Miserable state of relapsing sinners
“Be not affrighted: you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is risen; he is not here.”—Mark 16:6
I hope, my dear Christians, that, as Christ is risen, you too have risen from your sins by going to confession in this holy paschal season. But attend to what St. Jerome teaches: that many begin well, but few persevere. Incipere multorum est, perseverare paucorum—“To begin is common to many, to persevere is the work of few.” The Holy Ghost, on the other hand, declares that the one who is saved is not he who begins to live well, but he who perseveres in holiness to the end. “But he that shall persevere to the end, he shall be saved” (Matt. 24:13).
The crown of Paradise, says St. Bernard, is promised to those who begin, but it is given only to those who persevere. Inchoantibus praemium promittitur, perseverantibus datur—“The reward is promised to those who begin, but is given to those who persevere” (Sermon 6 On the Way to Live Well). Since, then, brethren, you have resolved to give yourselves to God, listen to what the Holy Ghost says to you: “Son, when thou comest to the service of God, stand in justice and in fear, and prepare thy soul for temptation” (Ecclus. 2:1).
Do not imagine that your temptations are over. Rather, prepare yourself for the combat, and guard against relapsing into the sins you have confessed; for if you lose the grace of God again, you will find it hard to recover it. This is what I intend to show you this day: the miserable state of relapsing sinners, that is, of those who, after confession, miserably fall back into the very sins they confessed.
1. Since, then, dearly beloved Christians, you have made a sincere confession of your sins, Jesus Christ says to you what he said to the paralytic: “Behold, thou art made whole. Sin no more, lest some worse thing happen to thee” (John 5:14). By the confession you have made, your soul is already healed; but it is healed, not yet saved. For if you return to sin, you will lose grace again, and the harm done by the relapse will be far greater than that of your former falls.
Audis—“Hear this,” says St. Bernard, recidere quam incidere, esse deterius—“to fall back into sin is worse than to fall into it the first time.” If a man recovers from a mortal illness, and afterwards falls back into it, he will have lost so much of his natural strength that recovery will be impossible. This is exactly what happens to relapsing sinners. Returning to the vomit—that is, taking back into the soul the sins vomited forth in confession—they are left so weak that they become the playthings of the devil.
St. Anselm says that the enemy acquires a certain dominion over relapsing sinners, so that he makes them fall and fall again as he pleases. Hence the miserable beings become like the birds that children use for sport: the children let them rise from time to time a little way off the ground, but, holding them by a cord, pull them down again whenever they wish. So the devil deals with relapsing sinners. Sed quia ab hoste tenentur, volantes in eadem vitia dejiciuntur—“But because they are held by the enemy, even as they fly they are cast down into the same vices.”
2. St. Paul writes that we have to contend, not with men like ourselves, of flesh and blood, but with the princes of hell. “Our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers” (Eph. 6:12). By these words he means to warn us that we have no strength to resist the powers of hell, and that to resist them the divine aid is absolutely necessary; without it we shall always be defeated. But when God assists us we can do all things and shall conquer, saying with the same apostle: “I can do all things in him who strengtheneth me” (Phil. 4:13).
But this assistance God grants only to those who obtain it by prayer. “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find” (Matt. 7:7). And he who does not ask does not receive. Let us, then, not trust in our own resolutions: if we place our confidence in them, we shall be lost. When we are tempted to relapse, we must place all our confidence in the help of God, who never fails to hear the one who prays to him.
3. “He that thinketh himself to stand, let him take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12). Whoever is in the grace of God should, as St. Paul here teaches, take care not to fall into sin, especially if he has already fallen into other mortal sins; for the relapse of one who has formerly been a sinner brings with it a greater ruin. “And the last state of that man becomes worse than the first” (Luke 11:26).
4. Scripture tells us that the enemy “will offer victims to his drag, and will sacrifice to his net; because through them his meat is made dainty” (Hab. 1:16). Explaining this passage, St. Jerome says that the devil seeks to catch all men in his net, in order to sacrifice them to the divine justice by their damnation. Those sinners who are already in his net he tries to bind with new chains, tempting them to new sins; but his “dainty meat” is the souls he finds to be friends of God. Against these he sets stronger snares, to make them his slaves and rob them of all the good they have gained.
