The Two Ways We Fall

Imagine there are two people who committed the same fault.

They missed their friend's birthday.

(Cue the dramatic music... dun dun dun...)

But the circumstances of each friend were different.

The first friend meant to come! She even wrote it on the calendar, but something came up and it totally skipped her mined under a pile of work and a hard week. By the time she remembered it was midnight and she felt sick about it.

The second friend is different. She also got the invite, added it to her calendar, and saw the reminder. But then she thought about some old grievance, some bitterness she had toward the friend whose birthday she was supposed to attend. Maybe something about this friend she was envious of. So, she decided, deliberately, to skip it. She feels no remorse over missing it at all.

Both failed to be a good friend in the same way, at least in terms of the act itself: they missed the birthday celebration.

Yet anyone with a conscience knows these two failures are not the same thing at all.

St. Thomas Aquinas actually discusses this dynamic when it comes to how we examine our sins.

This can be very helpful, I think, for those of us who are prone to beat ourselves up over our failures.

In the Summa Theologiae Aquinas distinguishes sins that come from passion, which he says may rightly be called sins of weakness (I-II, q. 77, a. 3), from sins committed “through certain malice” (I-II, q. 78).

The difference lies in where the fault begins.

In a sin of weakness, the will is pulled off course. Fear, desire, grief, or exhaustion clouds the reason, and the person does what in a calmer moment he would never choose.

In a sin of malice, nothing clouds the reason at all. The person sees the good clearly, sees the evil clearly, and chooses the evil because he prefers it. Aquinas describes this as a disorder not of the passions but of the will itself, which has settled on a lesser good and is willing to lose the greater one to have it.

Aquinas didn't draw this distinction from philosophy alone. He got it straight from the Bible.

Scripture, in fact, shows us both kinds of sinner.

Paul attributes sins of weakness to himself, in fact: "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do: (Romans 7:19).

This kind of sin is commited by someone whose will is fundamentally aimed toward God. He ardently desires to please God, to do what's right, to never commit a sin. 99% of the time, perhaps, he is working on virtue and growing in holiness. Still, there's that pesky 1% of the time when weakness strikes, the passions are inflamed, and he does what he wishes he didn't. By "passions" I do not mean lust alone (though that can be one) but any sort of biological urge, which can be an inflamed temper, a gluttonous binge, a scrolling habit that steps from restlessness.

Jesus names the same condition in Gethsemane, in fact, when after asking his disciples to keep watch, he instead finds them sleeping: "the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26:41).

The Greek word there is asthenēs, the same root the author of Hebrews uses when he says Christ is able "to sympathize with our weaknesses" (Hebrews 4:15). Weakness is the condition of a creature who wants the right thing, but still struggles to hold onto that virtue consistently.

Malice is entirely different. Think of Peter and Judas who committed sins that you might say were in-and-of themselves "objectively grave," and they did so on the same exact night.

Peter denies Jesus three times, and the Gospels are clear that he falls out of fear, terror. This is a grave matter, indeed. Jesus had said whoever denies him before men, He will also deny before His Father in heaven! (Matthew 10:32-33). In Mark's Gospel, which is often called "Peter's Gospel" since Mark likely wrote it as a scribe for Peter, it's quite pointed: 

"For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels" (Mark 8:38).

In other words, Peter remembered these words from Jesus when he made his denial. He knew what was at stake—and it was serious. So what happens next? He goes out and weeps bitterly.

Judas, by contrast, makes arrangements. His betrayal is also quite grave, and there were likewise similar warnings from Jesus about one who would betray the Son of Man. (i.e. Matthew 26:24). Judas collects his silver. He arranges to "signal" his betrayal with a kiss. Then, he goes to the upper room for the Last Supper, anyway. He walks out, when Jesus predicts his betrayer, and follows through with it. He does have a kind of contrition afterwards, but he allows it to turn to despair rather than repentance. And we know how that ended.

One man’s will was overwhelmed; the other man’s will was the problem.

Aquinas is honest that sin from malice is graver than sin from weakness (I-II, q. 78, a. 4), and that is an important thing to note. Not to "minimize" sins of weakness, but so that we might actually examen ourselves rightly. For when we examen ourselves, we are to judge our condition according to truth. Overemphasizing the gravity of a fall, thinking of ourselves a Judas, can be just as damaging as minimizing the gravity. Why? Well, see what happened to Judas. Despair leads us away from Him; contrition leads us back to Him.

