You Break It, You Own It: On Sin and God’s Permissive Will

There have been proud spirits who placed the whole efficacy of the virtues in free will alone; in our age there are also many who utterly despair that free will is anything at all.[1]

So Anselm in the early eleventh century contrasted the issues of his day to Augustine’s contest with Pelagius six centuries prior. Considering it repugnant to the nature of free will for God to move the heart directly, Pelagius asserted the sovereignty of human freedom to determine its own fate, whether to life or to death.[2] “God,” he reasoned, “decided to give rational creatures the gift of good will and the power of free choice. By making a person naturally capable of good and evil, so that he could do both and would direct his own will to either, God arranged that what an individual actually chose would be properly his own.”[3] Against this thesis, Augustine asserted the sovereignty of God over the inmost movements of the heart. Even the sinner’s desire to be converted, he argued, arose from God’s direct operation on the radical orientation of the will.[4] So thorough was Augustine’s triumph over Pelagius that Anselm found it had become exigent to defend human free will by showing its harmony with divine foreknowledge, predestination, and the interior action of grace.

Augustine and Anselm represent the constellation of tensions that Catholic theology, doctrine, and spiritual practice have aimed to hold together: the necessity of grace for conversion, good fruits, and perseverance; the indispensable role of consent, cooperation, and merit in justification; and, of special interest here, the innocence of God from any responsibility for sin.[5] As the Council of Trent has it: “If anyone should say that it is not in our power to make our ways evil, but that God works our evil deeds just as he works our good deeds, not permissively only, but properly and per se, so that the treachery of Judas is no less God’s proper work than the call of Paul: let him be anathema.”[6] What Trent puts in a doctrinal mode, St. Benedict offers as spiritual counsel: we ought to praise God for whatever we find good in ourselves; but acknowledge our sins as ours and ours alone.[7] Our exclusive ownership of and responsibility for sin—Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—is a law of prayer and a law of belief. The contrast between what God plants and fructifies, and what God endures in us, has been spiritually and theologically intelligible to Catholics from time out of mind.

Anselm’s plaint is called to mind by a novel perspective on these matters, recently featured in this journal.[8] Roberto J. De La Noval does not doubt (as did Anselm’s opponents) whether free will is anything at all, but whether it has anything at all, even failure, that is properly and solely its own.[9] “It is not difficult,” he says, “to reduce Pelagianism to one basic error: the idea that the final explanation for the salvation of any sinner is their own created freedom.”[10]

A “commonsense Pelagianism in Catholic culture,” he feels, stubbornly persists.[11] It “keeps us from cultivating awe and gratitude to God for authoring every aspect of us, from our holy desires to our fruitful decisions.”[12] But, he wishes to add, the converse is also true: it is “Pelagian” to think that even our failure, even final impenitence, could have its “final explanation” in “created freedom.”[13] “The total explication of why any sinner is damned [must] account for God’s free choice not to impart the grace that, were it given, would inexorably produce its intended result.”[14] Who, then, is ultimately answerable for our failures? God, apparently. Hence Noval’s universalism: if anyone is damned, it is finally—though Noval is far too learned and artful to put it so bluntly—God who has failed.

The Logic of “Pelagianism,” According to Noval

It is worth unpacking Noval’s argument. God has created us from nothing, and we can do nothing at all, whether good or evil, apart from his creating and sustaining power. As we can do no good without God’s help to succeed, Noval avers, so we can do no evil without his permission to fail. Our whole freedom, for good or for evil, is contained, as it were, within the transcendent decree of God’s freedom either to give help, and so ensure success, or by withholding it, doom us to failure. For Noval, “It follows therefore that no exercise of human freedom”—even, apparently, the free rejection of God—“can, from a Catholic perspective, be understood in disconnection from God’s impartation of grace.”[15] Since apart from God’s help we can do nothing, does it not follow, he thinks, that even our sins “are brought about by . . . the withholding of God’s grace,” the opinion he elsewhere (and approvingly) attributes to Thomas Aquinas?[16]

If God’s grace is the necessary and sufficient condition for conversion to God, is not God’s permission—that is, his decision to withhold the grace he knows would prevent it—the necessary and sufficient condition for the rejection of God? In every case, God might turn the sinner and prevent the sin. Does it not follow, in effect, that even our sins belong more to God than to ourselves, that is, that our failure is “ultimately explained” by his decree?[17] Should we not infer, therefore—although, again, we might expect Noval to quibble with our putting it so directly—that God, who by his permissive decree makes our fall inevitable, is somehow much more the owner or author or ultimate cause of sin than is the hapless sinner? And, to come to the point of his title, would it not be the most insidious Pelagianism to think that there is anything at all, even in the most radical perversity of our choices, that is ours alone, and not God’s, and, indeed, more God’s than ours?

