HistoricalChristian.Faith

Are all sins equal? (the gravity of sins)

The Stoics held that all wrongdoing is equal — that a man who needlessly kills a chicken does no smaller wrong than one who strangles his father, since what makes a fault a fault is the departure from right reason, and a departure is a departure. Christianity rejected the thesis with unusual unanimity, and yet it had to reject it while holding a verse that appears to teach it: “whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all” (James 2:10). This timeline follows both halves of that job. One line, running from Clement of Alexandria through Tertullian, Cyprian and Bede, builds the positive doctrine of graded sin out of 1 John 5:16–17 and its “sin unto death”; the other, running from Jerome’s Against Jovinianus through Augustine’s Letter 167 to Aquinas’s article on whether all sins are equal, disposes of the parity thesis and explains James. The two meet in Bede and end in the scholastic distinction between mortal and venial sin.

The stakes are not academic. A church that cannot grade sins cannot grade penance, and every witness here who attacks the parity thesis does so in a pastoral quarrel — Cyprian against Novatianist rigour toward the lapsed, Ambrose against the Novatianists at Milan, Jerome against Jovinian’s levelling of merit and reward. The doctrine of a purgation after death proportioned to what remains unpurged presupposes the same grading: see purgatory.

Timeline

Cicero (c. 46 BC)

Cicero is the channel by which the Stoic thesis omnia peccata paria reached the Latin West, and he reports it twice with opposite intent. In the courtroom he sets it out to be laughed at: Zeno’s followers hold “that all offenses are equal; that every sin is an unpardonable crime; and that he does not commit a less crime who kills a cock if there was no need to do so, than the man who strangles his father.”¹ In the Paradoxa Stoicorum he defends a weakened version of it under the heading “that all misdeeds are in themselves equal,” arguing that “crimes are not to be measured by the issue of events, but from the bad intentions of men.”² The cock-and-father pair is what travels: Ambrose’s “common fowl” and Bede’s stolen chicken are the same bird, four and eight centuries downstream.

4 Maccabees (c. AD 40)

4 Maccabees, a Greek Jewish martyrdom-homily written in Stoic categories, puts the parity principle in the mouth of the priest Eleazar refusing to eat pork: “to transgress the law in matters either small or great is of equal seriousness, for in either case the law is equally despised.”³ The reason given is not that the acts weigh the same but that the law is equally set at nought — the same ground James supplies at 2:11 — which makes this the closest datable parallel to “guilty of all” and shows the idiom was already at home in Greek-speaking Judaism.

Clement of Alexandria (c. 200)

Clement is the earliest Christian witness surveyed here to state that Scripture teaches degrees of sin, and he does it without polemic and without naming the Stoics: “John, too, manifestly teaches the differences of sins, in his larger Epistle,” quoting the sin unto death and the sin not unto death of 1 John 5:16–17.⁴ The argument is purely exegetical: if John gives two classes different remedies, the classes differ.

Tertullian (c. 210)

Tertullian hardens the same text into a two-class division and puts it to disciplinary use: the sin not unto death “will be remissible,” the sin unto death “will be irremissible” — and since John withholds even prayer from the second, so may the church.⁵ He is thus a witness against parity who is simultaneously the origin of the rigorism that Cyprian and Ambrose will have to fight, and he backs the refusal by appeal to Jeremiah’s prohibited intercession.⁶

Cyprian (252)

Cyprian is the first here to name the parity thesis as a philosophers’ doctrine and set it outside the faith. Writing to a bishop wavering toward Novatian about how to receive the lapsed: “The principle of the philosophers and stoics is different, dearest brother, who say that all sins are equal … But there is a wide difference between Christians and philosophers” — and he files it under the “philosophy and vain deceit” of Colossians 2:8.⁷ The reason it matters is medical: a doctrine that admits no degrees of injury can prescribe no degrees of treatment, and the wounded are to be reckoned “lying half alive,” not dead.⁸

Ambrose of Milan (c. 384)

Ambrose charges the Novatianists with reasoning “after the fashion of the Stoics,” holding that “he who has stolen a common fowl, as they say, no less than he who has smothered his father, should be for ever excluded from the divine mysteries” — and turns it into a reductio: on a doctrine where no sin is graver than another, they have no principled ground for singling out apostasy as the one unforgivable offence.⁹ The fowl and the smothered father are Cicero’s pair, and Ambrose’s “as they say” marks the tag as received: the Latin refutation of parity is being conducted partly in the words of the Latin who transmitted it.

