Whither the Fall?

"Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, all that I have and possess. Thou hast given all to me. To Thee, O lord, I return it. All is Thine, dispose of it wholly according to Thy will. Give me Thy love and thy grace, for this is sufficient for me." ~ St Ignatius of Loyola

From Crisis

By Regis Marin, STD

The wisdom that opposes and conquers the world, turns to God and says, "take all my liberty, memory, understanding, and entire will...leaving only Thy love and grace."

What is freedom for? And why is it so important that we be allowed to exercise it? Do the choices we make really matter? Ask an atheist and he’ll tell you it’s for actualizing the self in a world without God. Of course, in a godless world why would freedom matter at all? What difference are the choices we make in a world where, as Marx predicted, “everything solid melts into thin air”? 

Ah, but that’s just the point, the atheist will say: that we are free, utterly and madly free, to make whatever choices we damn well please. Where there is no God, everything is permitted. Unless, of course, you happen to believe otherwise. For the benighted there must be no freedom.

A saint, meanwhile, will see things quite differently and declare that freedom is for giving ourselves wholly to God, who is both the origin and finality of all that exists. Including even those who refuse to grant Him existence, preferring blasphemy to bending the knee. “If there were no God,” says Chesterton, “there would be no atheists.” Only a saint like Ignatius of Loyola, for instance, who founded the Society of Jesus to spearhead a renewal of faith amid a shattered Christendom, would compose a prayer asking God to take everything—“all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will”—disposing it as he wishes, leaving only “thy love and thy grace, for this is sufficient for me.” For as all the saints and mystics will confirm, true holiness only happens when we lose our freedom, returning it to God in order thus to be free from the temptation of ever having to offend Him.     

And the sinner, what does he think freedom is for? Well, if he’s not entirely unrepentant—but an honest sinner, who acknowledges his sin while longing in his best moments to rid himself of it—he will most likely see things very much as the saint does, which is that when we sin we diminish our freedom, imperilling its loss altogether.

So, how does that work? What is it about sin that makes a man less free when he commits it? And the answer is that sin amounts to a double affront, both to the God who made us and to the world He gave us, each possessing a fixed order to which we are obliged to conform. “To sin,” says St. Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor, “is nothing else but to hang back from the good that belongs to one by nature.” Any act contrary to God and to the nature He placed within us cannot, therefore, be good; thus, it qualifies as sin. 

And until the advent of modernity, when more and more standards fell away amid the storms of a world without God, everyone believed and was expected to behave this way. Being human simply meant that here is this order, this splendid set of norms, whose existence and validity not only do not depend on us but have been set in place long before we arrived on the scene. Whether we choose to follow or flout the norms will not disturb the order of nature or nature’s God. We can only end up by doing violence to ourselves. 

Everything turns, therefore, on the fact that we do not make ourselves but that we are made, by Another, by God.  “Man’s nature,” writes Josef Pieper, “can virtually be identified with his creaturely status: his being a creature—his coming into the world without his consent—defines his innermost essence.” A nature which urges him, moreover, at every turn, in the direction of doing the good, of becoming good. 

Indeed, says Pieper, quoting his great teacher St. Thomas, “Everything that fights against the inclination of nature is sin.” All that we do, argues Pieper, or hope to attain, “can be set into motion at all only on the basis of this fundamental presupposition: that both world and man are beings called into existence by virtue of their creatureliness.” And that from the first moment of our being in the world, “we are presented with the standard, the boundary, the norm for our decisions, decisions which are not drawn from nothing, but are decisions of the creature, as a creature.”

We can never say enough about this, nor ponder the consequences of never saying anything about it. No greater disaster could befall us than to rupture the relation we have as creatures to an order which God, from all eternity, designed for our good, for the perfection of all that we are and have; which may (please God!) finally catapult us into the Arms of God for a life of intimate and unending union with Him. What could possibly be worse, asks Pieper, “than sin’s destruction of our final concordance with the divine ground of being, without which we know ourselves to be lost along with all that is best in us?”  

So, what is the source of sin, of every sin, however slight or trivial we may trick it out to seem? It must surely be a most huge and intractable thing if it is to succeed in diverting, thwarting even, the natural inclination of the creature to see and to do the good. The answer is not far from any of us; nor was it far from our first parents, who were the first to fall for it, long after certain of the angels had fallen as well. 

It is the sin of pride whereby a creature, a free and rational human being, substitutes himself for God, choosing to anchor everything to the self-centered self. It is a movement in which, as St. Augustine describes it in The City of God, “an essentially dependent being whose principle of existence lies not in itself but in another, tries to set up on its own, to exist for itself.”

Thus, we find ourselves at a crossroads, faced with two starkly different choices, on the outcome of which everything depends. Yes, each of us is a creature, owing all that we are to God, who is both our ground and destiny; yet whose wishes for our happiness we need not consult. We are free, therefore, to reject every summons that He sends, even as we see how it edges us ever closer to a state of complete relapse and ruin. Pieper sums it all up as follows: 

The choices are either self-realization as surrender to God by recognizing one’s own creatureliness; orabsolute self-love by trying to realize oneself by denying or ignoring one’s creatureliness. It is thefundamental decision in every concrete decision, preceding them all. This decision for absolute self-love is the original sin, both in the sense that it was the first committed and has also become the very wellspring and fountainhead of all concrete guilt.

It is a pride positively Satanic insofar as it declares, before God Himself, that for all the joy and the happiness He has created me for, I have decided that it is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.

Pictured: St Ignatius of Loyola