A Fatal Confusion

 

Faith, in Christian theology, is not the greatest of virtues – that is charity, or Christian love, but it is the most fundamental in the root meaning of fundamental, that is to say, foundational.   Faith is the foundation upon which the other Christian theological virtues of hope and charity stand.   (1) Indeed, it is the foundation upon which all other Christian experience must be built.   It is the appointed means whereby we receive the grace of God and no other step towards God can be taken apart from the first step of faith.  The Object of faith is the True and Living God.   The content of faith can be articulated in more general or more specific terms as the context of the discussion requires.   At its most specific the content of the Christian faith is the Gospel message, the Christian kerygma about God’s ultimate revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ.   At its most general it is what is asserted about God in the sixth verse of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, that “He is and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him”.  

 

Whether articulated in its most general terms or its most specific, the faith Christianity calls for us to place in God is a confidence that presupposes His Goodness and His Omnipotence.   This has led directly to a long-standing dilemma that skeptics like to pose to Christian believers.  It is known as the problem of evil.   It is sometimes posed as a question, at other times it is worded as a challenging assertion, but however formulated it boils down to the idea that the presence of evil in a world created by and ruled by God is inconsistent with God’s being both Good and Omnipotent.   The challenge to the Christian apologist, therefore, is to answer the question of how evil can be present in a world created by and ruled by a Good and Omnipotent God.    This dilemma has been raised so often that there is even a special word for theological and philosophical answers to the dilemma – theodicy.

 

Christian orthodoxy does have an answer to this question.   The answer is a complex one, however, and we are living in an era that is impatient with complex answers.    For this reason, Christian apologists now offer a simple answer to the question – free will.    This is unfortunate in that this answer, while not wrong, is incomplete and requires the context of the full, complex answer, to make the most sense.  

 

The fuller answer begins with an observation about how evil is present in the world.   In this world there are things which exist in the fullest sense of the word – they exist in themselves, with essences of their own.    There are also things which exist, not in themselves, but as properties or qualities of things which exist in themselves.   Take redness for example.   It does not exist in itself, but as a property of apples, strawberries, wagons, etc.   Christian orthodoxy tells us that while evil is present in the world, it does not exist in either of these senses.   It has no essence of its own.  Nor does it exist as a created property of anything that does.  God did not create evil, either as a thing in itself, or as a property of anything else that He created.   Just as a bruise is a defect in the redness of an apple, so evil is present in the world as a defect in the goodness of moral creatures.  

 

If that defect is there, and it is, and God did not put it there, which He did not, the only explanation of its presence that is consistent with orthodoxy is that it is there due to the free will of moral creatures.   Free will, in this sense of the expression, means the ability to make moral choices.     Free will is itself good, rather than evil, because without it, no creature could be a moral creature who chooses rightly.    The ability to choose rightly, however, is also the ability to choose wrongly.   The good end of a created world populated by creatures that are morally good required that they be created with this ability, good itself, but which carries with it the potential for evil.

 

One problem with the short answer is the expression “free will” itself.   It must be carefully explained, as in the above theodicy, because it can be understood differently, and if it is so understood differently, this merely raises new dilemmas rather than resolving the old one.    Anyone who is familiar with the history of either theology or philosophy knows that “free will” is an expression that has never been used without controversy.   It should be noted, though, that many of those controversies do not directly affect what we have been discussing here.  Theological debates over free will, especially those that can be traced back to the dispute between St. Augustine and Pelagius, have often been about the degree to which the Fall has impaired the freedom of human moral agency.   Since this pertains to the state of things after evil entered into Creation it need not be brought into the discussion of how evil entered in the first place although it often is.

 

One particular dilemma that the free will theodicy raises when free will is not carefully explained is the one that appears in a common follow-up challenge that certain skeptics often pose in response.     “How can we say that God gave mankind free will”, such skeptics ask us, “when He threatens to punish certain choices as sin?”

 

Those who pose this dilemma confuse two different kind of freedom that pertain to our will and our choices.      When we speak of the freedom of our will in a moral context we can mean one of two things.   We could be speaking of our agency – that we have the power and ability when confronted with choices, to think rationally about them and make real choices that are genuinely our own, instead of pre-programmed, automatic, responses.   We could also, however, be speaking of our right to choose – that when confronted with certain types of choices, we own our own decisions and upon choosing will face only whatever consequences, positive or negative, necessarily follow from our choice by nature and not punitive consequences imposed upon us by an authority that is displeased with our choice.    When Christian apologists use free will in our answer to the problem of evil, it is freedom in the former sense of agency that is intended.   When skeptics respond by pointing to God’s punishment of sin as being inconsistent with free will, they use freedom in the latter sense of right.   While it is tempting to dismiss this as a dishonest bait-and-switch tactic, it may in many cases reflect genuine confusion with regards to these categories of freedom.   I have certainly encountered many Christian apologists who in their articulation of the free will theodicy have employed language that suggests that they are as confused about the matter as these skeptics.

 

Christianity has never taught that God gave mankind the second kind of freedom, freedom in the sense of right, in an absolute, unlimited, manner.   To say that He did would be the equivalent of saying that God abdicated His Sovereignty as Ruler over the world He created.    Indeed, the orthodox answer to the problem of evil dilemma is not complete without the assertion that however much evil may be present in the world, God as the Sovereign Omnipotent Ruler of all will ultimately judge and punish it.     What Christianity does teach is that God gave mankind the second kind of freedom subject only to the limits of His Own Sovereign Rule.    Where God has not forbidden something as a sin – and, contrary to what is often thought, these are few in number, largely common-sensical, and simple to understand – or placed upon us a duty to do something – these are even fewer - man is free to make his own choices in the second sense, that is to say, without divinely-imposed punitive consequences.    

 

Today, a different sort of controversy has arisen in which the arguments of one side confuse freedom as agency with freedom as right.    Whereas the skeptics alluded to above point to rules God has imposed in His Sovereign Authority limiting man’s freedom as right in order to counter an argument made about man’s freedom as agency, in this new controversy man’s freedom as agency is being used to deny that government tyranny is infringing upon man’s freedom as right.

 

Before looking at the specifics of this, let us note where government authority fits in to the picture in Christian orthodoxy. 

