In ordinary conversation, including among the 'educated,' the word 'sin' rarely gets mentioned except when one is trying to be coy or facetious. As Thomas Mann once said, 'sin' is nowadays 'an amusing word used only when one is trying to get a laugh.' But this small work will interpret sin in its true - that is, serious - meaning. What will emerge from its analysis is the discovery that the concept of sin can still serve to unlock the mystery of existence, at least for a thinking that wants to press down to the very foundations. In this work Pieper brings Plato, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas into a living dialogue with T. S. Eliot, Andre Gide, even with Jean-Paul Sartre. As he shows in this powerful work, none of these writers leaves any doubt that the fact of sin is central: It is the willful denial of one's own life-ground, a denial that alone rightly bears the name 'sin.' Paradoxically, this reality is both willed and yet also pre-given, that is, both adventitious and yet somehow innate to our existence - a paradox which, next to the mystey of existence itself, is the most impenetrable mystery of all.
I
Usage
We don't hear the word "sin" much anymore. Or so it would seem. At first glance, this observation can be easily verified: an average, ordinary conversation overheard at random will hardly ever mention the term. Of course no one expects to hear a somber word like "sin" when people are just rattling on in their casual, everyday "chit-chat." But even when they are engaged in serious discussions about pressing issues of the day, talking earnestly in such "high-toned" settings as salons, classrooms, or broadcasting studios - where the concept would seem more appropriate - no, even here the word "sin" can find no place.
Why is it that we seem to find it difficult, if not downright impossible, to speak in impartial, matter-of-fact tones of sin? Upon reflection, it would seem rather odd to speak of sin using inflections no different from those we use when we are talking about the tangible things of everyday life. But odder yet is that, even when we are giving verbal expression to the specific content of our inner life - when the conversation turns to such topics as conscience, or justice, or death - the word "sin" rarely crops up. Obviously there is something about the topic that keeps us from invoking the word "sin" without exposing ourselves to the raised eyebrow or perhaps even to rhetorical "assault."
Could this remarkable irritation in the word have something to do with the reality that this deceptively simple morpheme means and names? In a speech delivered shortly after the First World War (one that has since become rather notorious and which he gave, no doubt with a certain irony, before the French Academy), Paul Valéry once said something of the word "virtue" that seems to hold true for the word "sin" as well: namely, that the word vertu is dead. This observation, he said, one could easily verify simply by noticing how the word appears only in such confined settings as the catechism, operettas . . . and the 'Académie Française'!
Yet there is one sphere of discourse - religious language - where one does speak of sin without embarrassment, without having to overcome an inner resistance, as if the matter were quite obvious. Here sin is woven into the very fabric of the ordinary language of the believer. But is that not itself a problem? To hear of sin spoken of so unproblematically in the language of faith and yet so rarely elsewhere prompts one to ask whether such a "disconnect" from everyday language has not itself become the central issue.
Perhaps, though, this contrast is overdrawn. For there is yet another realm we might mention where people use the word "sin" without inhibition or self-consciousness, without a troubled sense that something might be amiss: the entertainment industry. No doubt, in such contexts the word has become trivial and misleading, as in coy expressions like a "night of sin" or a "sinful woman," terms usually spoken with a wink and a nod. Even bishops have been heard to talk this way: for example, the Archbishop of New Orleans welcomed a philosophical convention to his city in early 1968 by saying that, in contrast to New York or Chicago, tourists could walk in the streets of his city at night without anxiety, for here there might be, in his words, "much ‘sin’, but little ‘crime’."
To be sure, whether one can say the same thing about ‘sin,' at least by analogy, that Paul Valéry said in his Academy address about the word "virtue" - that the word is for all intents and purposes dead - is more than a little questionable; and for this reason we must continue to pursue our investigation of its usage.
Take, for example, the case of ancient Rome. Linguistic habits in the Late Republic and Early Empire (that is, the Rome of the so-called "classical" period) do not seem to be essentially different from what our linguistic survey has discovered about contemporary usage (namely, that nowadays the word "sin" is used only in confined settings like the catechism, or is ironically meant, as in the entertainment industry, etc.). In a learned philological treatise, for example, one Dutch author claims from his scholarly survey that the religious concept of sin no longer had any vital reality for Romans living in the Golden Age of the Empire. Words denoting sin in Latin('nefas', 'piaculum', 'peccatum', 'culpa') had by then become, so the author claims, "museum pieces." What's more, in a remarkable parallel with today, the term 'peccatum' was used more often than not in a pointedly ironic sense for misdeeds of a sexual or erotic nature scarcely taken seriously anymore. So the phenomenon we observed at the outset of this essay is nothing specifically "modern." A remarkable similarity, and surely indicative of something pervasive about the human condition.
Still, despite this seemingly uncanny parallel, one cannot really conclude merely from citing the statistics of word usage, either in the case of ancient Rome or in our own time, that the reality denoted by the word "sin" has simply disappeared from man's consciousness and been relegated to a "museum piece." The situation is obviously much more complicated than what it might seem to be at first glance.
