John Donne - Delphi Poets Series (41 page)

Although Aquinas calls it truly sin, he says he does so because it occasions many sins. If, as others affirm, it is punishment for sin, then it is involuntary, which is hardly consistent with the nature of sin. Certainly, many devout men have justly imputed to it the cause and effect of sin; yet, as in the Penitential Canons greater penance is inflicted upon one who kills his wife than upon one who kills his mother, and the reason added is not that the fault is greater but that otherwise more would commit it, so is the sin of desperation so earnestly exaggerated because, as it springs from sloth and cowardliness, our nature is more slippery and inclinable to such a descent than to presumptions, which without a doubt does more to wound and violate the majesty of God than desperation does. However, so that none may justly say that all who kill themselves have done it out of a despair of God’s mercy (which is the only sinful despair), we shall in a more proper place, when we come to consider the examples exhibited in scriptures and other stories, find many who in that act have been so far from despair that they have esteemed it a great degree of God’s mercy to have been admitted to such a glorifying of his name and have proceeded therein as religiously as in a sacrifice. As Bosquier says elegantly of Job, “He appears in splendid proverbs,” and of him we may properly say what Moses said when they punished one another for their idolatries, “Consecrate your hands to the Lord” (Exod. 32:29).

I come to consider their words who are of the second opinion and who affirm an inability to repent in this life. (A strong authorizer if not an author of this opinion is Calvin, who says that actual unrepentance is not the sin intimated in Matthew 12:30-31; rather, we must hold that whoever falls into such a willful resistance of the Holy Ghost never rises again.) Because these hard and misinterpretable words fall from them when they are perplexed and enmeshed with that heavy question of sin against the Holy Ghost, and because I presume to speak proportionally and analogically to their other doctrine, I rather incline to make for them this construction: that they place this inability to repent only in the knowledge of God—or that I do not understand them rather than either believe them literally or believe that they have clearly expressed their own meanings. For I do not see why we should be more loath to allow that God has made some persons unable to sin than that he has made them unable to repent. Even if they had their way and this were granted to them, I cannot see that therefore such an inability to repent must necessarily be concluded to have been in a person by reason of self-homicide, and it gives great-

4. The third sort is the tamest of all the three, and it gives the greatest hope of being overcome and corrected. Although they pronounce severely upon the act, it is for the single reason that the act precludes all entrance into repentance. I wonder why they refuse to apply to their opinions in this matter the milder rules of the casuists, who in doubtful cases always teach an inclination to the safer side. While it is safer to think a thing to be sin than not, that rule serves for your own information and as a as a bridle to you, not for another’s condemnation. They used to interpret that rule of taking the safer side so that in things necessary (necessary to an end, as repentance is necessary to salvation) we must follow any probable opinion, even if another is more probable, and so that opinion is to be followed directly which is favorable to the soul. They exemplify this point as follows. Although all the leading scholastics hold that baptizing a child, not yet fully born, on the hand or foot is ineffectual, still they all advise in that case to baptize and to believe it to be of good effect. The example of the good thief on the cross (Luke 23:43) informs us that repentance works immediately, and from that story Calvin gathers that such pain at the moment of death is naturally apt to beget repentance.

The church is so indulgent and liberal to all her children that at the point of death she will bestow her treasure of baptism upon one who has been insane from his birth, by the same reason as upon a child—indeed, upon one recently fallen into insanity, although he appears to be in mortal sin, if only he has attrition, which is only a fear of hell and not a taste of God’s glory. Such attrition shall be presumed to be in him, if nothing appears evidently to the contrary. If the church is content to extend and interpret this point of death to every danger by sea or travel; if she will interpret any mortal sin in a man provoked by sudden passion and proceeding from indeliberation to be no worse and of no greater malignity than the act of a child; if, being able to succor one before he is dead, she will deliver him from excommunication after he is dead; if she is content that both the penitent and confessor are only diligent, not most diligent; if, rather than be frustrated in her desire to dispense her treasure, she grants that insane and possessed men shall be bound until they may receive extreme unction; if, lastly, she absolves some whether they wish it or not—in light of all this, why should we abhor our mother’s example and as brethren be more severe than the parent? Not to pray for those who die without faith is a precept so obvious to every religion that even Muhammad has forbidden it. But to presume an inability to repent because you were not nearby to hear it is a usurpation.

True repentance, says Clement of Alexandria, is “To do no more and to speak no more those things whereof you repent; it is not to be always sinning and always asking pardon.” Of such a repentance as this our case is capable enough. Of one who died before he had repented the good Paulinus charitably interprets his haste, “That he chose rather to go to God a debtor than as free,” and so to die in his debt rather than to carry his discharge from it. Since in matters of fact the delinquent is so much favored that a layman who acquits him is sooner to be believed than a clergyman who accuses him—although in other cases there is much disproportion between the value of these two testimonies—so, if any will of necessity proceed to judgment in our case, those reasons that are most benign and (as I said) favorable to the soul ought to have the best acceptance and entertainment.

5. Of all those definitions of sin that the first collector of sentences, Peter the Lombard, has presented out of ancient learning, the authors of summas as well as the casuists insist most on the one that he gets from Saint Augustine. As usual, where that Father serves their purposes they look no further. This definition is that sin is a word, deed, or desire against the eternal law of God. They stick to this definition (if it is one) because it best supports their argument, because it is the easiest conveyance, carriage, and vent for their conceptions and for their applying rules of divinity to particular cases. Thus they have made all our actions perplexed and litigious in the inner court of conscience, which is their tribunal. By this torture they have brought men’s consciences to the same reasons of complaint that Pliny attributes to Rome until Trajan’s time, that the city founded on the laws was being overturned by the laws. For as informers vexed them with continual denunciations upon penal laws, so does this act of sinning entangle wretched consciences in manifold and desperate anxieties.

