St. Thomas Aquinas on Loving Sinners

I think a great scripture passage that highlights mercy and truth is in John chapter 8, where our Lord encounters the woman caught in the very act of adultery, and after her accusers leave, this is what he says, Jesus stood up and said to her, Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you? She said, No one, Lord. And Jesus said, And notice this, he leads with mercy, but he closes with truth. He says, Neither do I condemn you. From now on, sin no more. So it does seem to me that if we're going to go out and say, sin no more, that that does come off quite abrasive, especially to people who are hurting. I think it is important that we remember that everyone we're speaking to and speaking about right now are people who've grown up in a sexually broken culture. They've had pornography thrust upon them. They have Disney trying to brainwash them into thinking homosexual acts and transgenderism stuff is normal. And so we do need to lead with compassion. These people have a story. I have a story. You have a story. I too am sexually broken. I too am a hypocrite. And so I think that is important that we realize that when we're condemning sin, we're condemning my sin, your sin, their sin. We're all in this together. It's not like we've got the pure people and the sinful people. The pure people are Christ and the Blessed Mother. And then there's the rest of us. All of us struggle with our sexual passions. I think it was Father Mike Schmitz who pointed that out. It's not us versus them. It's just us. All of us struggle with, how else to put it, brokenness, perversions in our sexual desires that we have to wrestle with. So recognizing that. I think the problem with a lot of these bishops is—and when I say bishops, I'm talking about the Anglican bishops, but we can also say the German bishops and then perhaps other bishops—they say, neither do I condemn you. And that's it. We need to say, look, I don't condemn you. I want to invite you to be a Christian, to repent of your sin, to get the help necessary, just like I need the help necessary, just like the bishops need the help that comes from the grace of God that's necessary. But you've got to say, from now on, sin no more. So I just wanted to point that out, because I think it's a good point. What I want to do now is take a look at an article from the Summa Theologiae. You let me know in the comment section if you like this idea, because when Pines for the Quiner started, all we did was review Summa articles and talk about them. And I know some people wish that that would come back. And so we like the idea of maybe incorporating a Summa article into these little solo live streams that we're doing now. So this is, let's see, Article 6. This is from the Summa Theologiae, Secundae Secundae, which is just a fancy Latin way of saying the second part of the second part. Question 25, Article 6. And he's asking whether we ought to love sinners out of charity. I'm not sure if we'll read this whole thing, because it is quite long. If you're not familiar with the Summa, Thomas always sets up objections to the position he wants to make and then responds to those objections. So the Summa is like a pre-packaged debate. It's actually quite cool. So let's just look at the first objection that someone might have. They might say, it would seem that we ought not to love sinners out of charity, for it is written in Psalm 118, I have hated the unjust, but David had perfect charity. Therefore, sinners should be hated rather than loved out of charity. The thing is, whenever you read Aquinas's objections, they always seem, I mean, he writes in syllogisms and it's like, wow, that's a good point. That's a good argument. If David had perfect charity and he hated the unjust, therefore, we ought to hate the unjust. What would Aquinas have to say to that? Here's what he says. And this comes from the reply to Objection 1. The prophet hated the unjust as such, and the object of his hate was their injustice, which was their evil. Such hatred is perfect, of which he himself says, I have hated them with a perfect hatred. Now, hatred of a person's evil, listen to this, this is very good. Hatred of a person's evil is equivalent to love of his good. Hence also, this perfect hatred belongs to charity. So if I love you and you're destroying yourself, it's because I love you that I hate the thing that you're doing that's destroying you. Like if you, a random stranger, wrote in the comments section that you're addicted to meth, I'd be sorry for you. I would reply to you. I would maybe point you to a link that could help you. But it really wouldn't ruin my day because I don't know who you are and I don't love you because I don't know you. I mean, I love humanity in a general sense, but I don't love you particularly because I don't know who you are. If Thursday told me he was addicted to because of my love for him, I would seek to help him in a more intentional way. Now, if my wife tells me that, then my life falls apart, right? And I do everything that I can to help her. In other words, to the degree that I love a person is the thing that they're doing that's destroying them is going to affect me. It's going to impact me. So it's precisely because of my charity that I hate your sin. Let's look at his sed contra and main response. So Augustine says that when it is said, thou shalt love thy neighbor, it is evident that we ought to look upon every man as our neighbor. Now, sinners do not cease to be men for sin does not destroy their nature. Therefore, we ought to love sinners out of charity. And it should be said, we're not just talking about sexual sin here. We're not just talking about those who practice the sin of sodomy in either heterosexual or homosexual relationships. We're talking about all serious sin here. And here's Aquinas' main response. He says, there are two things that have to be considered in the sinner. All right. So when we talk about the sinner, what are we talking about? His nature and his guilt. Those are the two things. Now, according to his nature, which he has from God, he has a capacity for happiness, right? He has the, and we could just say the beatific vision, salvation. That is something he is capable of. On