Jerome (393)

Jerome wrote what antiquity treated as the refutation of the parity thesis — Book II of Against Jovinianus, seventeen chapters of scriptural argument for graded merit, guilt, and reward, from the thirtyfold and hundredfold of the sower to Christ’s word that another had “the greater sin” than Pilate.¹⁰ His charge is that Jovinian “in the distribution of rewards and punishments … all at once becomes a Stoic. He exchanges Jerusalem for Citium, Judaea for Cyprus, Christ for Zeno.”¹¹ But the four propositions Jerome himself lists before the polemic begins do not include the parity of sins — the fourth is “that there is one reward in the kingdom of heaven for all who have kept their baptismal vow.”¹² Twenty-three years later, asked by Augustine to expound James 2:10, Jerome praised the request and declined it: “a most trying time has come upon us, in which I have found it better for me to hold my peace than to speak.”¹³

Augustine of Hippo (415)

Augustine gave the question its fullest patristic treatment, a treatise-length letter to Jerome on James 2:10 alone. He takes the parity thesis as already refuted — “the Stoics alone dared to maintain [it] in opposition to the unanimous sentiments of mankind”¹⁴ — and denies that even the Stoics’ best argument would reach it: granting for the sake of argument that the virtues are inseparable, “it by no means follows that among bad actions one cannot be worse than another.”¹⁵ Against the Stoic image of a man equally drowned an inch or a mile below the surface he sets a man walking out of a cave into gradually increasing light — so that “no one lives here wholly without sin — one sins more, another less, and the best is the man who sins least.”¹⁶ His solution to the verse: one becomes guilty of all “because he does what is contrary to the love on which hangs the whole law,” while “the transgression of the law of love is greater in him who commits a more grievous sin.”¹⁷ The same love-criterion sorts 1 John’s two classes: the sin unto death is settled hatred of the brotherhood — with the caution, added later, that no living man is to be despaired of.¹⁸

Gregory the Dialogist (c. 591)

Gregory supplies the image that carried the moral point into medieval preaching without any of the exegetical apparatus: righteousness is a garment, and “he that is just in some deeds and unjust in others, it is as if he covered over this side, and exposed that one naked; nor are those henceforth good deeds, which are defiled by other evil deeds springing up.”¹⁹ He does not draw a parity conclusion from it, and could not: his own penitential theology, and the purgation after death he transmits to the West, are built on grading sins.

Bede (c. 716)

Bede is where the two strands knit together, handling both proof-texts in one commentary. On James 2:10 he reproduces Augustine’s solution and Augustine’s answer to the parity objection in a single breath — guilty of all “because the fullness of the law is love … upon which commandments of love the whole law and the prophets depend,” yet sins are unequal because “he acts more against charity who sins more gravely, and less who sins lightly.”²⁰ On 1 John 5:17 he calls the Stoic parity an “inept argument … against all human sense” and states in his own words the distinction the schoolmen would formalise: small sins “without which this life cannot be lived,” and sins which “unless they are corrected, lead their perpetrator to eternal punishment.”²¹ The grading is by then a rubric as well as a doctrine: light sins are confessed to a brother, graver ones brought before the elders of the church.²²

Theophylact of Ohrid (c. 1100)