In this way, Noval means to think the logic of Pelagianism all the way through to the end: it is, fundamentally, the assertion of primary or sole ownership of anything at all in ourselves. Noval’s version of a resolute anti-Pelagianism, then, follows the inverse logic to its completion. Everything we have, even our rejection of God, is more from God than from ourselves.

Noval is undoubtedly right to exalt the sovereignty of God, even over sin and sinners. Still, we cannot help thinking that he has treated sin as if it could be integrated into some logic when, in fact, it cannot. In effect, Noval makes God’s permission of sin into an explanation for sin. This, we think, is to be mistaken about sin, the goodness of divine permission, and the sufficiency of grace.

By publishing his opinions the author has invited the public to examine them.[18] While we share his antipathy to Pelagianism and his devotion to God’s sovereignty, and admire his commitment to think these matters through to the end, we find his particular construal of them extremely difficult to reconcile with Catholic doctrine and practice and the best traditions of theology.

As a doctrinal matter, the Church affirms that grace can be sufficient and nevertheless refused. It is condemned to say that sinners can never resist interior grace, or that, if they do, then the grace was not sufficiet. It is condemned to say that it is semi-Pelagian to hold that grace can be resisted. It is condemned to say that God’s endurance (permission) of our evil deeds effectively makes him the cause of our failure. It is condemned, finally, to say that the judgment of the Church can be disregarded because one claims to find something different in Augustine.[19]

We also find his exegesis of the authors he conscripts to his cause, particularly Augustine and Aquinas, somewhat disoriented. But while getting these authors right would be worthwhile and illuminating itself, the fundamental issues here are not exegetical but matters of basic principle and interpretive horizon. In brief: Noval expects that even sin has an ultimate explanation, and an ultimate explanation of anything can only be God. His universalism follows from the premise that only God ultimately explains why sinners fail, and is ultimately to blame if anyone should fail irrevocably. Ex falso sequitur quodlibet.

My Sin is My Own

Noval is right to think that we can learn a thing or two from Augustine on these matters. Augustine decidedly does not look to God as an explanation for sin. He constantly affirmed that sin is the one thing in all the world that is wholly our own.[20] If Noval is right on what makes a “Pelagian,” then, even Augustine had not thought the error of Pelagianism all the way through.

Augustine says in his Expositions of the Psalms: “You are nothing of yourself, call upon God; your sins are your own, but your merits are from God.”[21] Preaching on the same Psalm elsewhere, he remarks, “nothing truly belongs to me except my sins.”[22] So, he reads John 8:44—“Whoever speaks a lie, speaks from what is his own”—as teaching that the one thing we have as our own, apart from God, is to lie.[23]

In the same vein, Augustine’s response to the question posed by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 4:7—“For what do you have that you have not received?”—is not “nothing at all,” but “nothing, except sin.”[24] For Augustine, this passage reminds us that our every good is God’s gift, above all our desire and love for God. But while it is grace that frees us to cooperate with God, its absence does not oblige us to sin: “We have it in our power to sin, but to be justified is not in our power.”[25] He considers that, as a practical matter, the heirs of Adam’s Sin are unable to avoid sin consistently. But this inability is a consequence of sin and not its ultimate explanation, and it does not oblige us to choose sin.[26] Sin, then, is exclusively ours: not something we can attribute either to God or, with the Manichees, to a malevolent force outside ourselves and independent of God.

The Nothingness of Sin

If sin is something that human beings alone are responsible for, how does this not carve out some sphere in the cosmos independent of God’s sovereignty? Has Augustine merely shrunk the Manichean kingdom of darkness to fit the confines of the human heart, bestowing on each human will a principle of evil that lies outside of God’s control?

We would be mistaken to think Augustine insensitive to this problem. The origin of evil was one of the major intellectual obstacles in the way of his baptism. In his Confessions, Augustine famously recounts his realization that evil is not a substance demanding causal explanation but, rather, a privatio boni: “Everything that exists is good, then; and so evil, the source of which I was seeking, cannot be a substance, because if it were, it would be good.”[27] By speaking colloquially about sin as something humans “have” or an action they can “do” we may obscure the fact that what “sin” really names is a privation or defect in something we have or do—not something that is but rather an “is-not” in something that is.