Denis the Carthusian writes: Quanto quis fortius nititur Deo servire, tanto acrius contra eum saevit adversarius—the more earnestly a soul strives to serve God, the more fiercely the adversary rages against her. The more closely a Christian unites himself to God and strives to serve him, the more the enemy arms himself with rage and seeks to re-enter the soul from which he has been driven out; and, as we read in St. Luke, he says: “When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and not finding, he saith: I will return into my house, whence I came out” (Luke 11:24).
Should he succeed in re-entering, he does not enter alone, but brings companions with him, the better to fortify himself in the soul he has regained; and so the second ruin of that miserable soul is greater than the first. “And the last state of that man becomes worse than the first” (Luke 11:26).
5. The relapse of an ungrateful soul greatly displeases God. For after he had called and pardoned that soul with so much love, he sees it forget the mercies he had shown, turn its back on him once more, and renounce his grace. “If my enemy had reviled me, I would verily have borne with it. But thou, a man of one mind, my guide and my familiar, who didst take sweet meats together with me” (Ps. 55:13, etc.). Had an enemy insulted me, says the Lord, I would have borne it with less grief; but to see you rebel against me, after I had restored my friendship to you, and after I had seated you at my table to feed on my own flesh, grieves me to the heart and moves me to chastise you.
Miserable the man who, after receiving so many graces from God, passes from being his friend to being his enemy. He will find the sword of divine vengeance ready to chastise him. “And he that passeth over from justice to sin, God hath prepared such a one for the sword” (Ecclus. 26:27).
6. Some of you may say: If I relapse, I will soon rise again, for I will go to confession at once. To those who speak in this way will happen what happened to Samson. He let himself be deceived by Dalila, who, while he slept, cut off his hair, in which his strength lay. When he awoke, he said: “I will go out as I did before, and shake myself”—not knowing, Scripture adds, “that the Lord was departed from him” (Judg. 16:20). He thought to deliver himself from the hands of the Philistines as he had done before; but, his strength having failed him, he was made their slave. They pulled out his eyes, bound him in chains, and shut him up in prison.
After he has relapsed into sin, a Christian loses the strength to resist temptation, because “the Lord departs from him.” God abandons him by withholding the efficacious aid needed to resist; and so the miserable man remains blind and abandoned in his sin.
7. “No man putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62). Here is a true picture of the relapsing sinner. Note the word no man: no one, says Jesus Christ, who sets himself to serve me and then turns back, is fit to enter Paradise. Origen writes that to add a new sin to one already committed is the same as adding a fresh wound to a wound already there: Cum peccatum peccato adjicitur, sicut vulnus vulneri—“When sin is added to sin, it is like wound added to wound” (Hom. 1 on the Psalms).
If a wound is inflicted on any member of the body, that member surely loses its first vigor; but if it then receives a second wound, it loses all strength and all motion, with no hope of recovery. This is the great harm a relapse into sin brings: it leaves the soul so weak that she has little strength left to resist temptation. For St. Thomas says: Remissa culpa remanent dispositiones ex praecedentibus actis causatae—“After the fault has been remitted, the dispositions produced by the preceding acts remain” (Summa I, q. 86, a. 5). Every sin, though pardoned, always leaves the wound made by the earlier fault; and when a new wound is added to the old, the soul is left so weakened that, without a special and extraordinary grace from God, it is impossible for her to overcome temptation.
8. Let us, then, brethren, tremble at the thought of relapsing into sin, and let us beware of using the mercy of God as an excuse to go on offending him. “He,” says St. Augustine, “who has promised pardon to the penitent, has promised repentance to no one.” God has indeed promised pardon to whoever repents of his sin, but he has promised no one the grace to repent of the sin he has committed. Sorrow for sin is a pure gift of God; if he withholds it, how will you repent? And without repentance, how can you be pardoned?
Ah, the Lord will not let himself be mocked. “Be not deceived,” says St. Paul, “God is not mocked” (Gal. 6:7). St. Isidore tells us that the man who repeats the sin he once detested is not a penitent, but a scoffer at God. Irrisor, et non poenitens est, qui adhuc agit, quod poenitet—“He is a mocker, and not a penitent, who still does that for which he claims to repent” (On the Supreme Good). And Tertullian well says that where no amendment is seen, it is a sign that the repentance was not true. Ubi emendatio nulla, poenitentia nulla—“Where there is no amendment, there is no repentance” (On Penance).
