John's letters

My Brideshead Revisited blogging was Catholic culture everyday. Now that is over, Catholic culture will be less frequent but still here some days and today is one of those days. Of all the aspects of Catholic culture, one of the most interesting is moral theology.  Catholic moral theology is one of those things that people claim to hate but keep finding uses for. Anyway, here is bit of Catholic culture regarding moral theology and what better place to start talking about Catholic culture than an anecdote about an event that took place in the basement of an Anglican church.

A few years ago now, I was in a discussion group at an Anglican church. As the visiting Catholic, I tried to be a sympathetic listener rather than contribute a lot to the discussion. The discussion grew out of one of the Alpha courses so it was very much at the evangelical, or low church, end of the scale: much talk of scripture and preaching and very little ceremony, long flowing robes or romantic choral tradition.

Anyway, John's letters came up. This was not the wish of the group leader. She was a big fan of people reading the Bible, in theory anyway, but in practice she spoke almost exclusively of the letters of Paul. She cited bits of the gospels–especially Matthew and Luke—but didn't seem much interested in the larger context. The Old Testament for her was the selected bits from Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy and the prophets. The other stuff not so much. She knew the other stuff but she didn't base any interpretation on it.

Anyway, there was this very protestant woman in the group. She was a good person and always trying to be the servant of all. This woman had once visited a friend of mine and the friend left her alone for a moment and came back to find her cleaning the bathroom.

This one session, she was very nervous. She'd been reading John and she'd come across this:

If you see your brother or sister committing what is not a mortal sin, you will ask, and God will give life to such a one—to those whose sin is not mortal. There is sin that is mortal; I do not say that you should pray about that. All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin that is not mortal. (First letter from John, Chapter 5, verses 16-17)

This poor woman was shaking as she read that out to us. She was shaking because whatever protestant tradition she'd been brought up in she had been taught that Catholic teaching about venial and mortal sin was unscriptural and a lie. It sounded, to her, like this passage contradicted what she had been taught.

John is like that in his letters; he suddenly throws out things that shake you up. He more or less has to because his style is to tear off about seemingly comforting notions about love and God with great enthusiasm and then he has to pull back and qualify and explain* because he realizes he has gone too far. It is one of the many things the letters have in common with the gospel that is attributed to John. He gushes a bit and then he gets going to the point he has to pull back.

His first letter starts off saying that everyone sins and that if we deny that we sin, we are liars. That sounds good but he ends up saying, "No one who abides in him sins; no one who sins has either seen him or known him." Those two statements simply cannot be true at the same time, so John has to make an adjustment about sins and categories of sin, as he does in the bit above. Everyone sins but some kinds of sin do not necessarily imply that we are separated from Jesus, that we do not abide in him.

Incidentally, I have never seen any Catholic moral theologian cite this passage to justify the distinction between venial and mortal sin. They always argue on straight logical grounds. In Catholic thinking the two types of sin is flow out of natural law. In a sense, of course, you might say that John arrives at his conclusion the same way, albeit with considerably less logical rigor. As Lady Marchmain might say, the distinction between the two types of sin is in the logic of the thing.

By the way, "venial" derives from a Latin word meaning forgiveness because these are forgivable sins. All sins are forgivable, of course, but some require full penance and absolution whereas venial sins are forgivable sins do not require that we make full penance or even that we be aware of a specific sin being a sin. Anyway, the point I ant to make is that "venial"  does not derive  from Venus referring to matters of sexual love. That said, it seems to me that many, many sexual sins, probably the vast majority of sexual sins, are necessarily venial. This quite contrary to what a lot of Catholics argue.

Which brings to mind a funny thing about Casanova, whom I love. Casanova requested and received the last rites on his deathbed. As a consequence, a lot of people, including not a few scholars, have written that Casanova had a last minute change of heart. But he didn't: Casanova was devout Catholic his entire life. Really.

It's one of the incredible ironies that when the first edition of Casanova appeared in France it was heavily censored not because of the sexual stuff but because of his pro-Catholic and pro ancien regime sentiments. People like Casanova, Walter Pater, and Evelyn Waugh always cause scandal for some kinds of thinkers precisely because they refuse to be as evil as their critics want them to be. TS Eliot, for example, despised Pater to such a degree that he couldn't write rationally about the man.

Okay, back to work with me. I'll be writing about male bashing in sex advice columns tomorrow.

*This is the opposite of Paul who starts off by saying things that shake us up but, if we read to the end, he ends up qualifying them down in ways that don't shake us up so much.