Behold-Sin

So often, we think that the opposite of love is hate. While hate is contrary to love, so too are many other things. That is because, ultimately, sin is the opposite of love; hate is just one kind of sin. Love is a total (self) gift, whereas sin is grasping.

In the Gospels, when Jesus is asked about which of the commandments is the greatest, he responds:

“You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” (Matt 22:37-40).

The word in the original Greek text that Jesus uses for love is agape. In Koine Greek, the original language of the New Testament, there are several words for love. The one Jesus uses means: to do good for/to someone else, for that person’s own sake, without expecting a return or repayment. That is why he goes on to say: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). We see that in the cross of Jesus, true love is a total gift of self for the other person.

Thus, the direct opposite of love is grasping, which is why original sin is a form of grasping: Adam and Eve grasped the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They grasped at being God, tempted as they were by the serpent: “God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil”(Genesis 3:5).

Every sin is a form of grasping. It can be a sin of commission, seeking to grasp or take something. For example, one can murder (take a life), steal, lust (desire to take sexually), and so on. It can be a sin of omission, maintaining something in one’s grasp and refusing to give it as a person should. For example, withholding the truth, failing to help the poor, or failing to take care of one’s children are all forms of grasping.

As disciples of Jesus, we must always seek holiness, living according to God’s design for us as humans. It is too easy to think that sin is not a big deal, that we are just violating some abstract rule that God made up, rather than truly acting contrary to God, who is love. The great saints abhorred every sin they committed, even the venial ones that most people think are no big deal. Let us remember that Jesus suffered and died to forgive what we think of as the smallest of sins.

Have you ever wondered, why did Jesus have to suffer and die to save us from sin? Why didn’t God just forgive and forget? Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection were necessary to save us, not because God is petty and demands sacrifice as though he were a spoiled child. They were necessary because sin does real damage; that damage had to be undone. To put it another way: the wounds of sin and death had to be salved/healed [1].

Sometimes, people imagine that God’s laws are mere contrivance; meaning, that God simply made up some rules ad hoc, somewhat in the manner in which people make up rules for a new game. There is no absolute reason why there must be three outs to a team in an inning of baseball; there can just as easily be four or five. In the United States, we drive on the right-hand side of the road, whereas in England they drive on the left.

In contrast, the moral law is intrinsic to our human nature. When we sin, we harm our being. For example, when a person tells a lie, his conscience will boldly “yell,” that is wrong, and that he should not lie. If he lies again, and then again frequently, his consciences becomes more and more muted. At the extreme, a person who habitually lies has a significantly dulled conscience and can lie without thinking about it much if at all [2]. Lying has become, “second nature.”

Natural law is the interior structure of what it means to be human, according to the plan of our Creator; that law doesn’t change even when we behave contrary to it.

For example, if this author were to design and build a laptop from scratch, and give it to someone with the instruction: it is a gift; just don’t take it in the bathtub. Would such a “law” be an imposition? Would it be a mere rule written on paper? To the contrary, the very intention, design, and nature of a laptop means that it was never meant to be immersed in water. To do so would destroy the laptop and injure the user. (The amount of voltage would be insufficient to kill the user; however, taking a high-wattage lamp in the bathtub probably would.) 

Original sin did damage to our human nature; so too do the personal sins we commit. We are wounded, and thus, to truly be made whole and ready to be united with God and one another forever in heaven, God needs to heal us. For that reason, the popular imagery of God is incorrect: he is not keeping a checklist of all our good and evil deeds in separate columns like a lawyer, only to compare the totals at the end of our life. That is not how we will be judged. God is more like the divine physician who sees every wound that needs healing.

The word salvation comes from the word salve; we need his healing ointment. For that reason, God cannot just “forgive and forget,” for we would still be deeply wounded.

While we might prefer for God to “forgive and forget,” it is good news that he does not. Otherwise, if he did grant us everlasting life in heaven, we would be perpetually wounded and incapable of living in peace and harmony with him and one another forever. Rather, we can better appreciate the God who so loves us, that he would go to extremes, becoming human in Jesus Christ to suffer and die on a cross to salve us. We can also better appreciate Purgatory as a gift to those who are not going to hell, but are still in need of healing, even after death.

