In his President’s Report three years ago, Jack Mahoney considered whether a theologian’s relation to the episcopate should not be more like that of artist to patron than mandarin to minister, and he ended by suggesting that ‘part of the role of our Association is ... to have a sacramental function’ within the local Church, both reflecting on our common faith and aiming to communicate that reflection.

During the past year, a series of in themselves apparently unconnected developments convinced me that it might be helpful as part of our fulfilment of the tasks which Jack indicated, if we were to set aside an hour for their consideration. The developments that I have in mind may be listed under seven headings:

1. 1. First, and most diffusely, I sense a growing thirst, on the part of Catholic laypeople, for continuing theological (and especially biblical) education—the impetus for which comes variously from parental responsibility, from questions of justice and peace, increasingly (I think) from concern for creation and, most generally, from the recognition that, in an ever more barbarous and philistine society, only faith appropriated and purified through prayer and shared reflection can hope to stand.

2. 2. Secondly, there is a disturbing tendency towards polarisation in our perception of the relationship between ‘form’ and ‘content’ in religious education. This is surely an area which cries out for improvement in the quality of dialogue and collaboration between bishops, catechists, and theologians.

3. 3. Thirdly, the ‘Cologne Declaration’ signed in January by 163 theologians from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, was followed by statements from theologians in France, Belgium, Italy and Brazil.

Such a topic as this raises problems. Both Judaism and Christianity consist of a spectrum of organisations loosely associated with each other within a broad tradition, rather than neat, consistent, homogeneous religions. There is also the problem of understanding the thinking of people living in past eras and other cultures, especially as religions tend to behave as if events and experiences from the distant past—complete with detailed laws—still apply with all the force of divine authority. It will be an achievement just to identify a credible method for handling a topic such as this.

To start at all we must have a working definition of sin, whatever the difficulties, so the working definition is: ‘Sin is whatever is thought to ignore or defy God’s revealed will’. Some of the consequent questions are: How is God’s will revealed? What does it reveal? What constitutes defiance of it? Most of what follows looks at some of the answers given by Christians and Jews at various times. Finally, a conclusion is reached about common elements in what Jews and Christians understand by ‘sin’, and how to talk about it. Like all true mysteries, sin cannot be described comprehensively, but this does not mean that we have to retreat into silence. There is a way of talking theology which preserves integrity.

Both Jews and Christians share common ground in their belief that what Christians call the Old Testament contains the revealed will of God, even though Christians then modify their attitude towards the Old Testament in the light of what is contained in the New Testament.

The task facing a feminist theologian when asked to reflect on the legacy of St Augustine and sin is indeed daunting. For when confronting contemporary understanding of sin and guilt, it is frequently assumed that the legacy of guilt and the whole burden of responsibility for sin which women have borne in Christianity is somehow to be laid at Augustine’s door. So the problem underlying this paper is basically a historical one: how much responsibility for pessimistic views of human nature can be traced to what Augustine actually wrote and taught? Secondly, to reflect critically on Augustinian notions of sin will inevitably obscure the positive dimensions of his thought—in particular, his views on community, sacrament and Christology. For this I apologize in advance. But no one will thank me for tracing the legacy of Augustine’s teaching on sin through the anguishings of Luther and the rigorous extremism of Baius and Jansenius to the Papal encyclicals of this century. Instead, I begin by sketching sin-consciousness today. I then look briefly at Augustine’s doctrines in the context of 4th-century Christianity. Thirdly, I focus on certain threads, presumed to be the Augustinian legacy, and in the last section I look at attempts to represent ‘the sin of the world’ suggesting an alternative based on feminist psychological research.

Since my experience is probably typical of many Catholics, it might be a useful exercise to begin this paper by sharing with you my own personal journey through various understandings or paradigms of sin. I believe it has been a journey of healing, because my earlier understanding of sin was very crippling and has probably left me scarred for life.

DISOBEDIENCE is the word which captures my initial paradigm of sin. While this model presumed an internal dimension to disobedience, the external dimension loomed far more important. Psychologically ‘disobedience to authority’ was the dominant notion. This was emphasized by the fact that the gravity of the sin was often determined by the commanding or prohibiting authority. Certain actions were commanded or forbidden under pain of mortal sin. Other actions, admittedly, were regarded as mortal sins because the ‘matter’ was grave in itself. Yet even here the determination of grave matter was sometimes a matter of decision by authority—no light matter in the area of sexual sin, for instance! In my teens I once had to write out 100 times: ‘Tintinabulum vox Dei est’. That says it all! The ‘disobedience’ paradigm, in the form I absorbed it, was individualistic, act-centred and voluntarist. It offered no help in developing a capacity for moral decision-making or conscience-formation.

