins of the spirit take you away from God.26
I was so struck by this statement from Thomas Aquinas that I worked it into the title of my major book on Evil called Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society. I spend three chapters in the book celebrating what science has told us about flesh and matter and their sacredness, including the wonders of the flesh of the universe, the earth, and our human bodies, all of which we now recognize as made of the same stuff that was given birth 13.8 billion years ago.34
What excites me about Aquinas’s observation that sins of the flesh take us toward God and sins of the spirit away from God is that this teaching has the potential to end the sexual preoccupations of so much bad religion, a preoccupation that freezes people into a juvenile and adolescent stage of developmental awareness. As Pope Francis observed, there are “anti-condom zealots” who are want to “stick the whole world inside a condom.”35
Ever since Pope Paul VI’s ill-advised encyclical Humanae Vitae, there has been drawn a line in the sand regarding whether one is for or against birth control. The Roman Catholic Church has practically split over the issues of sexuality in recent decades, with the right wing making their rallying cry all about birth control—even though 93 percent of Catholics disregard the papal teaching on birth control—or homosexuality.
At the same time—and with no surprise—the loudest among the sexuality enforcers have more often than not succumbed to intense self-hatred, hypocrisy, and arrogance. Prime examples of this reality are laid bare in the recent lengthy study by French journalist Frédéric Martel, In the Closet of the Vatican, which concludes that most of the prelates attacking Pope Francis on his efforts to ease up on homophobia are not heterosexual prelates themselves, but self-hating gay prelates hiding in places of power—including the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.
One such figure who appears in Martel’s book is Cardinal Burke. A cleric close to Pope Francis states that Burke “is the very thing he denounces starkly.” He is “anti-gay and rages against homosexuality” and preaches that you should not “invite gay couples to family gathers when children are present” and homosexual couples are like “the person who murders someone and yet is kind to other people.” He denounces the pope for trying to alter the homophobic teachings of the church and calls homosexuality a “grave sin” and “intrinsically disordered.” Same-sex marriage is “an act of defiance against God” that derives from Satan. Martel comments that Burke’s “homophobia is so intense that it even disturbs the most homophobic Italian cardinals.” He “goes literally mad,” one Vatican priest observed, “when Pope Francis doesn’t wear red shoes or eccentric outfits.”36
Poet W. H. Auden may have put the issues at stake most succinctly when he wrote: “As a rule it was the pleasure haters who became unjust.”
Thomas Aquinas comes down decisively on the side of justice-seeking and of pleasure. He was not a pleasure hater—indeed, he teaches that the practice of virtue increases happiness and pleasure. “Pleasure arising from virtuous activities will be more delightful than any other pleasures. A passion of the soul increases the goodness of an action. … The more perfect a virtue is the more does it cause passion” (428). And he absolutely stands for justice as the “primary moral virtue” because it relates us to our neighbor. “The saints have a heart full of justice … charity, and effects of this kind, which are most like God” (419). Justice and love go together—but not necessarily love and celibacy. “Perfection does not consist in what is exterior to it, such as poverty, virginity, and the like except when these are instruments of love.”
He tells us that “God is justice” and urges us to “open the gates of justice.” There are two kind of gates we encounter in life: the evil ones, “which close the entrance to life,” and the good ones, “by which the way of life is opened. Psalm 118 says: ‘Open the gates of life,’ that is of justice. The evil gates are sins; but the good ones are virtues.”
Why does Aquinas insist that sins of the flesh take one toward God? He explains: “Spiritual sins are more grievous than carnal sins other things being equal. … Carnal sin as such denotes a turning toward something, and for that reason implies a closer cleaving. Whereas spiritual sin denotes more of a turning from something, whence the notion of guilt arises. For this reason it involves a greater guilt.” A “closer cleaving” might mean more intimacy. Sexual seeking is a seeking for intimacy, for cleaving, for love given and received, a yearning for goodness.
Sins of the spirit, on the other hand, are all about turning away from something, a flight from our own deepest self and its yearning for the good. Aquinas attributes this turning to “spiritual blindness and hardness of heart [which] imply the movement of the human mind in cleaving to evil and turning away from the divine light.” In “spiritual blindness” there lies a closing of the mind and refusal to learn while Aquinas believes learning includes both “sight and discovery.” No discovery! No curiosity! A “know-it-all” attitude accompanies sins of the spirit. A stuckness and attachment.
Carnal sins, however, do not turn us away from “the divine light” but toward it in a movement of discovery and curiosity. Desire seeks union, communion, and ecstasy. And therefore a movement toward the divine. Indeed, “prayer is the expression of desire” according to Aquinas (457).
What are some of the “sins of the spirit” that turn us away from the divine light and our deepest and best selves?
Among these sins would be greed or avarice. Greed separates one from others, expands the ego, and hoards. Aquinas says that a “quest for infinity” resides in all of us, but avarice seeks the infinite in all the wrong places. Avarice often leads to addictions that create havoc in relationships and never truly satisfy the yearning of the soul.
Acedia (often mistranslated as sloth) is a spiritual sadness (despair, depression, boredom, passivity) that robs us of the energy to begin new things or even to care about others.
Hatred is understood as coldness of heart and indifference to others.
Fear, Aquinas teaches, can so take over the human soul that all compassion is driven away.
Violence is anger that is out of control and harms others.
Consumerism would qualify as today’s most prevalent version of gluttony. It can gag the throat (gluttus means “throat” in Latin).
Arrogance separates us from others such as happens whenever we believe our “tribe” is superior to others. Thus racism, sexism, heterosexism, cold capitalism, excessive nationalism, anthropocentrism (what Pope Francis calls our collective narcissism as a species), adultism—all these are sins of arrogance and, therefore, sins of the spirit—and all of them separate us from one another and from a God of justice and compassion.
I also propose rationalism (and the repression of our intuitive or mystical brains) as a sin of the spirit appropriate to the modern era.37
Taking on all these shadow forces that allure humans is the work of a strong spirit, a spiritual warrior—which is to say all of us. Part of warriorhood is to be alert. To stay alert about how any or all of these forces can take us over is to stand up to evil both within ourselves and within society and its structures.
Aquinas is a big help in naming the challenge before us. Sins of the spirit that want to cut us off from justice and relationships with others hold far more destructive power to them than sins of the flesh that seek to bring us together ever more intimately.
What if religion had followed Aquinas’s teachings instead of the sins of the flesh teachings that mirror the guilt-ridden path of Augustine and company? Clearly it would not be as stuck in childish ways as it is, nor as blind as it sometimes is vis-à-vis social and ecological and structural sins. Psychology has become a healer for many to grow beyond the path of sexual guilt. We can be grateful for that. Psychology is no substitute for justice-making and healthy spirituality, yet it can be a valuable precursor. It can instruct us in needed self-knowledge and recognition of the shadow we all carry. It can assist our efforts to cease projecting and in the process it can empower people to come to their true and deepest selves, to become therefore the lovers and prophets we are all called to be.
It pertains to Magnanimity
to have
a great soul.