This use of the definition cannot be thought to apply only to sin, since it limits sin to the eternal law of God. (This term, although not in Peter the Lombard, Sayer and all the rest retain.) This eternal law of God is the ground of the governance of God, no other than his eternal decree for the government of the whole world; that is, providence. Certainly a man may without sin both speak and act against providence, since it is not always revealed, just as I may resist a disease from which God has decreed that I shall die. Even though he seems to reveal his will, we may resist it with prayers against it, because it is often conditioned and accompanied by limitations and exceptions. Even though God dealt plainly with Nathan, saying, “The child shall surely die” (I Sam. 12:14), David resisted God’s decree by prayer and penance.

We must therefore seek another definition of sin. I think it is not as well put in those words of Aquinas, “Every failure to perform an obligation has the character of sin,” as in his other definition, “Sin is an act departing from the ordained end, against the rule of nature or of reason, or of eternal law.” Here eternal law, being stated as a member and part of the definition, cannot admit of the vast and large interpretation that it could not escape in the description of Saint Augustine; in this text it must necessarily be intended as the divine law of scripture. Through this definition, therefore, we will grace this act of self-homicide and see whether it offends any of those three sorts of law.

6.—Of all these three laws—of nature, of reason, and of God—every precept that is permanent and always binds is so composed, elemented, and complexioned that to distinguish and separate them is an alchemistic work. Either it only seems to be done or it is done by the torture and vexation of scholastic nit-pickings [original: “school-limbicks,” a racking of the brain over abstract ideas], which are abstruse and violent distinctions. The part of God’s law that always binds already bound before it was written, and so it is simply the rule of rectified reason, and that is the law of nature. Therefore Isidore of Seville (as it is related in the canons), dividing all law into divine and human, adds, “Divine consists of nature, human of custom.”

Although these three laws are almost entirely one, yet because one thing may be commanded in various ways and by various authorities—as the common law, a statute, and a decree of an arbitrary court may bind me to do the same thing—it is necessary that we weigh the obligation of every one of these laws that is in the definition.

But first I shall only soften and prepare their crude, undigested opinions and prejudice, which may be contracted from the frequent iteration and specious but sophisticated inculcatings of law—of nature, reason, and God—by this antidote: many things that are of natural, human, and divine law may be broken. To conceal a secret delivered to you is of this sort. The honor due to parents is so strictly one of these laws that none of the Second Table (Exod. 20:12-17) is more so, yet in a just war a parricide is not guilty. Indeed, according to a law of Venice—though Bodin says better the town were sunk than that this ever should be an example or precedent—a son must redeem himself from banishment by killing his father who is also banished. We read of another state (and laws of civil commonwealths may not lightly be pronounced to be against nature) where, when fathers came to be of an unprofitable and useless age, the sons must beat them to death with clubs. We read of still another where all persons above seventy years were dispatched.

7.—This term, the law of nature, is so variously and inconsistently defined that I confess I must read it a hundred times before I understand it once or can conclude that it signifies what the author at that time means. Yet I never found it in any sense that might justify their vociferations upon sins against nature. For the transgressing of the law of nature in any act seems to me not to increase the heinousness of that act, as though nature were more obligatory than divine law. Only in one respect does natural law aggravate a transgression; that is, in such a sin we are inexcusable by any pretense of ignorance, since we can discern it by the light of nature. Many things that we call sin (and therefore evil) have been done by the commandment of God; for example, by Abraham (Gen. 22:2) and by the Israelites in their departing from Egypt (Exod. 12:35). Thus the evil is neither in the nature of the thing nor in the nature of the whole harmony of the world. Therefore, evil inheres in no law of nature but in violating or omitting a commandment.

All is obedience or disobedience. Wherefore our countryman Sayer confesses that self-homicide is not as intrinsically evil as it is to lie. This point is also evident from Cajetan, who affirms that to save my life I may not accuse myself from the rack. Although Cajetan extends the matter no further than that I may not belie myself, Soto refuses Cajetan’s reasons with so much force as to forbid any self-accusation, even though it is true. Thus, according to Cajetan, I may depart from life much more easily than from truth or fame. But we find that many holy men have been very negligent of their fame. Not only Augustine, Anselm, and Jerome betrayed themselves by unurged confessions; Saint Ambrose even procured certain prostitute women to come into his chamber so that he might be defamed and the people would thereby abstain from making him their bishop.

Intrinsic and natural evil can hardly be found! For God, who can command a murder, cannot command an evil or a sin. Since the whole frame and government of the world is his, he may use it as he will. For example, although he can do a miracle, he can do nothing against nature, because “That is the nature of everything which he works in it,” says Augustine. From this and from that other rule of Aquinas’s, “Whatever is wrought by a superior agent upon a patient who is naturally subject to that agent is natural,” we may safely infer that nothing we call sin is so against nature that it may not sometimes be agreeable to nature.

On the other side, nature is often taken so widely and so extensively that all sin is very truly said to be against nature—even before it comes to be sin. Saint Augustine says, “Every vice, so far as it is a vice, is against nature.” Vice is only habit that, being extended into act, is then sin. Yes, the parent of all sin, which is hereditary, original sin, which Aquinas calls “a languor and faintness in our nature and an indisposition, proceeding from the dissolution of the harmony of original justice,” is said by him to be in us “as if natural” and is, as he says in another place, so natural “that although it is propagated with our nature in generation, it is not caused by the principles of nature.” Thus, if God should now miraculously frame a man, as he did the first woman, from another’s flesh and bone (and not by generation) into that creature, all the infirmities of our flesh would be derived, but not original sin. Original sin is transmitted by nature only, and, since all actual sin issues from it, all sin is natural.