Dominik’s Blog

An enlightening Article in First Things discussing Cardinal Newman’s homilies, with a particular focus on Lent.

A choice quote:

So what is it about religion that makes it so irksome? Here we get to one of the most significant motifs of Newman’s sermons. Resistance to religion is based on an ineluctable fact of human psychology to which he returns again and again: No one sins without making some excuse to himself for sinning. This excuse-mongering is one of his main targets in the Lenten sermons. In a droll observation, he calls excuse-making the “second sin” of both Adam and Eve—Original Sin immediately followed, so to speak, by Original Excuse. In a passage not without its element of dry wit, he dissects the pathetic expedient to which Adam and Eve felt driven:

The original excuse offered by them after sinning was that they were not really free, that they had acted under a constraining influence, the subtlety of the tempter. . . . And this has been the course of lawless pride ever since: to lead us, first, to exult in our uncontrollable liberty of will and conduct; then, when we have ruined ourselves, to plead that we are the slaves of necessity.

I can imagine these lines drawing a wry smile from Newman’s flock—at least until he drove home the conclusion. For him the psychology of sin and its attendant need to claim victimhood (“I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!”) is simply too ingrained, too much a part of what sin is all about, for us not to feel vexed when reminders come of the opposite reality, which it is precisely the office of religion to provide: “Accordingly, it has always been the office of Religion to protest against the sophistry of Satan, and to preserve the memory of those truths which the unbelieving heart corrupts: both the freedom and the responsibility of man, the sovereignty of the Creator, the supremacy of the law of conscience as His representative within us, and the irrelevancy of external circumstances in the judgment which is ultimately to be made upon our conduct and character.”

Reading the entire article is well worth it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 11:59 am and is filed under Catholicism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.