 

Human government, Christianity teaches, obtains its authority from God.   This, however, is an argument for limited government, not for autocratic government that passes whatever laws it likes.   If God has given the civil power a sword to punish evil, then it is authorized to wield that sword in the punishment of what God says is evil not whatever it wants to punish and is required, therefore, to respect the freedom that God has given to mankind.    Where the Modern Age went wrong was in regarding the Divine Right of Kings as the opposite of constitutional, limited, government, rather than its theological basis.   Modern man has substituted secular ideologies as that foundation and these, even liberalism with all of its social contracts, natural rights, and individualism, eventually degenerate into totalitarianism and tyranny.

 

Now let us look at the controversy of the day which has to do with forced vaccination.      As this summer ends and we move into fall governments have been introducing measures aimed at coercing and compelling people who have not yet been fully vaccinated for the bat flu to get vaccinated.   These measures include mandates and vaccine passports.   The former are decrees that say that everyone working in a particular sector must either be fully vaccinated by a certain date or submit to frequent testing.   Governments have been imposing these mandates on their own employees and in some cases on private employers and have been encouraging other private employers to impose such mandates on their own companies.   Vaccine passports are certificates or smartphone codes that governments are requiring that people show to prove that they have been vaccinated to be able to travel by air or train or to gain access to restaurants, museums, movie theatres, and many other places declared by the government to be “non-essential”.    These mandates and passports are a form of coercive force.   Through them, the government is telling people that they must either agree to be vaccinated or be barred from full participation in society.    Governments, and others who support these measures, respond to the objection that they are violating people’s right to choose whether or not some foreign substance is injected into their body by saying “it’s their choice, but there will be consequences if they choose not be vaccinated”.

 

The consequences referred to are not the natural consequences, whatever these may be, positive or negative, of the choice to reject a vaccine, but punitive consequences imposed by the state.    Since governments are essentially holding people’s jobs, livelihoods, and most basic freedoms hostage until they agree to be vaccinated, those who maintain that this is not a violation of the freedom to accept or reject medical treatment would seem to be saying that unless the government actually removes a person’s agency, by, for example, strapping someone to a table and sticking a needle into him, it has not violated his right to choose.  This obviously confuses freedom as agency with freedom as right and in a way that strips the latter of any real meaning.

 

What makes this even worse is that the freedom/right that is at stake in this controversy, each person’s ownership of the ultimate choice over whether or not a medical treatment or procedure is administered to his body, is not one that we have traditionally enjoyed merely by default due to the absence of law limiting it.   Rather it is a right that has been positively stated and specifically acknowledged, and enshrined both in constitutional law and international agreement.   If government is allowed to pretend that it has not violated this well-recognized right because its coercion has fallen short of eliminating agency altogether then is no other right or freedom the trampling over of which in pursuit of its ends it could not or would not similarly excuse.  This is tyranny, plain and simple.

 

Whether in theology and philosophy or in politics, the distinction between the different categories of freedom that apply to the human will is an important one that should be recognized and respected.   Agency should never be confused with right, or vice versa.

 

(1)   Hope and charity, as Christian virtues, have different meanings from those of their more conventional uses.   In the case of hope, the meanings are almost the exact opposite of each other.   Hope, in the conventional sense, is an uncertain but desired anticipation, but in the Christian theological sense, is a confident, assured, expectation.   It is in their theological senses, of course, that I mean when I say that hope and charity are built on the foundation of faith.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                           

Evil is not Omnipotent

 

Picture in your mind a Red Delicious apple.    As with others of its kind it has a dark red colour that looks fairly uniform from a distance, although when viewed close up you can see streaks of golden yellow in it.   This particular Red Delicious also has a spot of brown on it where it has been bruised.

 

While the apple you have just pictured in your mind is not real it is the image of countless such apples which are real, many of which you have seen and eaten over the years.

 

Now let us consider a few distinctions concerning any real Red Delicious apple that matches the description of the one imagined.    Of such an apple in would be true to say that it exists.   It would also be true to say that the apple is red.  The statement that the apple is red can also be worded, although it is hardly the way we ordinarily speak, that redness exists in the apple.    The apple exists, therefore, and redness exists in the apple.

 

This illustrates the philosophical distinction between things that exists in themselves, such as the apple, and things that only exist as properties of things that exist in themselves, such as redness.    This is a distinction between two different kinds of existence.   It is closely related to the distinction between that which is essential to any given thing and that which is accidental.   You can conceive of an apple without redness, such as a Granny Smith or a Golden Delicious.    You have actually seen numerous examples of apples without redness.   Redness, therefore, is not essential to the being of apples, but an accidental property of certain kinds of apples.   You can also conceive of things other than apples that are red and, presumably, unless you are colour-blind, of course, have seen things other than apples that are red.   What you have never seen is redness by itself and not in something else like an apple or wagon or crayon or fire truck.   This is because redness does not exist in itself, only in other things.    It exists, but its existence is a lesser, subordinate type of existence to that of the existence of things, such as apples, which exist in themselves.

 

I trust that you all understand the distinction between things that exist in themselves and things that exist only in other things.   Now let us consider a further distinction illustrated by our apple.

 

Part of the apple is bruised.   The bruise is manifest to the eye by the fact that where red used to be there is now brown.   Now, it is as true of the brown on the apple as it is of the red on the apple that the brownness exists in the apple and not in itself.   There is, however, an important difference between the redness and the brownness.   Neither the redness nor the brownness is essential to the apple, both are accidental, but the redness is natural.   It is the nature of a Red Delicious apple to be red and a Red Delicious apple will be red unless something happens to change the colour.   Dropping the apple on a hard floor, for example, will produce the kind of bruise that changes a part of the apple’s redness into brownness.   The brownness is not a natural part of the apple, but is the result of damage or injury to the apple and its redness.

 

You have probably figured out, even if the title of this essay had not already tipped you off, that my purpose in explaining all of this is not to make some deep, philosophical, point about apples.   Rather it is to illustrate what orthodox Christianity teaches about evil.

 

There are many people who think of good and evil as being two equal forces locked in an eternal struggle.   There are many who even think of this as being the Christian point of view.   It is not.   Indeed, to the extent that there is truth to the idea that Christians share elements of a common worldview with Jews and Muslims, an idea which is not as true as most who articulate it think, but more true than many who oppose it are willing to admit, the idea of an eternal battle between the equal forces of good and evil is the opposite of what that worldview has to say about good and evil.  This idea of good and evil being equals and even, in some versions of the notion, each requiring the other, belongs to the worldview of comic books and science fiction movies, and perhaps some Eastern religions.   It does not belong to the worldview of those who believe that there is One God, that He is omnipotent, and that He is Good.

