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C l a s s i c A p o l o g e t i c s
THE BEGINNING AND END OF MAN: PART II
By RONALD KNOX
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This Rock
Volume 4, Number 8
 September 1993 
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Sin
WHATEVER you believe or don't believe about
it, one thing is certain about sin, that it doesn't enter into the
province of any of the natural sciences. [This is the second half
of a booklet first published in 1921 by the Catholic Truth Society
of London. The first half was reprinted in the August 1993 issue of
This Rock]. But all this loosening of the direct faith our
great-grandfathers had in the special creation of man, in his free
will, in the story of his Fall, all this uneasy feeling which has
got about, that the doctrines which are taught to us as children are
only taught to us because a child can be made to believe anything
and are quite out of harmony with what thinking people are saying
nowadays--all that has resulted, even among professing and practicing
Christians, in a sort of vagueness about religious dogma which is
perilous to the most central and the most practical articles in our
creed.
We use the old language, but we shrink from inquiring too closely
into the exact meaning of its terms, for fear of finding ourselves
up against a controversy. In that way, subtly and unobtrusively, the
directness of the Christian message is becoming endangered. Let us
think quite straight. Knowing what we do of man's soul, man's free
will, man's fall from grace, what do we understand to be the central
idea which the word "sin" ought to convey to a Christian?
And what aspect of sin is it that all these modern people, the philanthropists,
and the reformers, and the medical men, and the gentlemen who write
science for the millions in the Sunday papers, are all the time trying
to leave out of sight?
Sin is voluntary violation of the law of God. What do we understand
by a law? Law, says St. Thomas, is a certain ordinance of reason for
the common good, promulgated by one who has charge of the commonwealth.
That is the old and the literal sense of the word "law,"
and it's easy to transfer that definition of ordinary human laws so
as to apply to the eternal law of God.
But remember, since we all took to talking science, law has another
meaning for us as well. Commonly, we understand law to involve a command
imposed on somebody by somebody else, but in matters of science we
use it as meaning simply a statement--a statement of some principle
which is always operative and which infallibly produces, in our experience,
uniform results--Newton's laws in physics, Grimm's law in philology,
Gresham's law in political economy, and so forth. A law, in this sense,
is not what tells you to do something, but simply what assures you
that something will happen. It does not need to be asserted by rewards
and penalties; automatically it asserts itself.
Now, in speaking of human morals, it's very easy to get mixed up between
these two senses of the word "law." If I say, for example,
that the sinner is false to the law of his being, what do I mean?
Do I mean that he is disobeying a law, in the sense of a command,
imposed upon him by the author of his being? Or do I merely mean that,
in behaving as he does, he is neglecting the scientific principles
which will make for his health and happiness and calling into play
the scientific principles which will involve him in unhappiness or
in disease?
To us Christians, law is of two kinds, the natural and the positive.
To us the laws of nature, insofar as they affect human conduct at
all, are part of the law of God and have his sanction behind them.
If the effect of drinking whisky all day long is to turn a man into
a helpless, degenerate, degraded being, that is enough for us as proof
that his excesses, since they entail such a consequence, are contrary
to God's will. We do not need any express command given us by an angel
to warn us against imitating such an example. The scientific "law"
that excessive drinking has such and such effects on the system is
evidence of a divine law which forbids drunkenness.
But we have also to reckon with the positive law of God--commands
issued to us in the pages of Holy Scripture, or, in matters of detail,
by the regulations of the Church. We know, for example, that it is
wrong to receive Communion when not fasting. But nature never told
us that. The scalpel and the microscope could never have brought to
our notice such an obligation as that. Yet, because we believe that
God's natural law and his positive law proceed from the same source--that
is, from his infinite wisdom--we hold ourselves bound as much
by the one as by the other.
For the malice of sin consists precisely in the aversion of the soul
from God. You may commit a sin which primarily regards yourself, as,
for example, if you ruin your health by a career of intemperance or
take your own life in a fit of despair. You may commit a sin which
primarily regards your fellow men, by robbing them, by defrauding
them, by oppressing the widow and the stranger. Or you may commit
a sin which concerns God alone, by blaspheming, for example, his holy
Name or his Blessed Mother's. But in the first and second cases, just
as much as in the third, the malice of your sin consists in your aversion
from God--"To thee only have I sinned." In the first
case, you have neglected the plain warnings of experience, you have
defied nature, run counter to the principles of your constitution;
but that is not the point, the point is that you have broken the law
of God.
