What Is Sin?

What Is the Question?

Sin is the moral and religious failure at the heart of the human condition, as the philosophical and theological tradition has understood it. The word comes from the Greek hamartia, meaning "to miss the mark," and it carries the sense of a falling short, a failure to be what one should be. The concept is central to the Abrahamic religions, and it has shaped the Western moral imagination, but it has also been challenged, both by modern moral philosophy, which prefers the language of harm and rights, and by modern psychology, which prefers the language of dysfunction and recovery. The question is whether sin is a useful category, and if so, what it names.

The SEP entries on sin and on original sin set the philosophical discussion within the theology of the Abrahamic traditions, especially Christianity, where sin is the central problem to which salvation and grace are the response. The philosophical work is to articulate the concept of sin, to distinguish it from related ideas such as crime and vice, and to ask what it adds to the moral life that the alternatives do not.

Historical Background

The concept of sin is ancient. In the Hebrew Bible, sin is the failure to keep the covenant with God, and it is traced to the disobedience of the first humans in the Garden of Eden. The prophets, especially Isaiah and Jeremiah, deepened the concept, treating sin as a condition of the heart, a turning away from God that manifests in injustice and idolatry. The wisdom literature, especially the Psalms and Proverbs, treated sin as both a personal failing and a condition that requires divine forgiveness.

Augustine gave the concept its classical philosophical form in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Augustine's account, developed in the Confessions and the City of God, traced all sin to disordered love, the soul's loving the lower goods above the higher good that is God. The root of disordered love, on Augustine's view, is pride, the soul's turning from God to itself, and the attempt to find its fulfilment in its own powers and possessions. Augustine's account was deeply influential, and it shaped the medieval tradition, including Aquinas, the Reformers, and the modern theology of sin.

Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, systematized the Augustinian account, and distinguished mortal from venial sin. Mortal sin, on Aquinas's view, destroys the proper ordering of the soul to God, the charity that is the form of the virtues, and so it separates the sinner from God. Venial sin wounds but does not destroy the ordering, and it can be repaired by ordinary acts of contrition and amendment. The distinction is not a piece of legalism but a serious moral claim, that some failures are more serious than others, and that the seriousness is a matter of the relation to the ultimate good.

Augustine: Sin as Disordered Love

Augustine's account of sin is the most influential in the tradition, and it deserves a closer look. Augustine's central claim is that sin is not a positive substance, an evil that exists in its own right, but a privation, a turning away from the good. The good is God, the highest good, and all other goods, including the goods of the body, of pleasure, of knowledge, and of human relationship, are lesser goods, good in their place but not good as ends. Sin, for Augustine, is the love of the lesser goods above the higher, the substitution of the lower for the higher, and the attempt to find in the lower what only the higher can give.

The root of this disorder, on Augustine's view, is pride, the soul's turning from God to itself. Pride, in Augustine's sense, is not the swaggering self-assertion of the modern word, but the deeper spiritual pride of treating oneself as the ultimate good, of taking one's own will as the measure of value, and of refusing the dependence on God that is the condition of the soul's flourishing. Pride, for Augustine, is the original sin, the failure from which all other failures flow, and it is the deepest form of disordered love.

Augustine's account is not a piece of moralism, but a serious philosophical psychology. The account explains why sin is so persistent, why the sinner knows the good and yet does the evil, by tracing the persistence to a disorder of the will that is deeper than any particular choice. The will, on Augustine's view, is not a faculty that chooses among goods on the basis of reason, but a love that orients the whole soul, and a disordered love is not easily corrected by reason alone. The correction requires grace, the divine assistance that reorders the love, and the account of sin is inseparable from the account of grace.

Aquinas: Mortal and Venial Sin

Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica, developed the Augustinian account with his characteristic precision, and the distinction between mortal and venial sin is the heart of his contribution. Mortal sin, on Aquinas's view, is the sin that destroys the proper ordering of the soul to God, the charity that is the form of the virtues. The sinner who commits a mortal sin has turned from God as the ultimate end, and the act, by its very nature, separates the sinner from God. Venial sin is the sin that wounds but does not destroy the ordering, and it can be repaired by ordinary acts of contrition and amendment.

The distinction is not a piece of legalism, but a serious moral claim. Some failures are more serious than others, and the seriousness is a matter of the relation to the ultimate good. A failure that turns the soul from God is more serious than a failure that wounds the relation but does not break it, and the difference is not a matter of degree but of kind. The distinction has been criticized, both within the tradition and without, as drawing lines that are hard to draw in practice, but the underlying claim, that some failures are more serious than others, and that the seriousness is a matter of the relation to the good, is one that secular moral philosophy can recognize.