[1] Salve: to soothe
Definition from Oxford Languages

[2] Insert a joke here about such people entering politics…

Today, so many people get the Book of Genesis wrong. They think that, because current scientific knowledge and theory explain our human origins in the Big Bang and evolution, the story of Adam and Eve is not true. The difficulty lies in a failure to appreciate that there are different literary ways to tell the truth. A newspaper should attempt to tell the truth not only in its “factual” stories, but also in its other sections. Advertisements should not tell lies. Even the comics tell the truth in their own way; that is why they are, or should be, humorous.[1]

Science as a field of study and as a methodology for learning about the universe is a much more recent phenomenon in human history. It is a wonderful way to come to know the truth. The story of Genesis tells the truth as well, but in a way understood long before science ever existed; Genesis was never intended to be a scientific account. It does, however, answer an urgent question: why is there evil?

Back when the book of Genesis was written, the Israelites were surrounded by nations and their attendant cultures that were pagan. Typically, these cultures had their own creation myths, such as the Enuma Elish of Babylon. In these myths, the creation of humanity was the result of a conflict or battle between the gods. Thus, humanity’s existence was not originally planned; it was, in effect, an afterthought and incidental. Conflict was already part of the cosmos. 

Tragically, the woman in response begins to twist the truth herself: “God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, or else you will die’” (Gen 3:3). God only prohibited them from eating of the tree; he said nothing about touching it. The serpent continues: “You certainly will not die! God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil” (Gen 3:4-5).

The first lie is that the man and woman will not die. The second is more insidious: telling them that they “will be like gods” implies both that they are not already like God and that God is holding back on them. Tragically, the first man and woman failed to believe that God created them in his image and likeness. The fact that they could eat anything from the garden with the sole exception of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil shows that he was giving them everything that is good.

The results of Original Sin can be seen immediately in the story: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves” (Gen 3:7). They were not physically blind before eating of the fruit; they had seen each other naked. However, it is how each of them beheld the other that changed. They no longer saw each other as persons, the image and likeness of God; they started to see each other as an object of lust. Original sin marks the loss of the supernatural gifts of God: Original Justice and Holiness. They lost the grace of God’s friendship and the right ordering of their passions. With Original Sin came concupiscence, the inclination to sin (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2515). With Original Sin, man’s intellect became clouded and his will was weakened.

While at first glance the story of Genesis may seem utterly bleak, it is extraordinarily hopeful; it should give us modern-day sinners hope for ourselves. Evil is not God’s punishment on us, but rather the consequences of our sin. Yet, he wants to save us and grant us everlasting life. God holds nothing back from us, that includes his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ.

[1] For example, I think the comic Dilbert is funny because it is so true. If you studied engineering, as this author has, and have worked or work for a large company.

It may seem odd to see a Catholic writer state that “evil doesn’t have being.” Does that mean that evil is not real or that evil does not exist? No, it does not. What it means is that God, as creator, did not create evil. It does not have to be. So often people think that evil is “something,” sort of like a substance. People think that it is good versus evil, as though you have two cosmic principals fighting it out. But just as it is incorrect to conceive of the existence of God and the existence of Satan as two equal, cosmic forces locked in battle, it is also incorrect to think of evil as somehow having a concrete existence.

God is the infinite creator who sustains all things in existence. If a thing exists – such as the universe, an angel, or even an ant – then it exists because God wills it to exist and sustains that thing in its existence. As God is Being itself (see the prior Behold article on this topic), any being or thing only exists by a type of participation in God’s own existence. All of creation is continually dependent on the creator to continue in existence.

In so far as something exists, or has being, it is good. This means, that in effect, Being = Good. Otherwise, it could not exist at all. There is no concrete metaphysically existing thing called “evil.” So what, exactly, is evil? It is the lack of being; it is the lack of a good that should be there. Satan exemplifies this: he is merely a creature. Specifically, he is an angel who freely chose to reject God. God did not create Satan or any demon as an “evil” creature. They are all angels, who were created good but used their free will to turn against God.

When we speak of Satan being evil, we are speaking about his will, about what he chooses. The good that Satan and the demons should have is a properly ordered will and desire to do good, to do God’s will. They should freely choose to do actions that are in accord with their existence as angels. That would be to glorify God and promote the well-being of all his creation. But since they have freely warped their own will to want and continue to want evil, we call them “evil.”

We can generally, distinguish between physical and moral evil. A physical evil as evil is still the lack of a good that should be there. An example would be human blindness: it is the lack of sight that should be there, according to the way God made humanity. A moral evil is when a person purposely thinks and acts in ways contrary to the way God made our human nature. Moral evil is the lack of proper order. For example, humans are made for the Truth, hence lying is evil.

Evil, especially moral evil, is an affront to our Creator; it is an embrace of destruction. Yet, since evil is not an equal and opposite to God, we can trust in him and his power to help us with the evil we encounter in our lives. In a sense, the greatest evil in our lives about which we have the opportunity to do something are the sins we commit…or rather should choose not to commit.