 

In orthodox Christian doctrine evil is like the bruise on the apple.   It does not exist in itself.   God, Who exists in Himself in a way that is truer than of anything He created, because all other things that we conceive of as existing in themselves are dependent upon Him for their own lesser being as He is the Source of all Being, is Good, with a capital G.   He created all other things and pronounced them to be good.   See Genesis chapters 1-2.   After each separate act of creation God looked at what He had made and saw it to be good.   This happened on each of the six days of creation except the second, for the work of that day was one of separation rather than creation, a work which was not completed until the third day, at which point God saw it to be good, as He did the vegetation He created later on the same day.   The sixth day also has God looking at what He has made and pronouncing it good twice.   The first time is after He creates the land animals, the second time is after He creates man, which brings the Creation to a close, at which point He looks on everything He has made, the whole of Creation together, and sees that it is good.   God, Who is Good in Himself, created only good things. 

 

What then is evil and where does it come from?

 

The orthodox answer to the second question is “free will.”   Or, to express the concept more accurately, “moral responsibility.”   It is the ability of certain created beings, human beings and angels to be precise, to make choices for themselves for which they are accountable and for which they face consequences if they choose wrongly.   Moral responsibility is a better term for this than free will because the latter often has the connotations of something that is absolute and not subject to limitations.   Human and angelic moral responsibility is free in the sense that the decisions we make are real and not pre-programmed, but it is subject to such limitations and restraints as God in His sovereignty places on it.  

 

Human and angelical free will or moral responsibility is not evil.   Nor, for that matter, is it morally neutral.   It is itself good.    This is true in two senses.   The first, is that it is a necessary means for the end of the goodness for which men and angels were created.   Think of a person who does the right thing even though he would rather not because he has been forced to do so under duress – the existence of laws, divine and/or human, prohibiting wrongdoing and threatening the dispensation of justice to wrongdoers does not constitute duress.   Such a person does not deserve the praise for doing the right thing which somebody who deliberated on the decision and freely choose to do what is right because it is right does.   Morally responsible agency is necessary for praiseworthy moral goodness.   As a necessary means to the end of this kind of goodness it is therefore good itself.

 

There is a second way in which human and angelic moral agency is good.  It consists of the wills which God gave to men and angels.   Those wills included the capacity for weighing decisions and choosing for one’s self, but they were not created neutral.   Human and angelic wills were created with a natural inclination to choose right.   Free moral agency does not require a neutral will with a 50/50 chance of choosing right and choosing wrong.

 

This is why it is a mistake to think of Original Sin in terms of “a natural disposition to sin.”   It is rather a defect in the natural disposition to the good with which we were all created.   The thing is, when you make a wrong choice, this tends to lead to other wrong choices, which in turn lead to other wrong choices.   When our first parents sinned it became a defect in our human nature which has been passed down to us.

 

This needs to be stressed because this is the right way of thinking about evil – not as a powerful force that exists in itself, let alone one that is the equal of goodness, but as a defect in the goodness with which all beings were created.  

 

This is important to remember in times, such as these, when those bent on doing evil seem to have the upper hand.   Evil is not omnipotent.   To ascribe undefeatable power, omnipotence, to the conspiratorial forces, is to give Satan exactly what he wants the most, to be regarded as God’s equal.  Only God is omnipotent and God is good.  Do not give to Satan that which is due to God.

The Ascension

Almost two thousand years ago, the Son of God was put to death on a cross on the Passover, the annual celebration of God’s having delivered Israel from physical slavery in Egypt in the days of Moses. On the following Sunday, He rose again from the dead. Through His death, offered up as an expiatory and propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of the world, and His triumph over death, He brought deliverance from the slavery to sin and Satan which had held the world captive since the Fall of mankind. For this reason that Sunday has ever since been celebrated by Christ’s Church as the Christian Passover, known as Pascha, Easter, or simply Resurrection Sunday, depending upon where in the world you live, what language you speak, and what branch of the Christian tradition you belong to. Forty days later, He addressed His Apostles assembled on the Mount of Olives, commissioned them to carry His Gospel to the ends of the earth, bestowed a final benediction upon them, and then rose up into the sky and was hidden by the clouds. This is why the Thursday that is the fortieth day after Easter and the tenth before Whitsunday or Pentecost is Ascension Day. This past Thursday was Ascension Day.

In our time Ascension Day is not as widely recognized in the larger cultures of our nominally Christian societies as Christmas or Easter. For that matter, even in the ecclesiastical culture it seems to occupy a smaller space than it did up until a century or so ago. I am not thinking here primarily of those sects that seldom recognize any day on the Christian calendar that has not been heavily commercialized by the secular culture. Even in Churches that in one form or another affirm the Creeds, practice the liturgies, and follow the calendars that have come down to us from the early centuries of the Church, the Ascension has not been emphasized as much as it used to be. When Christendom was still recognizably Christendom, even in the early stages of its decline into the decadence of Modern Western Civilization, Ascension Thursday was a public holiday. Today, it has become a widespread practice, even in many provinces of the Roman Communion in which it is a Holy Day of Obligation, that is, a day on which attendance at mass is mandatory, to move the celebration to the Sunday after the actual day.

Having said that, I would note that prior to this year there was plenty of opportunity in my own Anglican diocese for anyone who wanted to do so to keep the feast. In the days of Christendom a vigil was traditionally held on the eve of all of the great Holy Days. That has regrettably died out for the most part except for the midnight Eucharist on Christmas Eve and the vigil on Holy Saturday which is Easter Eve. The eve of Ascension was no exception (1) and on this eve, the College Chapel of St. John the Evangelist, the Anglican college of the University of Manitoba, up until last year hosted All the King’s Men, the male-voice liturgical choir that sings Choral Evensong there on the first Sunday of every month. On Ascension Eve they would sing a Eucharist – usually William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices for the ordinaries - and the college chaplain, or a parish priest invited to do so if the chaplain were not available, would celebrate the Eucharist. On the following evening, the actual Ascension Day, the parish of St. Michael and All Angels which is the most Anglo-Catholic parish in the diocese, would hold a solemn Mass, just as beautifully sung although usually a different style and era, with all the “smells and bells.” Then three days later it would be Ascension Sunday in all of the other parishes.