One way to put the “is-not” of sin is to say that it lacks a proper cause, i.e., a proper “why.” Why do we sin? There is no why. If there were a “why,” a valid, true, sufficient reason, it would not be sin. There are only excuses and rationalizations for temptations that we ought, but fail, to resist.[28]

Augustine inquires into the cause of sin in his City of God while seeking the origin of evil in the human will. Since evil is a privation and not a substance, he concludes that one should not look for an efficient cause of its existence:

No one, therefore, should look for an efficient cause for an evil will. For it is not an efficient but rather a deficient cause, because the evil will itself is not an effect but rather a defect. For to defect from what has supreme existence to what has lesser existence is itself to begin to have an evil will.[29]

To seek a full causal explanation of evil is thus to make a category mistake, like “wanting to see darkness or to hear silence.”[30] As Jesse Couenhoven puts it, for Augustine “the Fall is fundamentally inexplicable, a matter of deficiency.”[31] And yet, even though “Augustine is left without an explanation [for the Fall itself] . . . he is able to provide an explanation for his inability to explain the Fall: if the primal sin made sense, it would not have been as bad as Augustine believed it was.”[32]

Even as we refer to human beings as alone the “cause” of their sinfulness, this is nothing more than to say that we do not need any help to fail. De facto, we can even fail to cooperate when God operates on the heart to change its deepest desires. The grace is sufficient; it changes the heart; but the changed heart falls back and does not persevere. Did grace fail? No. The sinner failed, despite God’s help. Why? If there were a sufficient reason, it would not be sin.

Hence, Thomas Aquinas says that the formal element of formal sin (malum culpae) is a deprivation of form, i.e., intrinsic intelligibility: sin is indefinable, lacks a ratio, has no due cause, is an objective falsehood in which there is nothing to understand. It is known and judged by God as a “false” fact, an absurdity.[33] Once we grasp that sin has no “why,” we realize that the sufficient grace and the efficacious grace are the same grace. Sin is an inexplicable failure, not of grace and not of God in giving it, but of the sinner. If the grace is given, the sinner is moved, because grace is always sufficient and its gift is the movement. Yet the sinner may be moved by God and refuse to move herself, to cooperate, to elicit the further acts required. There is, then, no intelligible or entitative difference between sufficient and efficacious grace.[34] The difference is just a brute fact: sin, and sin is unintelligible.

Someone might think this a subterfuge: there is always a still greater, a more sufficient grace God might have given; hence one might always find reason to blame the grace, or its Giver, rather than the sinner. To be sure, we are not saying that God must permit our failure, only that in fact he does; and the permission does not explain the failure, because nothing does. Or someone might say: being is completely intelligible; how then is sin a brute fact? We answer that sin is non-intelligible because the formal element in formal sin is a deprivation, a non-being.[35] Unless it is grasped that sin has no “why,” one will always think it can somehow be integrated into a synthesis with the divine will. It cannot.

To be precise, then, it is something of an abuse of language to say we are the “cause” of sin, because a cause is a reason “why.” As Lonergan observes, we wish to explain the “irrational privation” that is sin from a force of habit: “We are . . . accustomed to reducing intelligible beings to their causes; therefore, we likewise [expect to] reduce to their causes even occurrences that in themselves are not intelligible!”[36] Insofar as sin is a privation of being, it “lacks the intelligibility of cause” and so “cannot be reduced to God.”[37] He continues,

That is why when someone asks why people sin . . . no true reason can be given. Had there been a true reason, they would not have been acting contrary to reason; and if they had not been acting contrary to reason, they would have performed a voluntary act that was not evil but good.[38]

Iniquity and Divine Permission

Why is there sin? Why is sin permitted? Noval’s propensity is to treat these two questions as if they were somehow the same question. They are not.

Sin is radically evil and unintelligible: there is no “why.” Divine permission, on the other hand, is good and completely intelligible, although not to us in this life: why God permits sin is hidden in divine wisdom. (Augustine, as Noval notes, was persuaded at least of this: that God would not permit sin except to bring some great good out of it.[39]) There are, then, two different questions, one to which no answer at all may be expected, and another whose answer is hidden from us in the wisdom of God. The one is mysterious because it is utterly dark; the other is mysterious because its light is too bright for us. They cannot be synthesized.