In the second case, you have brought undeserved misery on others,
you have dissolved, as far as in you lay, the bonds of justice and
of equity which hold human society together, you have forfeited your
right to enjoy the protection of human laws; but that is not the point,
the point is that you have broken the law of God.
Turn which way you will, there is but one voice of command which is
peremptory, which admits of no excuses. And whether that voice breathes
from the happy soil of Paradise, or comes down in thunder from Sinai,
or goes forth to Christendom from the City of the Seven Hills, it
is the same voice, the voice of God.
I don't think you will be disposed to disagree with me if I say that
modern public opinion--and by that I mean the atmosphere of our
time in political, in literary, above all in journalistic circles--does
not come anywhere near that point of view. It does not deny that point
of view; I doubt if it has ever considered it seriously enough to
give it a denial, but it does proceed on the silent assumption that
sin is, in the first instance, not sin against God, but sin against
the law of your own nature or against your fellow-men.
It is a threadbare subject, but it seems inevitable to refer for an
illustration to that set of problems which is being so much aired
nowadays, I mean the problems of sex and of married life. In the ordinary
divorce-court case, modern opinion will be prepared to agree that
the co-respondent sinned, since he infringed another man's rights:
It will, perhaps, be prepared to agree that the respondent sinned
if she left her children as well as her husband--that was unnatural,
they say, in a mother; that was sin.
But if the petitioner secures a divorce and goes through the form
of a second marriage in flat defiance of the positive law of God--"Oh,
I don't know, why shouldn't he? You see, he was not to blame; you
can hardly expect a contract to be kept so onesidedly." That
is the root of all the trouble: God's law comes in only as an afterthought,
and when God's law has no considerations of public interest or of
natural decency to reinforce it, God's law is forgotten.
Let a man drink himself into delirium tremens, and we shall
all agree he is a bad man. Let a man commit murder, and we shall all
admit he is a bad citizen, and the priests whose undue influence has
been criticized for a century past will suddenly be asked why they
didn't stop him. But if a man cares, without doing himself or others
an injury, to indulge himself as he pleases, the doctor shrugs his
shoulders, and the politician strokes his chin, and the journalist
winks and passes by. In all that, modern opinion is suffering from
a threefold forgetfulness. And the three things it forgets are--man's
place in creation, man's free will, man's fall.
It forgets (I will not say it denies) that however much our bodies
are part of the natural order around us, our souls are, from the very
beginning of our history, and in the life of every individual human
being, a special creation, the breaking in of another world upon ours:
that, consequently, man is in a special position as a rational creature
and must not expect to have his sailing orders given him by mere instinct
or by mere habit, as the dumb brutes do.
Being rational, he is capable of receiving, is privileged to receive,
is responsible for receiving attentively, a positive law enjoined
on him by the expressed will of a personal Creator. God spoke to Moses
as a man speaks face to face with his friend--that is the charter
of humanity.
They forget, in the second place (for I will not say that they deny)
that man is a free agent. Their heads are so buzzing with statistics,
about how men in general will behave on an average in a given set
of circumstances, as to be unable to realize that this individual
man is here and now about to make himself responsible for an act freely
chosen by his own will.
In God's eyes, we are so many men; in the statistician's eyes, we
are so many guinea pigs: That's half the trouble of all our modern
talk about morals.
Our public opinion forgets, in the third place, that man is a fallen
creature. When the beast obeys the instincts that prompt it, however
cruel, however rapacious, however incontinent its habits may seem
to us, we know that it is only obeying the law of its own nature.
But if it be true, as Christian theology asserts, that man as he is
now is not man as he was meant to be at the time of his creation,
then it is obvious that he cannot plead, in defense of the morality
of his actions, the fact that he behaved as it seemed natural to him
to behave.
For who shall tell us whether the instinct which prompted him was
part of the healthy instinct of the human animal or part of the perverted
instinct which belongs to a soul Satan has tempted from its first
innocency? Only God's law can tell us that; often enough, only God's
positive law can tell us that.