And this matters for all of us. It's why I'm really writing about this today, because I think a lot of us miss it. And how we respond in the wake of a fall into either kind of sin requires a different remedy.

Weakness and malice are not healed in the same way, nor do they necessarily heal according to the same timetable.

Malice can end quickly, because malice is a decision, and decisions can be reversed.

The prodigal son in Luke’s parable did not drift into the far country; he asked for his inheritance and left. His sin was chosen. And so his return begins with a single moment: "But when he came to himself" (Luke 15:17).

Nothing about the Prodigal's circumstances had changed. What changed was that his will turned back to his father. He stopped preferring the pigsty. Of course, the long work of rebuilding trust and unlearning old patterns would follow, but the malice itself, the deliberate turning away, died the instant he chose to go home.

"The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise" (Psalm 51:17).

Contrition is the will coming back to its senses. When we discover we have been sinning with our eyes open, we do not need a twelve-step program. We need to stop. We need to say, in all honesty, “I knew, and I chose it, and I will not choose it again,” and then to mean it.

Weakness, while not as grave, is often a longer process. Healing goes slower, and I think God intends it that way. Weakness is not primarily a wrong choice; it is an underdeveloped capacity, a habit not toward grace and virtue, but toward sin and vice.

The person who loses her temper under pressure does not need to stress over a decision (he probably decided it was wrong, and felt awful about it, the moment after he commited it). What he needs is to grow, to be strengthened so that the habit of virtue grows stronger than the habit of vice. He or she needs the passions brought gradually under the gentle rule of a reason illumined by grace, and that happens the way muscle grows: through repetition, through failure, through getting up again and returning to the Lord.

Paul found this out after pleading with God to remove a particular unnamed thorn from his flesh: "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weaknes" (2 Corinthians 12:9). And why was this? To keep him from becoming conceited. It was a struggle God permitted so that in grace Paul could grow in the virtue of humility.

You see, a lack of humility is actually more dangerous to the soul than a habit that lingers in the passions. Sins of the passions are usually good things that are warped, bent in-ward. But they're good things. Lust is the "bent inwardness" of eros, which is Godly desire, which when rightly ordered, can be a beautiful expression of God's love between spouses. God's answer is not to remove this desire entirely, because it's a good thing! His grace, though, "straightens" the desire out, re-orders it toward the good. And this takes time. It requires growth in both humility and love.

God does not merely tolerate our weakness while we outgrow it. He does not sit there, seeing you struggle with your passions, and say, "Well, here we go again. When will he learn?" No, he enters even into the struggle, and can work even through our falls to help us grow in humility, and thereby, grow deeper in His love. He works in and through the struggle. And in that struggle, which for some may last weeks, or months, and for others takes years or decades, He gradually refines one's soul until it more perfectly accords with His Image in love.

This is where the distinction is actually good news.

Many sincere believers torment themselves because they keep falling into the same faults year after year, or even day after day. So, they conclude that they must be hypocrites, that their repentance is fake, that they are secretly people of malice.

That's the devil speaking. It's not the truth.

Aquinas helps us to see the truth more clearly.

Do you want the good? Do you grieve when you fail? Does the fall surprise and sadden you? Then you are weak, not malicious, and weakness is the ordinary condition of every saint before reaching heaven.

Paul describes the Christian life not as a finished state but as a process: we "are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another" (2 Corinthians 3:18). Degree by degree. That is the usual pace of healing for weakness, and while God does work miracles in some souls by freeing them from the struggle in an instant, for most of us, he chooses the long process. He knows our souls better than we do, so we should trust that He knows which path is best.

So here is a practical discipline for the week.

When you examine your conscience each day, ask of each fault not only “What did I do?” but “Which kind was it?” If you find malice, something you saw clearly and chose anyway, do not negotiate with it or commit to some long-term plan of gradual improvement.

Renounce it tonight, specifically and by name, and ask for the grace never to pick it up again.

If you find weakness, something you fell into against your own deeper desire, do not despair over it. Do not think it is something you can just "swear away" and be healed of immediately. God may grant you that grace, but He might not. Instead, thank God that your will is still pointed toward him, tell Him of your deepest desire to become the person God created you to be, that the one thing you seek is Him alone. Ask for strength in that particular spot, take whatever practical steps you think will help you improve in combatting that vice, and resolve to persist without losing a shred of hope.

In either case, the response is a turn of the will in Love to the Maker and Lover of our souls.

 

God Bless,

Judah