How different things are this year!

There was still one service available in the diocese on Ascension Day itself. This was a Choral Evensong offered by the parish of St. George (Crescentwood). It was, of course, only available online where it was livestreamed. This Sunday, the other parishes that offer online services, whether live-streamed or, like my own, pre-recorded, will presumably have an Ascension theme.

The reason for this difference is, of course, that the province has been under a public health order restricting gatherings to ten people and the diocese has been under an episcopal suspension of public services. The provincial gathering limit has been raised to twenty-five people in-doors, fifty outside, but this started the day after Ascension. Meanwhile the suspension of public services and the interdict on the Eucharist has not been lifted in the diocese.

Throughout this pandemic abortion quacks have been allowed to continue their ghastly, life-destroying, profession, even though all sorts of life-saving medical procedures have been delayed due to the virus. The vendors that sell in various forms the mind-destroying toxin taken from the non-industrial kind of hemp have been allowed to remain open, despite the fact that other, far more wholesome and legitimate, businesses have been closed and even driven to near insolvency. The province has been slowly lifting restrictions and allowing public facilities, services, and businesses to re-open. The re-opening of the Churches and other places of worship does not appear to be on the immediate horizon. It is very likely that they will be the very last to receive government approval to re-open.

How anyone can look at all of this and not consider the unreasonable and unprecedented government measures taken to control this virus to be a manifestation of darkness and evil is beyond me.

As I have been pointing out since the beginning of the lockdown these measures have mimicked the conditions that were imposed upon the enslaved nations behind the Iron Curtain by the Soviet Union. They have limited to the point of essentially nullifying all of the most basic rights and freedoms in our British Commonwealth tradition. A mountain of rules against actions which are merely normal, everyday, behaviour have been dumped upon us. Those who have been telling us to “stay home”, to practice “social distancing” and be “alone together” have been conditioning us to fear in-person human contact and interaction which is essential to our very nature and bonum in se. The only word to describe all of this is “evil”. Dr. Bruce Charlton has been very right to argue, as he has all along, that spiritual evil is behind all of this.

This is why the message of the Ascension is so very important at this point in time.

Here is what our Creedal confessions say about the Ascension:

“He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” – Apostles’ Creed

“And ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father.” – Nicene Creed

“He ascended into heaven, he sitteth on the right hand of the Father, God Almighty: from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” – Athanasian Creed

Like the Scriptures from which they are derived the Creeds connect the Ascension to both Christ’s present position in Heaven where He sits at the right hand of God (Mark 16:19) and to His Second Coming (Acts 1:11). The right hand of God where He presently sits is the position of ultimate authority. At the Second Coming, He will display that authority in a way visible to all when He pronounces the Final Judgement on the living and dead. Until then, He is invisible on earth except through His Body, the Church, but is still in the position of ultimate authority. The spiritual evil that is behind this lockdown is an evil He defeated once and for all in His death and resurrection. He promised that that evil would never prevail against His Church. (Matt. 16:18).

This is the message we need at this time.

(1) In the Eastern Church which, of course, due to the difference in the liturgical calendars celebrates it a week later than we do, the Ascension vigil is still an important tradition.

The Nature and Origin of Evil

Since ancient times, it has been the practice of the Christian church to observe a forty-day fasting period in preparation for Easter, the annual Feast of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Christian Passover in commemoration of the redemption of the world that inaugurated the New Covenant, of which the Passover of the Old Covenant was an anticipatory type. In the English-speaking world we call this period Lent. (1) In the Western church, this period begins on Ash Wednesday (2) which, as the name indicates, is a day set aside for the sober business of remembering our morality, and repenting our sin, (3) setting the tone for our reflections during this period. It is a very appropriate tone, since our sin and morality, are both the reason for Christ’s entering the world on His redemptive mission, taking our humanity, our mortality, and, as He died on the cross, our sin, upon Himself, and the enemies over which He triumphed when He rose victorious from the grave.

It is also ancient custom for the church’s lexicons to assign readings from the Pentateuch, and especially the books of Genesis and Exodus, to this period. The readings assigned to the daily offices (4) in the Book of Common Prayer begin Genesis at the start of Shrovetide (5), the two and a half weeks just prior to Lent. The book of Exodus is very fitting for this period, of course, because it tells the story of the redemption of national Israel from slavery in Egypt, the first Passover foreshadowing the Christian one. The book of Genesis prepares for this by explaining what the Israelites were doing in Egypt in the first place, but it also goes back to the beginning of the story, to the entrance of sin and death into the world with the Fall of man, and to Creation itself. St. Basil the Great’s Hexaemeron, a series of lessons on the six days of Creation, were originally a set of homilies preached during the Lenten season.

The juxtaposition of meditations upon Creation with reflections on sin and mortality, brings to mind the conundrum that theologians and philosophers have been struggling to answer for centuries. That is the question of evil. Why is there evil in a world created by a good and all-powerful God?

Framed that way, the traditional and orthodox answer to the question is that God gave man and the angels free will in the sense of the ability to make moral choices, i.e., choices for which they are responsible and can be held accountable, and that implicit in such free will is the possibility of evil. We shall return to this answer, but first let us look at a different angle of the question. What is evil?

This is actually a trick question, which requires some elaboration to explain. Everything that exists, is either a substance – in the philosophical sense of the term, which includes non-material substances such as spirit and energy – or an attribute– a quality, like colour, for example, that exists, not in itself, except in a transcendental realm like Plato’s realm of the Forms, but in substances. The existence of attributes, is secondary to that of substances, on which it is dependent, and a further distinction must be made between real attributes, whether properties or accidents, (6) in which the qualities are positively present in their substances, like sweetness in sugar, and “unreal” accidents that are only negatively present, i.e., absences, wants, and defects. The latter, while present and observable, do not “exist” in the same sense that substances and real attributes do. Everything that does exist, in this sense, must either be eternal, the source of its own existence, or created, dependent upon something prior to itself for its existence. As the existence of attributes is a secondary form of existence to that of substances, so the existence of all created substances and attributes, is secondary to that of the eternal. Only God, as the First Cause, is eternal, truly possessing existence in Himself that is not dependent upon another. (7) Everything else that exists derives its existence from Him as part of His Creation, either as substance or attribute. Since God Himself is Good, evil therefore, must either a) be part of His Creation as a substance, b) be part of His Creation as a real attribute, or c) not exist. Evil is certainly not a substance created by God. Nor is it a real attribute of anything that He made. Throughout the account of Creation, God looks upon the things that He has made – Light, Earth and Sea, plant life, the sun, moon, and stars, the birds of the air and fishes of the sea, and land animals – and sees that they are good (Gen. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25). Finally, after creating man in His own image, He “saw everything that he had made: and behold, it was every good.” (Gen. 1:31) Therefore evil does not exist. The orthodox answer to the question what is evil is that it is not.

