Sentiments of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus on the Doctrine of Philosophical Sin

Many people speak of the error of philosophical sin without knowing very distinctly in what it consists. The distinction between philosophical sin and theological sin is neither new nor chimerical, as some imagine. It is from Saint Thomas, who says that sin is considered in one way by the Theologian and in another by the Philosopher. [Ia. 2, q. 71, a. 6, ad 5.] The former, he says, examines the nature of sin insofar as it is an offense against God, and the latter insofar only as it is contrary to reason. It is the same sin viewed under different aspects. According to the one it is called theological, and according to the other it is called philosophical. According to the one it offends God; according to the other it offends reason.

Since Theology is ordinarily taught in Latin, the terms employed in it must be understood according to the force they have in that language. The word offendere, which in French signifies to offend, has various significations in Latin according as it is taken in the proper or in the figurative sense. In the proper sense it signifies what happens to a body which is in motion and which strikes another upon encountering it. In the figurative sense it is said of a rational being who acts against the will, against the inclinations of another, against the respect and against the obedience which he owes him. This signification is the one most used in our language.

The Theologians, following this usage of the Latin Language, say that sin, taking the force of the terms, is an offense against God, offensa Dei, only insofar as it strikes against the obedience which is owed to him; that when neither God nor his commands are known by the one who commits the sin, this sin, speaking rigorously, ought not to be called an offense against God, because then it does not directly strike against this obedience nor against his commands, which the sinner does not know. But this sin always offends reason, because it is against the lights of conscience and against that law written in our hearts, which are not things different from reason. This is what must first be well conceived in order to understand the question of philosophical sin. This perhaps appears a vain subtlety when speaking Theology in our language; but it is not so in the customary language of Theologians, that is to say, in the Latin language. After all, in matters of this kind one must always agree upon the signification which usage attaches to words.

It is then necessary to make a very important observation. It is that the Theologians who have made all these precise distinctions, and principally the Jesuits, when saying that the sin of a man who does not know God is not properly called an offense against God, do not thereby deny that it is a sin, and a sin punishable by damnation. On the contrary, most of the Theologians say that, even in this supposition, the sinner is justly punished with Hell, because although he does not act against the commands of a known God, he nevertheless acts against the law which that God has placed in his heart; that this law marks out his duty for him and makes him understand that he violates it by not following it; which, according to them, suffices to render him guilty of the penalties with which this God, altogether unknown though he is to him, punishes him in this life and in the other. Thus almost all the Theologians agree that the sins of the Barbarians which gave rise to this question, as soon as they are against the natural law, are punished by God in hell; but they do not all reason from the same principles, and they posit different ones from which they equally conclude the just punishment of these sorts of sinners.

Some lay down as a principle that an invincible ignorance of God is never found, at least for a long time, among the Barbarians who have the use of reason, whether their natural light, stirred by the sight of creatures, suffices to give them this knowledge, or whether God acts interiorly in them by ways which are unknown to us and of which they alone could give an account. What Saint Paul says of the Pagans in the Epistle to the Romans gives great authority to this System. However that may be, this principle being laid down, it follows that the sins of these Pagans offend not only reason but also the obedience which they owe to God, and that they are offenses against God in the most exact signification that this term can have in scholastic language.

The other Theologians have reasoned from an altogether opposite principle, which they believed to be more conformable to experience. They have said that there could be among some Barbarians an invincible ignorance of God; but to this principle they add that other one of which I have already spoken: that in order for the sin of a Barbarian to merit damnation, it is not necessary that it be directly against the obedience owed to God, nor that the sinner know distinctly that the law which he violates comes from that God; but that it suffices that he commit this sin against the lights of his conscience, which marks out his duty for him and makes him understand at the same time the obligation he has to conform himself to this law, which is written in his heart. That, by not doing so, he justly incurs the disfavor of God and the punishment attached thereto for all eternity. In this manner, neither in the one opinion nor in the other is there among the Barbarians any purely philosophical sin, that is to say, one which purely offends reason without offending God, either directly or indirectly, and which does not merit Hell, when it has the other conditions required for the essence of mortal sin.

All this having been set forth, it will be easy to understand in what the error of philosophical sin consists. It consists first in saying that certain Barbarians perform actions against the natural law, such as homicides, adulteries, etc., which are not mortal sins worthy of damnation, because in all those who are ignorant of God sins are purely Philosophical, that is to say, only against reason, and in no way Theological, that is to say, they are not against God, whom the sinner does not know and by them, consequently, God himself does not hold himself offended. [In Decreto Alexandri VIII, 24 Aug. 1690.]

A second Proposition may be made which will contain the same error, or an altogether similar error founded upon the same principle. It is this: that not only those who are ignorant of God and who have never known him, but also those who are not ignorant of him, if, when acting against the Law, they do not actually think that they offend God, do not in fact offend him; that their sins are purely philosophical, because they see clearly that they are against reason, but that they are not Theological, because they do not think that they are against God, and thus they are not worthy of being eternally punished. This concerns the sins of an infinity of libertines who, they say, commit the most horrible actions and abandon themselves to the most extreme debaucheries without ever thinking that God forbids them. It is precisely in these two Propositions that the error of Philosophical sin consists, and it seems in fact expressed in the famous Theology Thesis of Dijon about which so much clamor was made some years ago.