Theophylact states the mature Greek reading, reaching Augustine’s destination by another road: “whoever sins in one thing becomes guilty of all, because he does not have perfect love, for love is the head of all that is good, and when the head is absent, the entire remaining body amounts to nothing.” He adds an argument Augustine does not use — on any harder reading “no one among men would survive, because no one keeps all the commandments.”²³ And he anchors the reading textually: James’s two examples are chosen because “whoever loves his neighbor will neither commit adultery nor murder.”²⁴ Substantially the same exposition stands in the commentary circulating under the name of Oecumenius.²⁵

Bonaventure (c. 1267)

Bonaventure answers James 2:10 with a distinction the fathers had not drawn: the man who offends in one point is “not … punished with as much punishment of sense as for the transgression of all; but he will be punished with as much punishment of loss, yet not as severely for one as for all.”²⁶ “Guilty of all” is thus true in one currency of punishment and false in the other — Augustine’s shape of answer, with the universality relocated from the object violated to the penalty incurred.

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1270)

Aquinas gives the thesis a formal article and names its pedigree: “The opinion of the Stoics, which Cicero adopts in the book on Paradoxes (Paradox. iii), was that all sins are equal: from which opinion arose the error of certain heretics, who not only hold all sins to be equal, but also maintain that all the pains of hell are equal.”²⁷ His diagnosis is the sharpest anyone offers: the Stoics treated sin as a pure privation, like death or darkness, which admits of no more or less, whereas sin is the other kind, like sickness, which “retains something of the opposite habit” — for a fault which destroyed the order of reason entirely would destroy the act along with it.²⁸ He then supplies what the fathers lacked, a principle ordering the grades: gravity rises with the object, so that murder is graver than theft and sins directly against God graver still.²⁹ The development ends where Bede pointed, in the formal treatment of mortal and venial sin.³⁰

Arguments

Related arguments — “guilty of all”

Three readings of the same eight words at James 2:10. The first takes the verse to flatten the gravity of sins; the second and third accept that it does not, and disagree about what grounds the total liability it does assert — the love-command James invokes at 2:8, or the single Lawgiver he invokes at 2:11.

Does James 2:10 teach that all sins are equal? (assessment: weak)

The parity reading — the verse does say a single offence makes a man liable with respect to the whole, and the idiom has a Hellenistic-Jewish home in 4 Maccabees; but enochos is forensic vocabulary about standing, the reason James gives in the next verse is the identity of the Lawgiver rather than the equivalence of acts, and his own “in many things we offend all” would on this reading make every reader a murderer.³¹

Is “guilty of all” explained by the love-command on which the whole law hangs? (assessment: plausible)

The love reading — Augustine’s solution, adopted by Bede and paralleled in the Greek tradition. Its strength is contextual: James names the royal love-command two verses earlier, and both his examples are neighbour-directed. Its cost is that the middle term is supplied — where James explains the liability, he appeals to the one who spoke both commandments, not to the love on which they hang; “all the law and the prophets hang” on love is Christ’s formula and “love is the fulfilling of the law” is Paul’s.³²

Is “guilty of all” grounded in the unity of the law and the one Lawgiver? (assessment: sound)

The unity-of-the-law reading — to break any part of a law given by one Lawgiver is to become a lawbreaker, and the law broken is the whole law, because there is only one. It takes v. 11’s stated reason as the reason, matches the forensic vocabulary running through 2:9–11, and has an attested Jewish parallel that gives the same ground. Thinner than the patristic reading — it settles the verse without settling how sins are weighed — but it is the most probable primary sense.³³

Did Jovinian teach that all sins are equal? (assessment: contested)

The charge against Jovinian — strong by the lights of what his doctrine implies, weak by the lights of what he is recorded as holding. His equal-recompense thesis is verified in his own quoted words and does flatten the consequences of sins; that he held the parity of gravity as a doctrine is Jerome’s construction upon it, absent from Jerome’s own list of the four propositions, and repeated afterwards by Augustine, Bede and Aquinas on Jerome’s authority alone.³⁴

Sources