It should be clear from the above, that the assertion that evil does not exist is not a denial of its presence in the world, the evidence of which presence abounds wherever we look, but that evil, being neither a substance nor a real attribute, has no being, essence, or, the title of this essay notwithstanding, nature. Evil’s presence in this world is like the presence of the shadow that is cast when some object blocks the light. Light is something, it exists, it has an essence, whereas the darkness of the shadow does not, it is simply the absence of the light. St. Basil, therefore, introduces the subject of evil in the second homily of his Hexameron, in commenting on the words “and darkness was upon the face of the deep” in the second verse of Genesis. Just as the darkness in this verse, is neither a created nor an uncreated essence, but is the “shadow produced by the interposition of a body, or finally a place for some reason deprived of light” so evil is “neither uncreate nor created by God” but is “is not a living animated essence; it is the condition of the soul opposed to virtue, developed in the careless on account of their falling away from good.” (8)

St. Basil was addressing heresies here, primarily the dualistic heresy of Manichaeism in which darkness and evil are real essences, almost equal to those of light and goodness. St. Augustine, who had been a disciple of this heresy prior to his conversion to orthodox Christianity, declared that “What is called Evil in the Universe is but the Absence of Good”, illustrating the point with bodily diseases and wounds which “mean nothing but the absence of health” and which are not substances but defects “in the fleshly substance, — the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils— that is, privations of the good which we call health — are accidents.” (9) Similarly St. John of Damascus declared that “evil is not any essence nor a property of essence, but an accident, that is, a voluntary deviation from what is natural into what is unnatural, which is sin.” (10) The writer whose works were attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite devotes much of the fourth chapter of his book on the Divine Names to addressing the question of evil, concludes that “The Evil, then, is not an actual thing, nor is the Evil in things existing. For the Evil, qua evil, is nowhere, and the fact that evil comes into being is not inconsequence of power, but by reason of weakness…[the demons] aspire to the Good, in so fa as they aspire to be and to live and to think. And in so far as they do not aspire to the Good, they aspire to the non-existent; and this is not aspiration, but a missing of the true aspiration.” (11) St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote:

No growth of evil had its beginning in the Divine will. Vice would have been blameless were it inscribed with the name of God as its maker and father. But the evil is, in some way or other, engendered from within, springing up in the will at that moment when there is a retrocession of the soul from the beautiful. For as sight is an activity of nature, and blindness a deprivation of that natural operation, such is the kind of opposition between virtue and vice. It is, in fact, not possible to form any other notion of the origin of vice than as the absence of virtue. For as when the light has been removed the darkness supervenes, but as long as it is present there is no darkness, so, as long as the good is present in the nature, vice is a thing that has no inherent existence; while the departure of the better state becomes the origin of its opposite. (12)

If evil is not something that exists, in either a created or an uncreated essence, but denotes an absence of goodness in created beings, how, since God created all things good, do we explain the presence of this absence?

We return to the orthodox answer of free will – the ability, of men and angels, as rational, responsible, moral beings to make choices for which they are accountable. If free will explains the presence of that void in the souls of men and demons that we call evil, then this raises some further questions. If God created moral, rational, beings with the attribute of free will, then free will itself must be good. How then, can free will, being good, result in evil?

In considering this question it is important to observe that evil is the result of free will, not its product or creation. This is related to what we have already considered about evil not being a substance or a real attribute but a defect or absence. When men and angels exercised their free will in disobedience to God, the evil that ensued was not the entrance into existence of a new essence called evil, but the diminishment of their own being, through the loss of the quality of goodness. Which is why this event is referred to as the Fall. Mankind fell away from what he was to become something less.

The question, therefore becomes, one of how it can it be the nature of free will, an attribute that is itself good, to make choices that result in such a diminishment of being, such a loss of goodness possible. To add another dimension to the question, remember that according to the orthodox doctrine of Original Sin, the choice to sin resulted in the diminishment, not only of our created goodness, but the freedom of the will itself, which then became bound in slavery to sin. The answer is that what was included in the nature of free will, was not the inevitability of this result, but its possibility.

This leads to the question of how, if it is the nature of free will to include the potential for evil choices, for falling away from goodness and its own freedom, free will itself can be considered good.

Here, the orthodox answer is, that while it is the nature of free will to include the possibility of choosing evil, free will is necessary for moral goodness in created, rational, beings. Free will, again, is the quality of being able to make rational, moral, choices for which one can be held accountable. This is a quality which must exist in created beings who bear the image of their Creator, which is the first thing predicated of man in the Scriptural account of his Creation. (13) It is only this quality, which includes the potential for sin, that allows for the possibility of goodness that is chosen.

The influence of his orthodox Catholic upbringing is clearly visible in the novels of John Anthony Wilson Burgess, who wrote under his two middle names. He is most remembered, due to Stanley Kubrick’s film version, for his novel A Clockwork Orange, and the very point of orthodox theology that we have been considering is at the heart of this novel. The main character of Alex, leader of a gang of “droogs”, is caught, arrested, and sent to prison after a string of “ultra-violent” crimes, including the home-invasion of a writer who is beaten half to death and forced to watch the rape of his wife, and the murder of a wealthy, elderly, woman. He is offered the chance of early release from prison, when he learns of the government’s experimental new “Ludovico technique” for curing people of violent, criminal, tendencies. He volunteers to undergo the technique, which consists of his being conditioned, by being forced to watch images of violence while being injected with drugs that cause pain and sickness, to become extremely ill whenever a violent urge arises within him. The prison chaplain objects to the technique and, speaking as the voice of the author, explains that the removal of free will, and the possibility of evil, does not thereby create goodness. The state officials ignore him and proclaim their new technique to be a success, but the chaplain’s commentary is born out as the released Alex finds that he has not been cured of his violent tendencies, so much as robbed of the ability, not just to act on them, but also to defend himself against the violence of others. There is a lesson in this, that our government, which, responding to the demands of the ignorant following the recent string of school shootings south of the border, has just introduced more gun control legislation, legislation which only ever diminishes the ability of the law-abiding to defend themselves and never keeps guns out of the hands of criminals, might learn, if it had ears to hear and eyes to see, but as long as it is led by the Trudeau Liberals, it will remain as blind as a bat and as deaf as a post.