9. “Be penitent,” St. Peter preached, “and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19). Many repent, but are not converted. They feel a certain regret for their disordered lives, but do not truly turn back to God. They go to confession, strike their breasts, and promise to amend; but they do not make a firm resolution to change their lives. Those who firmly resolve to change persevere, or at least keep themselves a long time in the grace of God. But those who relapse soon after confession show, as St. Peter says, that they have repented but are not converted; and such persons will in the end die an unhappy death.
St. Gregory says: Plerumque mali sic compunguntur ad justitiam, sicut plerumque boni tentantur ad culpam—“For the most part the wicked are pricked toward justice in the same way that the good are tempted toward fault” (Pastoral Rule, p. 3, admon. 31). He means that, as the just often feel certain impulses to evil but do not sin by them, because their will abhors them, so sinners feel certain impulses to good; but these do not suffice to produce a true conversion.
The Wise Man warns us that mercy will be shown, not to the one who merely confesses his sins, but to the one who confesses them and forsakes them. “He that shall confess his sins, and forsake them, shall obtain mercy” (Prov. 28:13). Whoever, then, does not forsake sin after confession, but returns to it, will not obtain the divine mercy, but will die a victim of divine justice—as happened to a certain young man in England, according to the English history. He was a relapsing sinner in matters of impurity: he would confess, and always fall back again. At last he came to die, confessed once more, and seemed to die with signs of salvation. But while a holy priest was celebrating, or about to celebrate, Mass for his soul, the miserable young man appeared to him and told him that he was damned. He told him, moreover, that at the point of death, being tempted by an evil thought, he felt himself as it were forced to consent; and, as he had done all his life, he consented, and so was lost.
10. Is there, then, no remedy for the salvation of the relapsing sinner? I do not say that; but I say what the physicians say, according to their maxim: In magnis morbis a magnis initium medendi sumere oportet—“In great diseases one must begin the cure with great remedies.” Grave illnesses need powerful remedies. To put himself on the path of salvation, the relapsing sinner must do great violence to himself. “The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away” (Matt. 11:12).
Especially at the beginning of his new life, the relapsing sinner must do violence to himself, to root out the bad habits he has contracted and acquire good ones; for once the good habit is formed, the keeping of the divine commands will become easy, and even sweet. The Lord once told St. Bridget that, for those who bear with fortitude the first prickings of the thorns they feel in the assaults of the senses—in having to flee occasions of sin and to break off dangerous conversations—those thorns are in time changed into roses.
11. But to carry this out and lead an ordered life, you must take the proper means; otherwise you will accomplish nothing. On rising in the morning, make acts of thanksgiving, of love of God, and of offering of the works of that day. In particular, renew your resolution never to offend God, and pray to Jesus Christ and his holy Mother to keep you from sin that day. Then make your meditation, and afterwards hear Mass. During the day make a spiritual reading and a visit to the most holy Sacrament. In the evening say the Rosary and make an examination of conscience.
Receive Holy Communion at least once a week, or more often according to the advice of your director, whom you should keep to steadily. It is also very useful to make a spiritual retreat each year in some religious house. Honor the Mother of God every day by some particular devotion, and by fasting on Saturday. Most holy Mary is called the Mother of perseverance, and she promises it to those who serve her. “They that work by me shall not sin” (Ecclus. 24:30).
Above all, you must ask of God, from the morning on, the gift of perseverance, and beg the Blessed Virgin to obtain it for you, especially in time of temptation, by invoking then the names of Jesus and Mary as long as the temptation lasts. Happy the man who will continue to act in this way, and who, so doing, shall be found by Jesus Christ when he comes to judge him. “Blessed is that servant, whom, when his Lord shall come, he shall find so doing” (Matt. 24:46).
Points for Reflection
1. “Let us, then, not trust in our own resolutions: if we place our confidence in them, we shall be lost. When we are tempted to relapse, we must place all our confidence in the help of God, who never fails to hear the one who prays to him” (§2)
2. “On rising in the morning, make acts of thanksgiving, of love of God, and of offering of the works of that day. In particular, renew your resolution never to offend God, and pray to Jesus Christ and his holy Mother to keep you from sin that day” (§11)
3. “Above all, you must ask of God, from the morning on, the gift of perseverance, and beg the Blessed Virgin to obtain it for you, especially in time of temptation, by invoking then the names of Jesus and Mary as long as the temptation lasts” (§11)