How our senses are corrupted by sin

When one attentively considers the senses and passions of man, one finds them so well proportioned to the end for which they are given to us that one cannot enter into the thought of those who say they are entirely corrupted by original sin.

But, in order that one may recognize whether it is with reason that one does not yield to their opinion, it is necessary to explain in what manner one can conceive the order that existed in the faculties and passions of our first father during his original justice, and the changes and disorders that occurred there after his sin. These things can be conceived in two ways, of which here is the first.

Two ways to explain how our senses are corrupted by sin.

It seems to be a common notion that, in order for things to be well ordered, the soul must feel greater pleasures in proportion to the greatness of the goods it enjoys.

Pleasure is an instinct of nature.

It is an impression of God Himself that inclines us toward some good, which must be all the stronger as that good is greater.

According to this principle, it seems one cannot doubt that our first father, before his sin and coming from the hands of God, did not find more pleasure in the most solid goods than in others.

Thus, since God had created him to love Him, and God was his true good, one can say that God made Himself tasted by him, that He bore him to His love by a feeling of pleasure, and that He gave him interior satisfactions in his duty that counterbalanced the greatest pleasures of the senses — satisfactions which, since the sin, men no longer feel without a particular grace.

However, since he had a body that God wished him to preserve and to regard as a part of himself, He also made him feel through the senses pleasures similar to those we feel in the use of things that are proper for the preservation of life.

One does not dare to decide whether the first man, before his fall, could prevent himself from having agreeable or disagreeable sensations at the moment when the principal part of his brain was shaken by the actual use of sensible things.

Perhaps he had this empire over himself, because of his submission to God, although it appears more probable to think the contrary; for, although Adam could stop the emotions of the spirits and of the blood, and the vibrations of the brain that objects excited in him, because, being in order, his body had to be subject to his mind, nevertheless it is not probable that he could have prevented himself from having sensations of objects at the time when he had not stopped the movements they produced in the part of his body to which his soul was immediately united; for the union of the soul and body consisting principally in a mutual relation of feelings with the movements of the organs, it seems that it would have been rather arbitrary than natural if Adam could have felt nothing when the principal part of his body received some impression from those who surrounded him.

I do not, however, take any side on these two opinions.

The first man therefore felt pleasure in what perfected his body just as he felt it in what perfected his soul; and, because he was in a perfect state, he experienced that of the soul much greater than that of the body. Thus it was infinitely easier for him to preserve his justice than for us without the grace of Jesus Christ, since without it we no longer find pleasure in our duty. He nevertheless let himself be unhappily seduced; he lost this justice by his disobedience. Thus the principal change that happened to him, and that causes all the disorder of the senses and passions, is that, by a just punishment, God withdrew from him and no longer wished to be his good, or rather He no longer made him feel that pleasure that indicated to him that He was his good; so that the sensible pleasures, which lead only to the goods of the body, having remained alone, and no longer being counterbalanced by those that previously led him to his true good, the close union he had with God was strangely weakened, and that which he had with his body was greatly increased. Sensible pleasure, being the master, corrupted his heart by attaching it to all sensible objects, and the corruption of his heart obscured his mind by turning it away from the light that enlightens it and leading it to judge all things only according to the relation they can have with the body.

But at bottom, one cannot say that the change is very great on the side of the senses; for, just as if, two weights being in equilibrium in a balance, I were to remove one, the other would tip it to its side without any change on the part of the first weight, since it remains always the same, so, since sin, the pleasures of the senses have lowered the soul toward sensible things by the lack of those interior delights that counterbalanced before sin the inclination we have for the goods of the body, but without as considerable a change on the part of the senses as one ordinarily imagines.

Here is the second way of explaining the disorders of sin, which is certainly more reasonable than the one we have just stated. It is quite different from it, because the principle is different, but nevertheless these two ways agree perfectly with regard to the senses.

Being composed of a mind and a body, we have two kinds of goods to seek: those of the mind and those of the body. We also have two means of recognizing that a thing is good or bad for us: we can recognize it by the use of the mind alone and by the use of the mind joined to the body; we can recognize our good by a clear and evident knowledge; we can also recognize it by a confused feeling. I recognize by reason that justice is lovable; I also know by taste that such a fruit is good. The beauty of justice is not felt; the goodness of a fruit is not known. The goods of the body do not deserve the application of a mind that God made only for Himself. The mind must therefore recognize such goods without examination and by the short and incontestable proof of feeling. Stones are not suitable for nourishment: the proof is convincing, and taste alone has made all men agree on it.

Pleasure and pain are therefore the natural and incontestable characters of good and evil, I admit; but it is only for those things alone which, not being able by themselves to be either good or bad, also cannot be recognized as such by a clear and evident knowledge; it is only for those things alone which, being beneath the mind, can neither reward nor punish it. Finally, it is only for those things alone which do not deserve that the mind occupy itself with them; and, since God does not wish us to occupy ourselves with them, He leads us to them only by instinct, that is to say, by agreeable or disagreeable feelings.

But for God, who alone is the true good of the mind, who alone is above it, who alone can reward it in a thousand different ways, who alone is worthy of its application, and who does not fear that those who know Him will not find Him lovable, He is not content to be loved with a blind love and a love of instinct; He wishes to be loved with an enlightened love and a love of choice.

If the mind saw in bodies only what is truly there, without feeling in them what is not, it could neither love them nor make use of them except with much difficulty. Thus it is as if necessary that they appear agreeable by causing feelings that they do not have. But it is not the same with God: it suffices that one sees Him as He is in order to be moved to love Him, and it is not necessary that He use this instinct of pleasure as a kind of artifice to attract love without deserving it.