For man to be a good being, not just in the sense in which rocks and trees, fish and birds, are good, but in the sense God intended, of a rational, moral, being who freely chooses the good, required that he be created with the potential of choosing wrongly, of turning away from God and the light, from Goodness, Beauty, and Truth, to the void that is darkness and evil. Man having so chosen, the events that we are about to commemorate in Holy Week, from Jesus’ presentation of Himself as the Christ in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, through His death on the Cross on Good Friday, His burial and the Harrowing of Hell on Holy Saturday, culminating in His triumph over death on Easter Sunday, are the story of how God set about to rescue man from his own choice and free him from the bondage of sin, that he might finally be the being God intended him to be.





(1) As with “Easter”, “Lent” is a term that indicates the season of the year in which these occur. In the languages first spoken by the church, and modern languages derived from those languages, the celebration of the Resurrection is called Pascha (the Christian Passover) and the preceding fasting period is called by words designating its length, “from the fortieth.”
(2) The Western church does not count the six Sundays as part of the forty days of Lent because Sundays, on which the church meets in remembrance of the Resurrection, are weekly Easters or Paschas. The Eastern church, however, counts the Sundays in the forty days and so begins them on a Monday.
(3) The “Ash” of “Ash Wednesday” alludes to the ancient practice of donning sackcloth and heaping ashes on oneself to mourn over one’s sins, and to the dust and ashes, to which everything temporal is ultimately reduced.
(4) From Latin “officium”, meaning “duty” or “service”, this refers to the Hours of Prayer. There are traditionally seven of these. The Book of Common Prayer assigns readings and liturgy to the two most important, Matins or Morning Prayer, and Vespers or Evening Prayer which, when chanted or sung, is commonly known as Evensong. Elements of two other of the offices, Lauds and Compline, are incorporated into this liturgy.
(5) The period that begins on Septuagesima and ends on Shrove Tuesday, the day prior to Ash Wednesday.
(6) A property is an attribute that arises out of an essence or substance so that it cannot be changed without the substance itself becoming something different, an accident is an attribute that can be altered without altering essence.
(7) Note that God, when asked by Moses: “Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you: and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?” answered “I AM THAT I AM...Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” Ex. 3:13-14.
(8) St. Basil of Caeserea, Hexaemeron, Homily II.4.
(9) St. Augustine of Hippo, Enchiridion, XI. Enchiridion is Greek for “handbook”, and this handbook is on the subject of the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and love. Chapter XI falls in the “faith” section, which is rebutting various heresies. The chapter prior asserted that “The Supremely Good Creator Made All Things Good”.
(10) St. John of Damascus, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, IV.20.
(11) The Divine Names, IV. 34. Dionysius the Areopagite was the convert St. Paul made at Mars Hill (the Areopagus – hence the Areopagite) in Acts 17. The works attributed to him, are almost universally considered to be much later than the first century, and so the true author is unknown.
(12) St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism, II.5.
(13) Genesis 1:26.

Original Sin and Free Will

Novelist, poet, screenwriter and composer Anthony Burgess in his second volume of memoirs explained the reason why he rejected the doctrines of the left and held to a form of conservatism “If I was a kind of Jacobite Tory, like John Dryden and Samuel Johnson, this was because socialism was positivist and denied original sin.” (1) His reasoning is both excellent and sound. The doctrine of original sin is an essential component of both orthodox Christian faith, such as the Roman Catholicism in which Burgess had been raised, (2) and philosophical and political conservatism. (3) Early twentieth century critic T. E. Hulme identified it with classicism in the arts. (4) It is also empirically verifiable, an unusual trait among religious and political doctrines. People do not have to be taught to do wrong, it comes naturally to them. Nor do they ever cease doing wrong and become morally perfect – at least in this life.

Original sin is not a popular doctrine. It is, as Burgess wrote, denied by socialists and others on the left. It is also rejected by classical liberals, who are often perceived as being on the right in North America. One author, whose writings are quite popular among classical liberal republicans, made the dogma the focus of the attack of the 1070 page polemical novel for which she is most remembered. In this novel, the creative, industrious, elite of a United States saddled with oppressive socialism, take up the prerogative assumed to belong to manual labour, and quietly go on strike. In their absence everything falls apart. Towards the end, the leader of the strike, John Galt, goes on the air with a tedious broadcast in which he lectures the world about the evils of selfless altruism and the virtues of selfish individualism and humanism. In this harangue he condemns what he calls “the Morality of Death”, a code which “begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice.” “The name of this monstrous absurdity” according to John Galt “is Original Sin”. (5)

These words placed by Ayn Rand in the mouth of her implausible hero describe how the doctrine of original sin looks to those who hold to her set of beliefs – that there is no God, that the human spirit is noble and pure and contained entirely within the individual, that collectives like the nation, community, and even the family are parasitical, and that human reason is an all-sufficient guide to truth and virtue. In the absence of God and His grace, the idea that mankind is fallen, fundamentally flawed, and incapable of perfecting himself, must make any demand for goodness, justice, and virtue seem horribly unfair. This, however, merely raises the question of whether the problem is with the dogma of original sin or with the humanistic and materialistic presuppositions that strip the dogma of its necessary context.

As an element of orthodox Christian theology, the doctrine of original sin comes from the Holy Scriptures, the writings accepted by the Christian Church as being God’s direct revelation to the community of faith, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. In the Scriptures the doctrine is formulated by St. Paul in the fifth chapter of his epistle to the Roman Church in a passage that makes reference to the account of the Fall of Man in the third chapter of the book of Genesis. In the twelfth verse the Apostle states the doctrine succinctly:

Wherefore , as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.