the fellowship of which charity is based as stated above, wherefore we ought to love sinners out of charity in respect for their nature. On the other hand, we can talk about their guilt, right? And their guilt is opposed to God and is an obstacle to happiness. We don't often think about it like that, but the reason you should hate my serious sin that I'm engaged in and that I might love is precisely because that stuff is an obstacle to my happiness. Wherefore in respect to their guilt, whereby they are opposed to God, all sinners are to be hated. So we have to hate the sinners. But when we're talking about the sinners, we're not talking about their nature. We're talking about, what does he say here? Their guilt, their serious sin. That's what we're talking about when we talk about hating sinners. And we ought to hate, by the way, not just the sins of others that are obstacles to their happiness. We also ought to hate the sin in our own life, which is an obstacle to our own happiness. Let's see. Okay. All sinners are to be hated, even one's father or mother or kindred, according to Luke 12, 26. For it is our duty to hate in the sinner, his being a sinner, and to love in him, his being a man capable of bliss. And this is to love him truly. Think about my analogy with my wife again. If I said to her, you know what, babe, I love you. And if your meth addiction is, you think it's going to make you happy, then who am I to stand in your way? This reminds me of that classic example I had with a sex worker at the Baltimore Basilica, I think. She got up. I don't know if you know this story, but she got up. You've told it before. Yeah. And she just said, look, I'm happy. And you're painting people in the industry as being helpless victims. I'm not a helpless victim. It makes me happy. And my response, it may have been unhelpful to her, but I think it was accurate, was you're wrong to be happy. You're actually not. You can think yourself subjectively at peace, but that isn't happiness. The Blessed Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross was happier then than someone who's, let's just keep using the analogy, on a meth binge right now, even if they think it's making them happy. Because happiness has to do with our objective good and the fulfilment of our nature. I'm certainly not saying that the Blessed Mother was smiling while her son was being tortured, or that she felt peace, or she probably felt peace in the sense that she had submitted this to God's providence. But that's what we should mean by happiness. All right, let's look at another objection here. Let's look at the second one. Further, and again, this is what Aquinas is going to respond to. Love is proved by deeds, as Gregory says in a homily for Pentecost. But good men do no works of the unjust. On the contrary, they do such as would appear to be works of hate, according to Psalm 108. In the morning I put to death all the wicked of the land. And God commanded, wizards love it, thou shalt not suffer to live. Therefore sinners should not be loved out of charity. What's Aquinas' response to this? He's going to begin by quoting Aristotle, who observes that when our friends fall into sin, we ought to deny them the amenities of friendship, so long as there is hope of them mending their ways. And we ought to help them more readily to read, listen to this, this is, if we treated our friends like this, we would be much better friends than we may currently be. We ought to help our friends more readily to regain virtue than to recover money had they lost it. For as much as virtue is more akin than money to friendship. When, however, they fall into very great wickedness and become incurable, we ought no longer to show them friendliness. It is for this reason that both divine and human laws command such like sinners to be put to death, because there is greater likelihood of their harming others than of their mending their ways. Now, Aquinas is definitely not, for those who are confused, not talking about you becoming a vigilante, killing those involved in mortal sin, so this has to be understood correctly, of course. Nevertheless, the judge puts this into effect, so you think of the state inflicting capital punishment on a serious sinner, for example. So the reason the state may do this isn't out of hatred for sinners, but out of the love of charity, by reason of which he prefers the public good to the life of the individual. Moreover, the death inflicted by the judge profits the sinner if he be converted unto the expiation of his crime, and if he be not converted, it profits so as to put an end to the sin, because the sinner is just deprived of the power to sin anymore, and that's a loving thing. All right, so table the question of capital punishment for a moment, but this idea that, you know, if I came on here today and started saying that I'm doing something, I don't know, like I started a porn company or something like that, you know, and people in town who love me would try to rebuke me, and suppose I was completely uninterested in their rebukes, then they should not show friendliness to me in a way that would lead me to believe that they're okay with the serious evil that I'm committing. I love this idea of, you know, if your friend lost $10,000 and he said, can you help me? I had it in a suitcase for some reason. This doesn't sound like it's legit, but he lost it and you want to help him find it. All right, well, if you know your friend is caught in serious sin, and here I don't mean venial sin necessarily, here I don't mean sin that was committed, you know, once and then repented of, but someone who's involved in serious sin and who doesn't think he has to repent, you should be more interested in this person regaining his virtue than him regaining his $10,000 because it's the virtue which is conducive to his happiness in the way that the money isn't necessarily. All right, so that's what Thomas Aquinas has to say. So this adage or this axiom that people sometimes throw out, love the sinner, hate the sin, it's based in scripture and it's based in Thomas Aquinas. We'll send you that stuff for free and you get a bunch of other free things in return. You'll get more information by going over to mattfrad.locals.com. Thanks.