Sin, Crime, and Vice

The concept of sin is distinct from related ideas, and the distinctions are philosophically important. Crime is a violation of the law, and the law is the public code that governs the political community. Sin is a violation of the moral and religious order, and the order is the divine law that governs the relation of the soul to God. The two overlap, since many sins are also crimes, but they are not identical, since some sins are not crimes, and some crimes are not sins. The distinction is important because it marks the difference between the political and the moral, and between the public and the personal.

Vice is a settled disposition to moral failure, a habit of the will that produces wrong action. Sin is a particular act or omission that violates the moral and religious order, and the two are related, since vices produce sins, and sins, when repeated, become vices. The distinction is important because it marks the difference between the act and the disposition, and between the failure and the condition that produces it. The tradition has used both concepts, and the account of sin is inseparable from the account of vice, especially in Augustine's account of disordered love as the root of sin.

The Modern Challenge

The concept of sin has been challenged in the modern period, both by moral philosophy and by psychology. The moral philosophical challenge is that the language of sin is the language of religion, and that in a pluralistic society the moral life should be governed by the language of harm, rights, and preference, which are available to all reasonable inquirers. The psychological challenge is that the language of sin is the language of guilt, and that guilt is a destructive emotion that the modern psychology of recovery has taught us to manage rather than to indulge.

The defender of the concept of sin has several replies. The first is that the language of harm and rights, while valuable, does not capture the full range of moral failure, especially the failure of ingratitude, of pride, and of the substitution of the lower for the higher. The second is that the language of sin, when properly understood, is not the language of crushing guilt but the language of honest self-knowledge, the recognition that we are not as we should be, and that the recognition is the precondition of the correction. The third is that the modern psychology of recovery, while valuable, can slide into a refusal of responsibility, and that the older concept of sin, with its insistence on the reality of moral failure, may be a necessary corrective.

The deeper question is whether the concept of sin names a real feature of moral life that the newer language obscures. The defender of the concept argues that it does, that the persistence of moral failure, the gap between what we know and what we do, and the depth of the disorder that produces the gap, are real features of the moral life that the language of harm and preference does not adequately capture. The critic argues that the concept of sin, with its religious framework, is not available to all reasonable inquirers, and that the moral life should be governed by concepts that are.

Sin and Freedom

The concept of sin raises deep questions about freedom and responsibility. If sin is a condition of the will, a disorder of love, then the sinner is not fully free, and the question arises whether the sinner is responsible for the sin. Augustine's answer, developed in his debates with Pelagius, is that the sinner is responsible, because the disorder is the result of the original free choice of the first humans, and the inherited disorder is a just punishment for that choice. The Augustinian account has been criticized, both within the tradition and without, as making God the author of evil, but it has shaped the doctrine of original sin and the account of the human condition that the doctrine expresses.

The contemporary philosophical debate has refined the question. Compatibilists, who hold that freedom is compatible with determination by prior causes, can hold that the sinner is responsible for the sin, even if the sin is the product of a disordered will. Libertarians, who hold that freedom requires the absence of determination, may struggle to reconcile the persistence of sin with the freedom of the sinner, since the disorder of the will is a kind of determination. The debate is part of the larger question of freedom and responsibility, and it is not settled.

Contemporary Relevance

The concept of sin remains a live topic, both in philosophy and in the wider culture. The persistence of moral failure, the recognition that we are not as we should be, and the search for ways to name and to address the failure, are as pressing in the secular age as they were in the age of faith. The philosophical question is whether the older concept of sin, with its religious framework, is still useful, and whether the newer language of harm, preference, and dysfunction can carry the moral weight that the older concept carried.

The deeper lesson is that the question of sin is part of the larger question of the human condition, and that the older concept, with its insistence on the reality of moral failure, may still have something to teach us. The honest philosophical stance is to take the concept seriously, to engage with the modern critiques, and to ask what the concept names that the alternatives do not. The work of philosophy is not to dismiss the concept by procedural fiat, but to do the careful work of comparison and assessment that the question deserves.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Original Sin" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-sin/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Sin" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sin/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Augustine" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Thomas Aquinas" — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aquinas/

Related Topics

• What Is Original Sin? — the inherited condition.
• What Is Salvation? — the response to sin.
• What Is Grace? — the divine assistance.
• Is Faith Rational? — the wider question.
• What Is the Problem of Evil? — the moral challenge to theism.
• Philosophy of God — the wider domain.