The end of man
You will remember, perhaps, the little girl in Punch
who asks, "Mummy, what's that?" "That, dear, that's
a cow," and the little girl says, "Why?"--a thoroughly
philosophical question, and Aristotle might have been proud of it.
Our minds cannot rest content with asking How? We must go on to ask
Why?
Suppose I were traveling and, on landing in some
strange country, saw a man working his arms this way and that above
his head, and suppose I ask a bystander, Why does he do that? "Oh,
well," says the bystander, "the muscle of the arm is a most
interesting anatomical affair and illustrates very well the principles
of leverage. Suppose, for example--" . . . "No, no,"
I interrupt, "I didn't ask how he did it, I wanted to
know why." "The nerves," replies the bystander,
"form a most fascinating subject of discussion; their office
is to telegraph, as it were, to all the limbs the orders of the organizing
brain. You would hardly believe . . ." But by this time I have
gone off in despair: I have been asking questions in teleology from
a scientist.
Science doesn't know why, and has no right to care. But all this business
of evolution has, since it passed into the hands of the philosophers,
inspired them with the hope of finding out more about the meaning
of the world and the meaning of human existence in particular.
For if we are assured that nature presents to our view not a fixed
set of types, but a set of types that differs from one age to another,
and if these types do not merely change backwards and forwards, but
move onwards with a kind of progress, so that we can say of the elephant
that it is not merely different from the mammoth but more highly developed
than the mammoth, more highly organized than the mammoth, better suited
than the mammoth to survive in this queue that struggles for existence,
our minds cannot but form the idea of evolution from the lower to
the higher, evolution which is progress, not merely process.
I am afraid that so far as the little girl's question is concerned,
we don't know, and never shall know in this world, why the thing should
be a cow. We feel sure that behind all the marvelous order in which
creation develops there is, somewhere, a purpose; but what it is we
can't even guess. Except in one single department; there we not only
can but must guess: So long as we are men and not vegetables we cannot
stop guessing about it.
As a great Catholic poet has told us, "the proper study of mankind
is man"; and when the question is raised, "Why is man here;
why has he developed as he has developed; what is he developing and
what ought he to be developing into?" then the guessing competition
does become fast and furious, and we aren't going to be kept out of
it. For man desires knowledge not merely for the sake of knowledge;
he desires to know how to shape his life; his right or his wrong development
is an issue which is practical to him, for it is his business to make
or to mar the decision of it.
If you take it for granted, as most modern thinkers do, that man has
evolved, is evolving, and has got to evolve, not merely from something
into something else, but from something less perfect into something
more perfect, then there are three ways of going about your investigation.
You may go to biological science and ask how and by what weapons man
developed (if he did develop) from the brute.
Or you may go to history and try (it's a very thorny process, but
you can try) to read impartially in that record the story of man's
development in the last (shall we say?) three thousand years, with
a few guesses about a period still further back, and you may then
take it for granted that the way man has gone is the way he ought
to be going, and the sooner he gets on with it the better.
Or (and this is far the commonest method of the three) you may take
your own pet theory about what man ought to be like, and you may sit
down and wrestle with history until you succeed in convincing yourself
that man has, all the time, been becoming more and more like that,
whatever facts seem to point to the contrary--more moral, or more
socialistic, or more vegetarian, or whatever you will. And then you
publish that in serial form on all the railway bookstalls and label
it "history."
And what are the results of those three processes? If you stick to
the first method and try to prove that the development of the human
race is in a strict line with the principles which govern, and the
instincts which inspire, the struggle for existence in the brute creation,
the upshot of your meditations will certainly not be encouraging to
morality. You may, if you will, think of the ideal man as a perfect
physical type, strong, patient, highly endowed with all the pagan
virtues--and yet, even so, you are false to biological theory,
for cunning, not brute strength, is man's weapon; and your ideal man,
if you think of man as an individual, will be the crafty, unscrupulous,
selfish, cringing, bullying creature that was long ago exposed, in
all his nakedness, in the first book of Plato's Republic.
Or, if you prefer to think of man as essentially gregarious, hunting
not alone but by the pack, you must still admit that the strongest
nation, by however foul means it may have gained its ascendancy over
the rest of mankind, is the dominant and therefore the highest type,
and if anyone is proposing to revive that doctrine after all Europe
has bled for four years in disproof of it [Knox refers to World
War I, this essay having been written in 1921], he is welcome to his
opinion, but he is not likely to make converts.
