On Sin

This is a document that I got out of a book called A treasury of philosopy.  It is one of

the documents I want to read this fall with my cousins for their class I am doing with them.

On Sin

By Peter Abailard

Peter Abailard lived from (1079-1142). Abailard’s life is a portrait of the triumphs and vicissitudes of philosophy, faith and love. He was born in a little town in Brittany, and having been ordained as priest, returned there to tutor Heloise, the niece of Canon Fulbert. His secret love affair with her, and Astrolabius, the son she bore him, caused him considerable misfortune, for when the canon discovered the secret relationship he had the priest physically mutilated. Abailard persuaded Heloise to take the veil; he himself retired to a quiet place near Troyes.

His disciples, however, sought him out, and once again the handsome, eloquent schoolman attracted students from all over Europe. He established an oratory called the Paraclete. His subtle argumentation persuaded his listeners to found their beliefs on reason. He tabulated the contradictions of the Bible and the Church Fathers for easy reference; he made freedom of the will the basis of all ethics; he opposed the teachings of the famous schoolmen, and expounded those concepts which hold that the Aristotelian precpets, called universals in scholastic philosophy (such as genus and species), have only intellectual significance.

The story of his “calamtites” (he wrote a book by that title) was never-ending. His interpretation of the Trinity was twice condemned as heretical. Finally, weary of the fight, he burned his book on the Trinity and lived out his life, a subdued follower of the faith. Upon his death, Heloise, twenty-one years younger than he, claimed his body and buried him. The ashes of both lovers now rest at the Pere-Lachaise in Paris.

　

When the Scripture says: ‘Go not after your own desires’, and ‘Turn from your own will’, it instructs us not to fulfil our desires. Yet it does not say that we are to be wholly without them. It is vicious to give in to our desires; but not to have any desires at all is impossible for our weak nature.

The sin, then, consists not in desiring a woman, but in consent to the desire, and not the wish for whoredom, but the consent to the wish is damnation.

Let us see how our conclusions about sexual intemperance apply to theft. A man crosses another’s garden. At the sight of the delectable fruit his desire is aroused. He does not, however, give way to desire so as to take anything by theft or rapine, although his mind was moved to strong inclination by the thought of delight of eating. Where there is desire, there, without doubt, will exist. The man desires the eating of that fruit wherein he doubts not that there will be delight. The weakness of nature in this man is compelled to desire the fruit which, without the master’s permission, he has no right to take. He conquers the desire, but does not extinguish it. Since, however, he is not enticed into consent, he does not descend to sin.

What, then, of your objection? It should be clear from such instances, that the wish or desire itself of doing what is not seemly is never to be called sin, but rather, as we said, the consent is sin. We consent to what is not seemly when we do not draw ourselves back from such a deed, and are prepared, should opportunity offer, to perform it completely. Whoever is discovered in this intention, though his guilt has yet to be completed in deed, is already guilty before God in so far as he strives with all his might to sin, and accomplishes within himself, as the blessed Augustine reminds us, as much as if he were actually taken in the act.

God considers not the action, but the spirit of the action. It is the intention, not the deed wherein the merit or praise of the does consists. Often, indeed, the same action is done from different motives: for justice sake by one man, for an evil reason by another. Two men, for instance, hang a guilty person. The one does it out of zeal for justice; the other in resentment for an earlier enmity. The action of hanging is the same. Both men do what is good and what justice demands. Yet the diversity of their intentions causes the same deed to be done from different motives, in the one case good, in the other bad.