The Concept of Sin

Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking
Review: All too often, the word "sin" stirs up notions of personal responsibility, even guilt, which is uncomfortable and would rather avoid. So we blame our genes, an incurable illness, or we simply declare flatly (without evidence) that this is "human nature".

However, I find that this book places this concept in its proper perspective. Pieper opens his discourse with a quote from T.S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party", which is illuminating: "I should really like," says Celia, "to think that there's something wrong with me. Because if there isn't, there's something wrong... with the world itself. And that's so much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I'd rather believe there's something wrong with me, that could be put right."

Rating:
Summary: A great introduction to some hard questions.
Review: Pieper begins this short book with the observation that while sin still have grave connotations in our
language, it is used largely for humorous effect in modern times.

Confucius once observed that the first step in philosophical debate was to agree on one's terms, and Pieper does a neat little job of investigating what the misunderstood yet evocative word "sin" means. His chief foundation is Thomas Aquinas, but he does a very impressive job of integrating modern, Eastern, and other pre-Christian sources; I did not realize how the concepts of expiation, confession, and original sin have parallels in Eastern and Classical thought. Even Sartre and Nietzsche--hardly Christians themselves!--are used in very sensitive, perceptive ways to show what sin does to us.

The book begins with observations on how sin is perceived in modern times, and then analyzes what the word sin actually means (to "miss the mark"), and how the Hebrew, Latin, and Greek writers have used the the word sin. Building this foundation, we begin to delve into the psychological basis of sin, and look at
a very troubling paradox of sin: "if sin is going against our nature, how can our natural desires lead us to sin?" This question of what exactly drives us to sin haunts much of the book, and Pieper gives no easy answers, but rather opens up this debate for the reader, and gives many references, allowing one to pursue this question on one's own later on.

For anyone who wants to know more about why we do evil things, this is a good beginner's guide. Pieper is intelligent but
accessible, and the book is very compact. Sometimes I wish he would have spent a litle more time developing some ideas--he sometimes takes Scholastic philosophical terms for granted, and while he defines them clearly, it would have been nice if he shows why these definitions are relevant to us. For instance, he observes that the term "order" has a static, fixed connotation to the modern person, but to the Medievals, it could mean a dynamic process. Pieper then adopts the Medieval view without telling us why we should take the Medieval one over the modern. This could have been easily explained by noting how scientific laws, while they are fixed equations, describe dynamic events, like radio waves, falling objects, and chemical reactions. Such an explanation would have been easily within Pieper's capabilities, and would connect his wealth of Scholastic understanding to the modern reader more easily.

Still, that quibble aside, this is a very readable, educational book, and I recommend it.