By Henry Aloysius Barry
The second in the group of sins against the Holy Ghost is obstinacy in wickedness. This enormity consists in cultivating a taste for evil. The world refers inelegantly to such a disposition as pure "cussedness." It is a deliberate looking for evil with no other impellent in the world for so acting except that it is evil. In this we do not refer to the man who may be prone to, and do, evil out of weakness or lack of reflection, but rather to such a one as is maliciously fond of wickedness, the undiluted essence of evil.
The devil is the perfect type of this. He is the sworn foe of good, and his taste is only for what is wicked. There is, of course, a taint of this devilry in man's raw nature, not precisely that he yearns for a thing because it is evil, but rather because it is forbidden him; it acts reflectively upon his tendencies. There is a disparity here. In the former case the evil is directed toward God, in the latter case it is more identified with one's weakness. In the devil, besides, it is malice prepense, whilst with man it is mostly the germ of weakness and feebleness, which is a foundational means of virtue. It is not easy to imagine that man can be so like the devil in a formal resistance to good, in a satanic dislike of it, and, yet, it is a fact. St. Stephen called the attention of the Jews to the fact that through such a diabolic disposition their fathers slew the prophets—because they foretold "the coming of the Just One, of Whom you have been now the betrayers and murderers." (Acts xii, 52.) "You stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears. You also resist the Holy Ghost as your fathers did, so do you also." (v. 51.) The Jews, whom the saint warned, instead of heeding and repenting, "were cut to the heart and they gnashed with their teeth, against Him." (v. 54.) Pharaoh is a type of this malignant obstinacy. He was bent on evil and all his susceptibilities were dead. No remonstrance could rouse him from his moral coma. The hand of God was clear in protest, but the tyrant was determined upon evil and be would do it. Let us repeat it: the weak man despises his folly, he sighs and groans and sadly succumbs to evil; even in its enactment there is a lingering would-not. Pharaoh and his kind exult in it; they have no regrets in the matter. "What is a hard heart?" asks St. Bernard. "It is one that is not torn with compunction, not softened by pity, not elevated by prayers nor yielding under threats, one hardened by scourges; it is one ungrateful for benefits, having no faith in advice, cruel in judgments, in low things without sense of shame, one without fear in the midst of perils, one inhuman toward the human, one bold in divine things, without memory of the past, with neglect for the present, without any eyes for the future, everything of the past goes by the board save wrongs, the present is slain, it has no future except the prospect of preparation for vengeance. To sum it all up in one word, a hardened heart is one that has no fear of God or reverence for man." (De consid. lib. i, c. 2.) St. Bernard cites Pharaoh as a living definition or embodiment of this blasphemous obstinacy and says that its active principle is lack of fear. "Do not look around you to find it," the saint goes on (namely, a hard heart). "If you have no fears you have the complaint." (Loco, cit.) Cold, heartless disdain of the existent forces of goodness and mercy, aye, a mocking sneer for the means of salvation is characteristic of blasphemous obstinacy. It is said of a French infidel who had lost the pearl of faith after a youth spent in immoral rectitude that he expressed his regrets for the years he had spent on the cultivation of virtue in those early days, bathed in the soft fragrance of purity and innocence, as lost opportunities for the pleasures of life. He died unrepentant. As Proverbs says: "The man who despises with a stubborn head the one who corrects him, shall fall by a single blow, by a mortal fall, and he shall never be cured." St. Paul says: "Knowest thou not that the benignity of God leadeth to penance? But according to thy hardness and impenitent heart, thou treasurest up to thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the just judgment of God." (Rom. ii, 45.) The shadow of doom lies stretched across the path of the obstinate sinner. The prophet, Ezechiel, (iii, 20) is quoted by St. Gregory: "If the just man shall turn away from his justices, and shall commit iniquities, I shall lay a stumbling block before him." The saint tells us that by a just judgment God will desert them, because they refused to repent when repentance was held out to them. St. Gregory tells us that God of course does not urge them on to sin, but, rather, declines to deliver them. In this way the saint also interprets Exodus, where God says of Pharaoh, "I shall harden his heart." (iv, 21.) The peculiar punishment of this obstinacy is found in chapter seven, verse three. These wonders and graces which should recall Pharaoh to his senses, are still poured out as such so that they will demand corresponding retribution for their being contemned. Pope Leo speaks of the punishment of those who repudiate the truths of Christianity— "Not infrequently, too, God, in order to chastise their pride, does not permit them to see the truth, and thus they are punished in the things wherein they have sinned. This is why we often see men of great intellectual power and erudition making the greatest blunders even in science." (Encycle the Holy Year, 1900.)