Things being so, one must say that Adam was not led to the love of God and to the things of his duty by a prevenient pleasure, because the knowledge he had of God as his good, and the joy he felt unceasingly as a necessary consequence of the sight of his happiness in uniting himself to God, could suffice to attach him to his duty and to make him act with more merit than if he had been, as it were, determined by a prevenient pleasure. He was in this way in full freedom; and it is perhaps in this state that Holy Scripture wishes to represent him to us by these words: God made man from the beginning, and, after having proposed His commandments to him, He left him to himself — that is to say, without determining him by the taste of any prevenient pleasure, holding him only attached to Himself by the clear sight of his good and his duty. But experience has shown, to the shame of free will and to the glory of God alone, the fragility of which Adam was capable in a state as orderly and as happy as the one in which he was before his sin.

But one cannot say that Adam was led to the search and use of sensible things by an exact knowledge of the relation they could have with his body. For, finally, if he had had to examine the configurations of the parts of some fruit, those of all the parts of his body, and the relation that resulted from the one with the other, in order to judge whether, in the present heat of his blood and in a thousand other dispositions of his body, this fruit would have been good for his nourishment, it is clear that things that were unworthy of the application of his mind would have entirely filled its capacity, and that even quite uselessly, because he would not have preserved himself long by this sole means.

If one considers, therefore, that Adam’s mind was not infinite, one will not find it wrong that we say he did not know all the properties of the bodies that surrounded him, since it is certain that these properties are infinite; and if one grants, what cannot be denied with any attention, that his mind was not made to examine the movements and configurations of matter, but to be continually applied to God, one will not be able to find fault if we assert that it would have been a disorder and a derangement — at a time when all things had to be perfectly well ordered — if he had been obliged to turn his mind away from the sight of the perfections of his true good to examine the nature of some fruit in order to nourish himself.

Adam therefore had the same senses as we, by which he was warned, without being turned away from God, of what he had to do for his body. He felt, like us, pleasures, and even pains or repugnances, prevenient and undeliberated. But these pleasures and pains could not make him a slave or unhappy like us, because, being absolute master of the movements that were excited in his body, he stopped them at once, after they had warned him, if he wished it; and, without doubt, he always wished it with regard to pain. Happy, and we too, if he had done the same with regard to pleasure, and if he had not voluntarily distracted himself from the presence of his God, by allowing the capacity of his mind to be filled with the beauty and hoped-for sweetness of the forbidden fruit, or perhaps with a presumptuous joy excited in his soul at the sight of his natural perfections, or finally with a natural tenderness for his wife and a disordered fear of grieving her, for apparently all this contributed to his disobedience.

But after he had sinned, these pleasures, which only warned him with respect, and these pains, which without troubling his happiness only made him know that he could lose it and become unhappy, no longer had the same consideration for him; his senses and passions revolted against him, they no longer obeyed his orders, and they made him, like us, a slave to all sensible things.

Thus the senses and passions were not born of sin, but only that power they have to tyrannize sinners; and this power is not so much a disorder on the side of the senses as on that of the mind and will of men, who, no longer being so closely united to God, no longer receive from Him that light and that strength by which they preserved their freedom and their happiness.

One must conclude in passing, from these two ways according to which we have just explained the disorders of sin, that there are two things necessary to restore us to order.

The first is that one must remove that weight which makes us incline and drags us toward sensible goods, by continually cutting back our pleasures and mortifying the sensibility of our senses through penance, and through the circumcision of the heart.

The second is that one must ask God for the weight of His grace and that prevenient delight that Jesus Christ has particularly merited for us, without which we may cut back this first weight as much as we please, but it will always weigh; and however little it weighs, it will infallibly drag us into sin and disorder.

These two things are absolutely necessary for re-entering and persevering in our duty. Reason, as one sees, agrees perfectly with the Gospel, and both teach us that privation, abnegation, the diminution of the weight of sin, are necessary preparations, so that the weight of grace may straighten us and attach us to God.

But, although in our present state there is an obligation to fight continually against our senses, one must not conclude from it that they are absolutely corrupted and ill-regulated; for if one considers that they are given to us for the preservation of our body, one will find that they acquit themselves admirably well of their duty, and that they guide us in so just and faithful a manner toward their end that it seems it is wrongly that they are accused of corruption and disorder; they warn the soul so promptly through pain and pleasure, through agreeable and disagreeable tastes, and through other sensations, of what it must do or not do for the preservation of life, that one cannot rightly say that this order and exactness are a consequence of sin.

Our freedom, not our senses, is the true cause of our errors

Our senses are therefore not so corrupted as one imagines.

But it is the most inward part of our soul, it is our freedom that is corrupted. It is not our senses that deceive us, but it is our will that deceives us through its precipitate judgments. When one sees, for example, light, it is very certain that one sees light; when one feels heat, one is not mistaken in believing that one feels it, whether before or after sin. But one is mistaken when one judges that the heat one feels is outside the soul that feels it, as we will explain later.

The senses would therefore not throw us into error if we made good use of our freedom, and if we did not use their report to judge things with too much precipitation. But because it is very difficult to prevent oneself from doing so, and we are almost constrained to it because of the close union of our soul with our body, here is how we ought to conduct ourselves in their use so as not to fall into error.

Rule for not being mistaken in the use of one’s senses.

We should observe this rule exactly: never to judge by the senses what things are in themselves, but only the relation they have with our body, because in fact they are not given to us to know the truth of things in themselves, but only for the preservation of our body.

But in order that one may completely rid oneself of the facility and inclination one has to follow one’s senses in the search for truth, we shall in the following chapters make a deduction of the principal and most general errors into which they throw us, and one will manifestly recognize the truth of what we have just advanced.