By Henry Aloysius Barry
CHAPTER XI
SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST.
Our Lord has said: —"Whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him, but he who shall speak a word against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him neither in this world nor in the world to come." (Matt, xii, 31.) These words are altogether compatible with the fact that the Church has the power to absolve from any sin or number of sins whatever, given true repentance, that is to say, where there is found the Prophet David's: ''Contrite and humbled heart." (Ps. iv, 19.) The Master's words are not to be taken, then, in such an absolutely literal sense a* to restrict in any way the tribunal of penance. This would be tending to dwarf the figure of Christ. Our Lord's words should be taken in the sense that the sin against the Holy Ghost is, as a matter of fact, rarely forgiven. In other words, such a sinner, less frequently, comes to have regret, repentance and contrition for his guilt. What the nature is of this particular sin, that drew from our Lord's lips a solitary instance of pessimism, is matter of dispute. The earlier Fathers have variously explained it.
Some have said it was the particular sin of blasphemy, which consisted in attributing to the devil with malice presence, such works of the divine goodness as were peculiarly the property of the Holy Ghost. The Pharisees had committed such an offense in the case of our Lord. They called the Son of Man a gourmand and drinker of wine, an associate of publicans. As yet, however, they had committed a sin against our Lord only, but, when afterwards they ascribed His works to Beelzebub, the prince of demons, they entailed the particular offense that makes the door of heaven so heavy to open. So Sts. Athanasius, Hilary, Chrysostom, Jerome and Ambrose have interpreted our Lord's words.
Others say that the sin against the Holy Ghost consists in ultimate impenitence. St. Augustine takes the lead in this view of the case. Others, still, have said that it means any crime perpetrated in cold-blooded malice, because such a procedure is, in a glaring way, found to be in direct opposition to the divine goodness inasmuch as it implies a gross, contemptuous setting aside of the proffered gifts of a merciful God, placed in the sinner's path for the purpose of diverting him from a choice of evil. St. Gregory says — "we must know that sin is committed in three ways, for, one is led into it by ignorance, by weakness or design. It is more grievous to sin by infirmity than ignorance, but, it is far more criminal to sin by design than weakness. St. Paul had sinned through ignorance, as he avows." (I. Timothy, i, 13.) "Who before was but a blasphemer, a persecutor, and contumelious, but I obtained the mercy of God because I did it ignorantly and in unbelief." Peter, however, sinned out of weakness, when one word from a handmaiden shook in him all the strength of the faith which he had sworn to the Lord, and led him to deny with his lips that God to Whom his heart still clung. But as the sin of weakness or ignorance is the more easily blotted out, inasmuch as it is not perpetrated out of pure design, Paul, who was simply ignorant, was cured by knowledge, and Peter became strong again by watering with his tears the living but, as it were, arid faith that had been spurned but not uprooted in him. By pure design, however, sinned they of whom the Master said,—"If I had not done among them works that no other man hath done, they would not have sinned, but now they have both sinned and hated Me and My Father." (John xv, 24.) St. Gregory says:—"It is one thing to leave good undone; it is another thing to bear hatred toward the teacher of good; just as it is one thing to sin by precipitation—when beside one's self as it were,—and another thing to sin with pure deliberation because, often times, one commits, by precipitation or thoughtlessly as it were, a sin, which, upon counsel and reflection, one would be swift to repudiate. They err by weakness, generally speaking, who have a liking for what is good but are unable to live up to it. They sin by deliberation and design, who decline to do what is good and have positively no love for it. As, therefore, it is always a more grievous thing to love sin than to commit it, so is it more heinous to hate justice, than simply not to have done it."There is a specific sin against the Holy Ghost, as we have already observed; at the same time there is a group of sins which have in their characteristic traits the elements of this specific sin and are accordingly classified as sins against the Holy Ghost. One might say, by way of prelude to their detailed treatment, that their dominant feature is a sort of structural, radical depravity and a stubborn resistance to the Spirit's voice. Not only is the "flesh weak," but the "spirit is not willing." The persons involved have no love whatever for goodness, which is the particular, though not exclusive, attribute of the Holy Ghost. Mind and heart join hands in a formal contempt of His gifts. The study of this group of sins is deserving of the most serious attention in view of their particularly malodorous character and the most dreadsome consequences thereof in the shape of a most difficult repentance.