Noval, however, wants an explanation: sin occurs, because God permits it; ultimately, then, sin results from God’s decision. If God withholds grace, Noval seems to reason, we are condemned to inevitable failure; and if God grants grace but not “enough” grace, still we are condemned; and God knows this. As God’s free liberality explains our success, so his parsimony explains—and ensures—our failure. The “why” of sin, then, for Noval, is God’s decision not to fulfill the conditions he has made needful for our success. In effect, permission, for Noval, amounts to prevention. The fix is in.

Noval effectively takes it that both the good and the evil have an ultimate “because” in God’s decision. Already we observed him to say that “the total explication of why any sinner is damned [must] account for God’s free choice.”[40] The expectation of synthesis is a recurring theme: “It is incoherent to understand a sinner’s rejection of saving grace as ultimately explained by that sinner’s throwing up obstacles in the way of grace;”[41] “No exercise of human freedom,” even sin, can be understood “in disconnection from God’s impartation of grace,”—i.e., God’s decision to give grace sufficiently or not—since, otherwise, the creature and not God would be the ultimate principle of explanation.[42]

Now, we appreciate the demand that all things be completely explained. Without it, there would be no valid proof for the existence of God. But sometimes the right answer to a question is that it is the wrong question.[43] It is, as a matter of fact, incoherent to understand a sinner’s rejection of grace as explained by anything at all. What has no why cannot be assigned a why and, therefore, God is not its ultimate why. Because Noval maintains that even sin must have an ultimate why, he seems to locate the mystery of iniquity, not where it belongs—in the radically unintelligible failure of created freedom—but where it does not belong— in the transcendent counsel of divine wisdom.

Noval insists he is not making sin “comprehensible.”[44] What would make sin comprehensible, he thinks, would be to relocate the mystery of iniquity from the inscrutability of God’s will into the failures of ours, to “reduce this mystery to manageable proportions and so to annul it, to revert to a Pelagian account of grace and divine causality” by denying that God operates directly on human freedom.[45] Blaming ourselves alone, Noval seems to think, is the wrong explanation, the Pelagian explanation.

For Noval, then, the incomprehensibility of sin is not because it has no why, but because its why is hidden from us in divine wisdom. Iniquity is mysterious to us, he suggests, because we do not understand why God permits it to occur. He reasons: we know that God’s will is the salvation of all; we know that “God’s will cannot be defeated by creatures”;[46] we know that sin can never occur without God’s permission, else his will would be frustrated; we know that sin nevertheless does occur. This can only be, for Noval, because God decrees that it occur: “To say God ‘permits’ but does not ‘will’ sin is not to communicate anything we actually understand. It is, rather, only to confess the mystery that God’s will is universally efficacious and yet moral evil exists.”[47]

The real problem, however, is that there simply is no proper explanation for moral evil. Conversion, no doubt, is a divinely operated, internal reorientation of human desire. But sin? They are not parallel; there can be no synthesis. “Your downfall, O Israel, is your own doing” (Hos 13:9).

Conclusion: The (Im-)possibility of Iniquity?

“Whom God passes over, he condemns,” says Calvin, “for no other reason than that he wills to exclude them.”[48] There is in Calvin’s thought no meaningful difference, save in outcome, between God’s will to save and his will to permit.[49] It is difficult to see wherein Noval would disagree. That is why Noval thinks it Pelagian to attribute our exclusion from divine fellowship to ourselves; everything, even this, is ultimately God’s. But unlike Calvin, Noval quite rightly finds it intolerable that God should create some only to prevent their flourishing. The only acceptable outcome, on these premises, is that all will be saved.[50] It would be one thing for God to let us learn a few lessons. It would be another entirely for God to damn us forever for a downfall that, in the final analysis, is not our doing, but his own.

Now, it is not our intention here to populate hell, define its torments, or even consider how it is compatible with the blessedness of God and the saints, except to say this alone: if any sinner is ever finally impenitent, it is entirely the sinner’s own fault and not at all God’s. With the Church, with Augustine, Aquinas, and Lonergan, we deny that the will to permit is a will to exclude or a predestination to evil.[51] It is an endurance of absurdity. To ask the reason for the absurd is to make a basic mistake. There is no final synthesis of the non-intelligible with the intelligible. There is only the “great enigma” I become to myself when I turn away from the source of goodness, being, and intelligibility: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.[52]

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