“I had to learn the hard way that sin makes people stupid,” my friend said. 

Most of us had to. I did. It makes us stupid about the world and especially about ourselves, and that’s a useful thing to know, but not all that useful in practice, because sin hides itself really well.

It’s a useful thing to know because it helps us understand our problems better than most of us do, and gives us a key to understanding our past. Knowing that we did that really dumb thing at least in part because we were committing that sin helps us take responsibility for our lives, rather than feeling we were simply victims of circumstance. It also pushes us to the answer — repentance and amendment of life — great aids for which the Church provides.

It’s useful to know also because it helps us think well about thinking. We know sin corrupts our will and damages our character. But we don’t see as clearly that sin reduces our ability to think well. 

For historical reasons, modern people — and we are all much more modern in the negative sense than we’d like to think — understand thinking as an objective operation, like doing mathematical equations. Anyone can do it if they follow the rules. How well they think depends on how much they know and how smart they are. It doesn’t depend much on what kind of person they are. 

That’s partly true. Scientists have the scientific method, and philosophers and social scientists have their methods as well, all designed to help people think as objectively as possible.

But it’s not completely true and it’s especially not true where it most matters. Our character matters a lot when we think through the most important questions, like “Who am I?” and “What should I do with my life?” and “Does God exist and if so do I need him?” The answers to this kind of question will change our lives, and how we answer them depends on our character. 

That makes the insight that sin makes us stupid helpful. But it isn’t so useful in our efforts to become saintlier. In theory, we might say, “I’m being stupid. What am I doing wrong?” But we don’t say that, generally, because we don’t know we’re being stupid when we’re being stupid. We don’t have reason to suspect we’re sinning because the sin hides itself by making us stupider.

No matter how stupid we’re being, everything makes sense to us. We find reasons for doing what we’re doing, and we think up the principles and ideals we’re serving. Part of being stupid is finding clever ways to look smart.

That’s not the only effect. At the same time, we frequently become less insightful and intelligent in what we say to the world.

Who’s He Sleeping With?

Here’s an example. Many years ago, in a group of friends reading spiritual classics, one said that a pastor he had worked for had started preaching against the Christian moral teaching he had once insisted upon, and promoted in opposition to his liberal denomination. My friend then said, “I wonder who he’s sleeping with.”

The rest of us chided him for his unkindness and argued that the pastor may have changed his mind for good reasons. A few months later — you will have seen this coming — the pastor openly left his wife for the young parish worker with whom he’d been having an affair.

People who knew him told me that he saw no connection between the adultery and his newfound theology. If I remember right, he vigorously denied it, claiming that he’d finally seen the truth and begun bravely preaching it, and I presume believed he’d simply applied the new gospel he’d found to his own life. He’d become less intelligent about his own life.

He also became less intelligent about the world. He’d been an evangelical Protestant who preached biblically and theologically rigorous sermons. Now he preached sermons that didn’t require any real study or thought at all.

I don’t remember the examples but I do remember the type, with lots of talk of finding yourself and then affirming the self you found, rejecting other people’s expectations, living in freedom, growing out of a religion of rules — and all of this “bold” and “courageous.” That is, the kind of sermon someone with a mind for cliches could preach for hours.

Another Example

I see another example of how sin makes us stupid in my work as an editor, and as a writer who knows the temptation all too well. That is, distorting the truth in some way, usually to a small degree, to make the article better or more effective or to get more readers, thinking that’s all right because we think we have something important to say and need to get more readers to read it.

In other words, lying — but in such a limited way that it doesn’t feel like lying, and for a purpose that seems to justify it even if it is lying.

The writer can do this in many ways, most of them small and easy to rationalize. Leaving out important counter-evidence, for example, or quoting selectively or paraphrasing in a way to make the case stronger and the other side’s case look weaker. Making a strong claim without doing enough work to make sure it’s actually that strong. Being unkind or unfair to someone because readers love seeing the other side getting hit. (Writers do that a lot these days.)

The sin of lying blinds writers to what they’re doing and what it does to them — making it easier to lie next time, for one thing — and blind to how much less of the truth they see and therefore how much less of the truth they offer.

We’ve all been that pastor and that writer. We’ve all sinned in some way that we didn’t see at the time as a sin and grew stupider about who we are and stupider about the world we spoke about.

The Lenten Answer

We have two ways to respond to sin’s very effective capacity for making us stupid: Be smarter so we don’t sin, and be better so we don’t need to be smarter. The Catholic life of repentance, so tightly focused on in Lent, insists on both, helping us gain some ability to see our sins even though they hide themselves.

It helps us be smarter. The examination of conscience, for example, especially in the longer versions, gives us a method for understanding ourselves better, especially when followed by confession. So do Bible and spiritual reading, penitential disciplines, almsgiving and other works of charity.

It helps us be better, so that we more naturally live the right way as we grow holier, through the same gifts from the Church. This is the greatest benefit of Lent and the life of repentance, I think. There’s a limit to how much smarter we’re likely to become, and how good we can be at recognizing our sinfulness by its fruits in our stupidity. In this life we see through a glass darkly, as St. Paul said, and among the things we see darkly is ourselves.

The Church in her wisdom knows that, and teaches us to walk more safely even when we can’t see clearly.