It is a silly mistake to talk as if, the doctrine of the Fall once
discarded, it would be easy to bring human progress into line with
biological evolution. As Huxley pointed out long ago, you cannot bring
human progress into line with strict biological evolution unless you
are prepared to throw over moral standards and moral judgments altogether.
If, on the other hand, you take human history as far as we can trace
its records and try to read it as an impartial document, you will
find development in it, I admit, process in it, I admit, but whether
it be in any true sense progress I see no ground for determining.
You can say with some certainty that the spread of civilization has
made the human animal into a more complicated being, with his sensibility
increased in a thousand ways (music and the arts alone will bear witness
to that) and his nerve fibre correspondingly less tough; a higher
price set upon human life, a more resolute determination to eliminate
physical pain; less importance attached to the group, more to the
individual; and there is, of course, much more to be said.
But whether we approve or disapprove of such symptoms depends entirely
on our own ethical standards, and those ethical standards we do not
read in the record, but bring them with us, ready formed, to the discussion.
Civilization has spread; so do the mumps. A civilized man is more
highly developed than a savage; so is pneumonia more highly developed
than a cold on the chest. I am not decrying civilization; I am merely
saying that, so far as we admire it, we admire it not simply because
it has developed, but because it has developed on lines which seem
to us good ones--we are using a standard of our own to judge it
by.
But the moment you allow people to read history in the light of their
own prejudices, you must despair of finding any agreement of opinion
as to what is higher and what is lower in the scale of development.
One believes that our international politics are tending towards world
peace and world brotherhood; another sees a progressive and a salutary
growth of the sense of separate nationality going on all around us.
One holds that our psychic gifts are the latest flower of our civilization,
and through them lies the gateway to all further human advancement;
another (one of the greatest of contemporary Oxford philosophers)
will tell you that these psychic gifts are a mere survival of the
beast in us and that the ordinary horse or dog is far more sensitive
to uncanny spiritualistic impressions than is the ordinary man.
And as to the very widespread neglect of organized religion in our
day, you will find some writers who regard it as merely the backwash
of an intellectual movement, others who hail it as the beginning of
a purer, more spiritual conception of religion, others, again, who
take it as evidence that the whole Christian superstition is tottering
to its downfall. It's odd, isn't it, that we all agree in proclaiming
that man evolves, yet no two of us can agree how, or since when, or
into what? It's odd, and it's worse than odd, it's
tragic. For the world is full of young men who go about wanting to
evolve as they ought to evolve (though why they shouldn't let the
world evolve without them, if they think it gets better every day,
is sometimes a puzzle to me), and to them it is a life-and-death question,
" Where is all this progress of the human species leading to?"
And when, wearied of debate and baffled by a thousand unanswered questions,
they cease to worry about the remote future and determine to let civilization
go its own way and save itself or damn itself as it pleases, what
is left to them?
There is left to them one movement still which remains untried, a
movement so purposeful that it is easily mistaken for a conspiracy,
yet so sure of itself that it needs no program and no platform, begs
no support from the presumed approval of a shadowy posterity. Such
is the Catholic Church, which has no theories as to whether mankind
is moving and if so in what direction, nor, if it were assured that
there were any such tendency, would swerve aside for one moment from
its appointed path.
For the message which the Church of God preserves is a message not
to the human race in the aggregate, but to each solitary, individual
soul. Its hero, God's hero, the character in the world's drama which
holds the angels breathless with expectation, is not mankind but man--this
man or that man, you and I, with our hopes and ambitions, our difficulties
and strivings, our falls and recoveries.
"Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is all man"
the human race exists to make heaven populous, and that end has to
be achieved by us singly, in the dreadful loneliness of our dual destiny.
Whether Christendom is marching forward to fresh world conquests,
or whether the Son of Man, when he comes, is to find but little faith
on the earth, the end of man will be achieved--is daily being
achieved, according to the plan of his creation. The end of man is
realized whenever the gates of heaven open once more, and one more
pardoned soul struggles to the feet of its Creator.
Msgr. Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was the author of apologetical
works such as Difficulties (with Arnold Lunn), The Belief
of Catholics, and the posthumously published Proving God.
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