Liberal individualism is a stumbling block to both the understanding and the acceptance of this doctrine. If you start with the liberal premise that man is fundamentally an individual and that all social collectives are artificial constructions that are secondary to human nature, St. Paul’s words will not make sense. It will sound like the Apostle is asserting that all individuals must suffer for the crime of one individual. From a liberal individualistic perspective this would appear to be either a gross injustice or an invitation to export one’s personal guilt onto another – “it’s not my fault I robbed that bank, I did it because Adam ate the forbidden fruit”.

The liberal individualist’s premise is observably wrong, however. Human beings do not start out as individuals and later join groups. They are born into families, communities, and nations, social collectives which existed before they did. It is their identity as individuals that is a later development. Liberal assumptions about individuality do not match up with the reality of the world we see around us. They are also completely foreign to the worldview of someone like St. Paul. The doctrine of original sin, as he stated it in the epistle to the Romans, is an assertion about collective man.

This is suggested by the very name given to the first man by the book of Genesis. In English we use the word man in different ways. Sometimes we use it to refer to an adult male human being as opposed to a female. Other times we use it as a collective term to encompass the entire human species, male and female. Used in this sense, it is interchangeable with “mankind”. Other languages often have at least two words that can be translated man, one which has the same range of meaning as the English word, another that can only ever refer to males and which often has the connotation of “husband”. In ancient Greek anthropos meant “man, mankind”, whereas aner meant “man, husband”, in Latin the equivalents were homo and vir respectively. In ancient Hebrew, the word that meant “man, mankind”, corresponding to anthropos and homo in Greek and Latin, was adam. (6) It is no coincidence that this is also the name given to the first man. When Genesis speaks of the creation of Adam, it is not speaking only of the creation of an individual, but of the race known in Hebrew as adam and in English as man. Likewise, the account of the Fall speaks of more than just the personal transgression of our first parents. The fall of Adam is the fall of adam – of collective man or mankind.

Therefore, the idea that you or I as individuals are unfairly suffering the consequences of the sin of another individual, Adam, or the idea that you or I can export the guilt for our personal sins back onto Adam, is foreign to the concept of original sin as it is presented in Scriptures. Adam is not just a specific individual but a collective to which we all belong and as members of that collective we all participate in Adam’s sin.

Although it is not spelled out, the idea of Adam as a collective embracing all mankind is very much present in the fifth chapter of Romans. St. Paul makes reference to the fall of man here for a specific purpose. It is not to establish the universality of human wickedness. He had already done that earlier in the epistle in order to demonstrate the impossibility of justification by works and the need for justification by grace. At this point in the epistle he introduces the concept of original sin in order to build a contrast between Adam and Christ. He declares the former to be a figure, i.e., a type or illustration, of the latter (v. 14). In this comparison, Adam and Christ each represent collective man. In Adam’s case, he represents the collective that bears his name, the race of which he is the progenitor, mankind. In Christ’s case, He represents the body of which He is the head, in which all believers are united with Him and each other, by the Holy Spirit through baptism, i.e., the church. The point of the comparison is to show that as far reaching as the impact of Adam’s sin, which brought sin and death upon all men, was, the impact of Christ’s obedience and righteousness, bringing grace, the free gift of justification, and everlasting life, will be even greater. (vv. 17-18)

This, by the way, is the answer to those who charge the doctrine of original sin with being a dreary and pessimistic doctrine. It is pessimistic only towards man’s efforts to achieve salvation and justification for himself. Towards these it goes beyond pessimism, outright declaring the impossibility of man redeeming himself. “Therefore by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight:” St. Paul declared, “for by the law is the knowledge of sin” (Rom. 3:20) The Apostle was speaking of justification in the theological sense of being declared righteous by God, now and ultimately at the final judgement. Translated from the theological into the political, this denial of the possibility of justification by the works of the law becomes a denial of the possibility of progress, not in the neutral sense of improvement but in the loaded sense of our achieving a kind of salvation on earth through social, economic, technological and political reform. For what is the doctrine of progress, with which liberals, progressives, socialists, communists, and leftists in general are enamoured other than the idea that man, set free from the shackles of tradition and religion and “enlightened” by the unleashing of reason and science, can build for himself Paradise on earth? Towards this idea cynicism, scepticism, and pessimism are appropriate responses. (7)

Towards the idea that there is hope for man, however, the doctrine of original sin as presented in its original context is anything but pessimistic. St. Paul’s entire point was that Christ is greater than Adam, that Christ’s obedience is greater than Adam’s sin, that the grace, the free justification, the everlasting life which Christ brings to man far surpasses the sin, guilt, and death which is Adam’s legacy. In orthodox Christian doctrine, Christ through His death, burial, and resurrection, broke the power of sin, death, and hell, triumphing over these ancient enemies of man once and for all. The Christian gospel does not just promise that this victory will come at some unspecified point in the future – it proclaims that it has already taken place. That the blessings of grace, which Christ came to bring to man, far exceed the curse of sin and death that has been upon man since Adam, has time and time again found wonderful expression in the lyrics of Christian hymnody. Think, for example, of the words “He comes to make His blessings flow/Far as the curse is found” in Isaac Watts’ “Joy to the World” or of Julia H. Johnston’s hymn which speaks of “grace that is greater than all our sin”.

Ayn Rand, speaking through her character John Galt, opposed the idea of free will to the doctrine of original sin. Most opposition to the idea of original sin has come from the belief that it is incompatible with free will and therefore moral responsibility. Pelagius, the fifth century monk whose name has become synonymous with the denial of original sin, believed the doctrine to be both fatalistic and harmful to moral character. He taught that by sinning, Adam set a bad example which his descendants voluntarily follow, although retaining the ability not to do so.

Others have held that the doctrines of original sin and the necessity for salvation by grace do not contradict the idea that man has free will and is thus morally responsible for his actions. St.Augustine of Hippo, for example, was the primary opponent of Pelagius, yet he also wrote to Valentius defending the idea of free will. (8) The Augustinian position of affirming original sin and salvation by grace on the one hand and the moral necessity of free will on the other has been regarded, by the western church at least, as being the orthodox position.

A great deal depends here on what we mean by free will. If we define free will in such a way that any constraint upon our freedom to choose nullifies free will then of course it is incompatible with original sin – and a host of other things including the sovereignty of God, the rule of law, and respect for other people. This kind of absolute free will is desired only by madmen. On the other hand, it is apparent that opposite that Scylla is the Charybdis of defining free will so loosely that it is devoid of any real meaning.

