Article III: On Malice as a Cause of Sin on the Part of the Will — On Sins of Malice

St. Thomas, I-II, q. 78; II-II, q. 14; De Malo q. 3, a. 12-15.

471. On the part of the will the cause of sin is malice or depravity and perversity (Ps. LI), by which the will, with no ignorance or passion influencing, from itself chooses evil knowingly and of set purpose (Job XXXIV, 27), not because it wills evil as evil, which is impossible, but insofar as it prefers the privation of a spiritual good to the absence of a temporal good, and loves the lesser good more. Then the will is said to do evil not only choosing, but from election, as happens a) in affected ignorance, which it chooses in order to sin more freely; or b) in passion, which it deliberately excites in order to sin more intensely; or c) in a bad custom voluntarily and freely admitted. These things can also occur in venial matters.

472. Sins from a bad habit are done from malice. - For since a vicious habit has been freely acquired, if it is also freely conserved in the present by the will not retracting it, the man who acts according to the habit, not from inadvertence or passion, but knowingly and freely uses his habit, sins from malice, because he acts from a will confirmed in evil, or from a bad inclination of the will by which it has been made firm in evil. Then the will is said to do evil, not according to habit, but from habit. - Yet not every sin from malice is from habit; but man can also, without habit, choose evil of set purpose (as the evil angels and the first man did), whether from an innate or acquired predisposition of the body, or from the removal of what restrains, namely faith, hope, fear, etc.

473. Principle. It is more grave, other things being equal, to sin from malice than from passion (or, a fortiori, from ignorance), because 1) it is done from a motion more proper to the will, since the will is moved in no way by an impulse extrinsic to it (such as passion is), but wholly from itself: "hence sin is aggravated so much the more as the malice has been more vehement, and is diminished so much the more as the passion has been more vehement"; - 2) one sinning from passion, since this quickly passes, easily returns to a good proposal, but one sinning from malice often sins from habit and therefore more lastingly; - 3) one sinning from passion has his will ordinarily ordered to the good: for he proposes and seeks the good, but sometimes recedes from the proposal on account of passion; but one sinning from malice is badly disposed as to the very end, because he has a firm proposal of sinning. But the end in morals is the first principle. Hence one sinning from malice sins more gravely, because the defect of the principle is worst, and more perilously, because he is not easily recalled from sin.

474. Of special malice are sins against the Holy Spirit. - They are those which are done directly against the good which is attributed to the Holy Spirit by appropriation, namely, the goodness and love of God, and indeed from malice or election of evil. This name, taken from the Scriptures (Matt. XII, 31; Mark III, 29; Luke XII, 10), there designates that sin of the Pharisees by which, from malice, they attributed to the devil the miraculous works of Christ, done by the power of the Holy Spirit so that men might be saved and drawn back from evil; which is to assail truth manifested and clearly proposed and acknowledged. By the Fathers and Scholastics, however, by analogy it was extended to designate all similar sins which maliciously contemn the means granted by the Holy Spirit for converting man and drawing him back from sin.

Therefore two things are required for those sins: a) that they be from malice, that is, not from a sudden motion of passion (as can also happen in the case of despair, hatred of God, etc.), but from the will alone deliberately moving itself to evil. Yet this does not suffice, otherwise all who sinned from habit would sin against the Holy Spirit; but b) special malice is required, from the fact that one contemns and casts away those things which could impede sin or procure its remission; these means are effects of the grace of the Holy Spirit in us, and therefore he who thus acts from malice properly sins against the Holy Spirit. They are, therefore, those sins by which man through contempt casts away the means granted from the goodness of the Holy Spirit by which he could have been drawn back from sin.

475. Six sins against the Holy Spirit are numbered by the Scholastics. - For man is drawn back from sin:

a) on the part of divine judgment, either 1. by consideration of mercy through hope, which despair casts away; or 2. by consideration of justice through fear, which is taken away by that presumption by which one wishes to obtain glory by the mercy of God alone and without merits or penance;

b) on the part of the gifts of God, either 3. by acknowledgment of truth through faith, against which is placed the assailing of acknowledged truth, so that one may sin with greater license; or 4. by the help of interior grace, against which is placed envy of fraternal grace, while someone is saddened not concerning the good of neighbor alone, but concerning the very increase of grace in souls;

c) on the part of sin, either 5. by the inordination and baseness of sin, which, actual grace moving, lead to penance, and to this is opposed impenitence, which is not mere death in sin but the proposal of not doing penance; or 6. by the smallness and brevity of the good which is found in sin, which, actual grace moving, induces man to this, that he not be made firm in sin, and to this is opposed obstinacy, that is, the firm proposal of adhering in sin.

Hatred of God, although in itself it is a sin of the greatest malice, is not placed among the sins against the Holy Spirit, because it is graver than they, and because in some way it is implicitly contained in all of them.

476. Sin against the Holy Spirit is called irremissible: not as though it could not be remitted by the grace of God, nor because in fact it is never remitted, but it is such according to its nature, because it directly excludes those things through which the remission of sins is made, and includes a disposition of pertinacity which of itself is permanent, and while it remains is an obstacle of positive resistance to the action of divine grace. Hence it is remitted with greatest difficulty, more rarely, and only as it were miraculously, because, by contemning the supernatural gifts necessary for remission, it directly assails every conversion to God.

477. Remark. - Sins of malice which are from the inclination of habit are never first sins, because they presuppose the acts from which the habit was caused. Sins against the Holy Spirit ordinarily presuppose other sins, because man is accustomed to proceed from a more imperfect and lesser sin to a perfect and greater one; yet on account of freedom of choice,¹ someone can, even in the first act, sin against the Holy Spirit from contempt.

¹ Thus according to St. Thomas this happens either on account of preceding bad dispositions (as from the complexion of the body and from preceding sins, but forgiven), or on account of a vehement motive to evil and a weak affection toward good.