To begin, we need to say something in general about the cinema as a medium. To do this, let’s throw away the packaging, the ice cream, the popcorn, the advertisements. We are not dealing with television, so there are to be no advertising breaks within the film, no welcome or unwelcome intrusions from other people; we pay our money, settle in our place, the lights are lowered. We can’t escape, it is us and the film. We are in the dark or semi-dark, but around us there are others, an anonymous collectivity drawn together in the watching of a film. Film makes its appeal to a mass audience, so we laugh, we weep, we are scared, or we are just bored, with others. Afterwards we can talk about the experience, agree or disagree with the critics. Yet besides all this shared experience, those images on the screen can stir personal memories, stimulates desires, bring up from the subconscious dreams and fantasies, we can identify with the characters and with the situations. It is a way to escape from our everyday life. Like Wittgenstein, we can sit in the front row of the stalls and let the film take over, cleanse and purify us like a shower bath. It is a way in which we can indulge ourselves, let our imagination have free scope. Pope Pius XII in two allocutions in 1955, to the Italian Film Industry (June 21) and to the Congress of the International Union of Theatre Owners and Film Distributors (October 28) was eloquent about this power of the cinema to transfer the spectator to an imaginary world and so produce an effect of emancipation and liberation. Another Italian put it rather differently. Federico Fellini in his film The City of Women, recalling his visits to the cinema in his youth, shows us a row of schoolboys in the stalls who become a host of individuals in one vast bed, each fantasizing and masturbating.

Do you, when speaking informally in your own words, talk of particular other people as ‘holy’, or say you desire ‘holiness’? Christians today vary widely on this—from omission of the word ‘holiness’, through assorted hesitations, to unselfconsciously terming certain others holy and voicing a wish to be holy themselves. People may often have deep down a lot more inklings regarding holiness than commonly become explicit. But faced here with an invitation to consider how ‘our perceptions’ of holiness relate to ‘our perceptions’ of sin, it is wise to note that initial reactions on the former front as well as the latter can prove less than clear-cut. In my own case, I tend to be fairly reticent in singling out specific individuals as markedly holy, while quick—amidst theologizing—to state that all are called to holiness, and that some growth towards it is widespread.

The central ideas in this article are the possibility for humans of close relationship with God and alignment with God’s purposes; the primacy in this of God’s gracious outreach; yet the place also of human personal responsibility. These ideas lie at the heart of my account of holiness; and they help assessment of statements about holiness as ‘virtue’, or as ‘wholeness’. Notions of sin are correspondingly clarified. And light is thrown—so I think—on some issues evident during reflection on engagement within history, including in political arenas.

From biblical times onwards, ‘holiness’ has been applied to certain collective referents: specially ‘People’ and ‘Church’. ‘Sin’ terminology too has had collective referents, whether defined religiously or by other social concepts. The immediate focus of this paper is on individuals, and ascriptions of holiness or sin to them. But such focus spans not just any particular individual’s private concerns, but also the individual’s stances vis-à-vis broad social affairs and structures.

When I set out to prepare this paper I was mildly disconcerted to discover that what I had in mind had already been done, and done brilliantly, by an American nun, Sister Kathleen Hughes R.S.C.J. You will find it in Reconciliation, a collection of lectures given by American theologians at Notre Dame in 1986, and I must express my warm appreciation of its excellence and my debt to its contents for stimulating much that I now wish to say.

Sister Hughes’s argument was that any theological discussion of reconciliation should start from human experience, which she illustrates very broadly from both fiction and real life. It may be worth adding that the point applies not just to this one sacrament but to all. Every sacrament meets something lodged deeply in human instincts and widely expressed in human behaviour. It was not the sacrament that invented marriage. It was not the Eucharist that invented ritual meals celebrating the intimate bond between creator and creature, the gifts of creation, and human ties of affection. And so with the other key human experiences—entrance into life, entrance into adulthood, serious illness and death. The sacraments are not stuck into ordinary life like candles on a cake. They are the God-given, church-moulded, Christian ways of speaking to deep-seated human needs and instincts as familiar as the lines on our hand.