The Great Sin

I am, in my heart of hearts, a monist. My intellectual proclivity is to reduce things to their most basic or primary component, to assume that underneath all complexity is a simple core. For instance, I am not content with a scientific theory that describes material in terms of electrons and protons or maybe quarks; there must be something even smaller, more rudimentary that comprises all matter. And for that matter, I won’t get a full night’s rest until physicists give us a theory of everything. I’m partial to social and historical theories that offer explanatory power in terms of grand schemas: eternal recurrence or Hegel’s dialectic—that everything can be read in terms of thesis and antithesis, I can buy that. I am convinced that all logic and mathematics boils down to the law of non-contradiction, and that divine simplicity is a necessary doctrine of God—that God is singular, with no distinction in his attributes, and that his essence is his existence. It’s more elegant that way. 

For this reason, I am far too interested—more than I really ought to be—in the idea of a primary sin. In the same way that we might say that all virtues and all good deeds stem from our capacity for love, so it only makes sense that there is one vice that rules them all. Admittedly, there’s not much to go on since this particular topic is neither a central concern of the Bible nor of the Christian religion, but I nonetheless perk up when I encounter contenders and I continue to wonder, What evil lies behind all other sins?

I imagine the answer most folks are familiar with is the sin of pride. C. S. Lewis famously includes a chapter in his Mere Christianity, “The Great Sin,” in which he argues that pride or self-conceit is the fundamental vice. It is the sin behind Satan’s fall from grace and it is the root of all transgressions—each of our sins stems from an inordinate love of self rather than a love of God. Lewis is not the first to point a finger at pride; he writes in a long tradition that includes Reinhold Niebuhr, Gregory the Great, and even Augustine.

Yet, doubt has been cast on the primacy of pride, and alternative sins have been suggested as the fundamental evil. Valerie Saiving, in particular, argued that pride is the basic sin for men only, whereas something like self-negation is the basic sin for women. In that vein, let me survey some of the other contenders for the capital sin. One possibility is greed or covetousness—Paul, after all, tells us that the love of money is the root of all evil. Yet as an answer to our question, it feels unsatisfying; greed is too contextual, not basic enough. Another possibility is murder. This is an intuitive option, the first sin recorded after the Fall and the pinnacle of wrongdoing in most of our minds. But to be the primary sin, it seems that it must be something internal, something in our inner life that overflows into everything we do, and so perhaps hate is the better answer (for it is, after all, the opposite of love). Going further back than Cain’s murder of Abel, to the Fall itself, some theologians like Irenaeus have posited disobedience as the original sin from which all other sins flow. Consider also idolatry, which lies behind the first half of the Ten Commandments and plagues Israel for the entirety of the Old Testament. In the Reformation, the sin of unbelief comes to the fore as the main obstacle for the faith that God requires of us. Before that, many monastics considered acedia to be the most insidious vice; this sin can be translated as sloth (so you can imagine why monks resented it) or sometimes as apathy (so it has that Elie Wiesel quote to back it up)—it is, more than mere laziness, a weariness or resistance toward divine good, a refusal to delight in God. And in addition to all these, a final evil I have been thinking about is the deadly sin of envy. 

Envy is a sin of desire—of concupiscence, to use an old-fashioned term. It is intimately related to the sins of greed and jealousy. But whereas greed involves wanting a good that does not belong to you, and jealousy fears losing a good one has (and may not always be a sin), envy grieves that another has a good—it resents them for the good they have. And so envy is about wanting nothing for another. I was turned on to this possibility by the Mere Fidelity podcast with Phil Porter in which he suggests that envy, more than pride, describes the devil’s original sin. The devil provides the example we each follow in which we look outward and despise the good—and thereby desire evil.

A sin with an external focus seems to capture something properly basic about our lives and where we go wrong. The error is not merely in how we think about ourselves (as with pride) but in how we relate to the world. This, to my mind, is the insight Jesus is gesturing to when he condemns blasphemy against the Holy Spirit as an unforgivable sin or John when he speaks of the “sin unto death”—that certain sins are so all-encompassing because they distort how we see the world, leaving us unable to even appreciate the good of God and wanting it to come to nothing.

If we, therefore, accept envy as the primal sin, it suggests something more about the nature of sin. If envy is the replacement of goodness with nothingness, then this suggests that underneath all other vices—malice, greed, lust, however envy appears—that underneath all these is nothingness. There is no alternative something being offered, no competing good being given, no evil power, not even a corrupted self: simply nothing. Sin is nothing all the way down.

This is, of course, in complete contrast to the nature of God, whose essence is existence, who is Being itself. And, more so, it is in complete contrast with the Incarnation, which is maximally something. In Jesus, we encounter someone who is material and spiritual, who is fully flesh and also fully God—someone who is Being and Actuality and somethingness, all the way up.