A simple definition of free will is the ability to make choices for which we can be held morally accountable. From this definition it is apparent why there is perceived to be tension if not contradiction between free will and original sin. If our being held responsible for our choices, so as to be justly rewarded for our right actions and punished for our wrong actions, requires that we have the ability to choose between right and wrong, how can we be said to have free will if we are in a fallen condition due to original sin so as to no longer be able to not be sinners?

One possible answer to this is to follow St. Augustine in pointing out that original sin is not an external coercion of the will but an internal corruption. It is not that some force outside our will prevents us from making right choices and forces us to make wrong ones, it is that our internal inclination has been bent by original sin towards making wrong choices and away from God and the good. To expand upon this we could add the observation that we are creatures of habit, that once we have made a decision, whether good or bad, we are more likely to make the same decision again and that this likelihood increases the more often we make the decision. We ordinarily recognize that this does not nullify our responsibility. We would consider the judge who accepted “I did it once, now I’m hooked, I can’t stop” as a legitimate excuse and let the offender off to be an incompetent fool. Original sin operates in a somewhat similar way. Our race’s initial choice to rebel against God, generated in each of us an inclination to continue to do so.

The Apostle Paul would appear to have a different answer to this question however. If we continue to read in the epistle to the Romans from where he introduced the concept of original sin in the fifth chapter, we find that in the sixth he describes our relationship to the sin that indwells us as one of slavery or bondage. This would seem to be an acknowledgement that original sin has indeed damaged our free will. God, however, through His grace and mercy given to us in Jesus Christ, has set out to undo the damage done by man’s sin. This includes the damage done to the freedom of our will. Those of us who have been baptized into Jesus Christ, he declares, have been baptized into His death and resurrection. What this means for us, St. Paul explains, is that we are to consider Christ’s death to be our own death to sin, breaking its slavery over us, and setting us free to submit to God and serve righteousness rather than sin. The grace of God brings the restoration of free will to fallen man. (9)

This might raise the question of why the restoration of free will is considered to be a good thing. Was not free will the source of the problem in the first place? Man was given the choice between obedience to God and immortality on the one hand and sin and death on the other and chose the latter, bringing all sorts of misery upon himself, enslaving himself to sin and death. If God, motivated by His love, mercy, and grace, decided to redeem mankind from the mess he had gotten himself into, why return him to a state of free will and the choice between following the sinful inclinations from which he has been liberated and obeying God in righteousness?

The problem with this question is that free will was part of the original creation and is therefore something that is good in itself. It is not free will but the abuse of free will that is the origin of sin. Free will is not just the ability to choose evil, but the ability to choose good. The latter cannot exist without the former.

This brings us back to Anthony Burgess, with whom we began this essay. The writer who grounded his rejection of progressive politics on its inherent rejection of original sin, in his most well known novel offered a defense of free will, a belief in which was also the result of his Catholic upbringing, on precisely the grounds that removing the possibility of choosing evil also eliminates the possibility of choosing good. In A Clockwork Orange, the main character and narrator, Alex, the leader of a gang of “ultraviolent” teenage hooligans, imprisoned after an evening of rape and murder, becomes a test subject of a progressive government experiment in which an aversion to sex and violence is created with pain inducing drugs. If you have read the novel or seen Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation you are undoubtedly aware of how the process works. The point is that Alex is turned into a model citizen by the removal of his free will. This turns out to have major drawbacks.

Once Kubrick’s film had made the novel famous, Burgess was besieged with requests for explanations of the story, its violence, its title, and the weird lingo, a combination of rhyming slang and Russian, that many of the characters use. In his response he would always point to the theme that had inevitably been overlooked – that free will is an essential component of any real choice of the good. (10)

(1) Anthony Burgess, You’ve Had Your Time: Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess, (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1990), p. 140.

(2) John Anthony Burgess Wilson, who wrote under his two middle names, records his Catholic upbringing in his first volume of memoirs entitled Little Wilson and Big God. As an adult he would describe himself as a “lapsed Catholic”. The influence of the doctrines and ideas of the Church in which he was raised is evident in his books, especially his later ones.

(3) One major traditionalist conservative thinker who contested the idea that original sin is essential to political conservatism was Michael Oakeshott in his essay “On Being Conservative”, published in Rationalism and Politics and Other Essays. This is because in this essay, Oakeshott took a minimalist approach to the definition of conservatism, describing it as an attitude rather than a body of belief, and not because Oakeshott saw man or his society as perfectable.

(4) Indeed, Hulme made the doctrine the essence of the distinction between classicism and romanticism. He wrote “Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstances; and the other than he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.” T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism” in Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1924), p. 117. In the next paragraph he wrote “One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin.”

(5) Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Signet Classic, 1957, 1996), p. 938.

(6) The Hebrew word meaning “man, husband”, corresponding to aner and vir, is iysh.

(7) A couple of conservative authors have recently written books espousing the value of such pessimism. These are John Derbyshire in We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism ( New York: Crown Forum, 2009) and Roger Scruton in The Uses of Pessimism and the Dangers of False Hope (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

(8) http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf105.xix.iv.html

(9) This, in Christian ethics, is the highest and truest freedom available to man on earth – liberation from the sin that enslaves him from within. In the classical ethics of Plato and Aristotle, vices are habits that are formed when man allows his reason and will to be enslaved by his appetites and passions. Instead, the philosophers declared, man should strive for virtue by ruling over these instinctual drives. To facilitate this is the end for which government and its laws are established. Both Christian and classical thought clash at this point with modern, progressive thought. To the modern, progressive, way of thinking, human freedom is threatened most, not by some internal enslaving factor, be it Adamic sin or animal passion, but by the external restraints of custom, tradition and authority. Freedom, the modern progressive insists, lies in the unshackling of human desires and what the church calls “sin”, from the repressive bonds of religion and law. That the “freedom” valued by the modern progressive, might be most likely to be found within a society that is the exact opposite of “free”, one in which the lives of its members are planned by the state from birth to the grave, was a theme brilliantly explored by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World, a novel that seems today to have been almost prophetic.

(10) If it be objected that the perfected saints in glory do not sin, it should be noted that what has been removed in glorification is not free will, the power to choose evil, but the internal desire to do so – the exact opposite of what the Ludovico Technique did to Alex in Burgess’s novel.