It was denounced to the Bishops and to the Pope as a new heresy of the Jesuits. It was condemned by Alexander VIII on the twenty-fourth of August in the year 1690. The Jesuits, who were as much scandalized by it as the others, anticipated the condemnation of the Pope by being the first to condemn it in public writings. They subsequently produced, among others, one entitled The Error of Philosophical Sin Combated by the Jesuits, in which they demonstrated that this had never been the doctrine of their Society. They showed, moreover, that this very Thesis was in no way conformable to the writings of the Professor of Dijon, which they caused to be authenticated and brought to Paris. They printed extracts from them which contained only the common doctrine in Theology on this subject. And in fact, in reading the writings of the Professor, one does not comprehend how he could have made a Thesis of this nature.

This is not the place to enter into the detail of the defense of the Jesuits, nor of the calumnies which were published against them on this subject. Nothing was omitted in order to tear them apart and to render them odious everywhere. For this purpose people dared to falsify the writings of the Professor; to cite the objections which he made to himself as though they had been his assertions; and to make him advance not only the most detestable but also the most extravagant maxims, so that, in order to say what people made him say, not only would he have had to be a libertine by profession, but also mad in the sovereign degree. And what is surprising, and what will never be believed unless one is willing to take the trouble to compare the writing of the Jesuits with those of their Adversary, is that after these Fathers had published the true extracts from the writings of the Professor in order to show the falsification that had been made in them, no other answer was given than that it was by a figure of Rhetoric that he had been made to speak in that manner. [The true extracts are in the Second Letter to a Man of the Court. The false extracts are in the Denunciation of the New Heresy, art. 3, third denunciation, pp. 81-82.]

However that may be, in order to execute the design proposed here, the Jesuits declare, first, that they condemn this doctrine as scandalous, as rash, as offensive to pious ears, and as erroneous, which are the qualifications with which the Holy See censured it.

Second, they declare, and they have always declared with truth, that this was never the doctrine of their Society, and that none of their Authors ever taught it.

Third, not only is this doctrine not that of their Society, but none of the principles of their Theology leads to it. Some of their Theologians have held, after several others, that invincible ignorance of God can exist for some time among some Barbarians; but they have added at the same time that these Barbarians, acting against the lights of their conscience, committed not only philosophical sins but mortal sins worthy of hell, as I explained previously. Others have held that, in order to offend God in this manner, it is necessary to know him; but they have at the same time laid down as a principle that invincible ignorance of God was impossible, as several other Theologians think. In a word, in reasoning in this manner they have reasoned as people reason in all the Catholic Schools. From neither the one nor the other of these two principles taken separately does the error of philosophical sin with respect to the Barbarians follow. And there has never been, so far as is known, any other Jesuit who joined them both together, except a Spaniard, namely Arriaga, who did so after the example of some other non-Jesuit Theologians, but who was neither followed nor preceded in such a doctrine by the Theologians of his Society, not even by the Professor of Dijon, who in fact admits neither ignorance nor forgetfulness of God that renders sin purely philosophical, and who expressed himself as he did only in a purely metaphysical and morally impossible hypothesis, as he expressly says himself.

In the fourth place, the Jesuits declare that the constant and universal doctrine of their Society is that the sins of libertines, of habitual sinners, and of the hardened are imputed to them in themselves or in their cause; that their Theologians follow in this only the common doctrine in the Catholic Schools; that every ignorance or inadvertence which has its source in the free will of the sinner cannot excuse his sin. And, on the occasion of the Thesis of philosophical sin, they did not fear to challenge their Adversaries to show anyone among the great number of Jesuit authors of every kind - Interpreters of Scripture, Scholastic Theologians, Controversialists, Casuists or Canonists, Preachers or those who composed Treatises of devotion, and even Philosophers themselves - they challenge their Adversaries, I say, to produce any one of them who, when treating of ignorance or inadvertence with respect to our duties, did not distinguish that which is culpable from that which is not; or who did not always suppose this distinction; and who did not say, when treating the matter, that voluntary ignorance or inadvertence never excuses the evil which one has thus ignored through a criminal negligence. So constantly has this doctrine, which is directly opposed to the error of philosophical sin, always been that of their Society.

After this, what is the charity, what is the equity, what is the sincerity of those who wish to persuade the world that the error of philosophical sin is the doctrine of the Jesuits? Where is the good faith of those who every day, in Books and in Theses, affect maliciously to inveigh against the error of Philosophical sin more vehemently than against those of Nestorius and Arius, in order to cause its infamy to fall back upon the Jesuits, who detest it more than they do, and whose Society, of all the Societies that are in the Church of God, has always openly professed to be the most submissive and the most universally submissive to the decisions of the Holy See which concern faith and morals? I pass to the article of probable opinions.