Peccavi Nimis Cogitatione, Verbo et Opere: A Note on Sin

In the Catholic liturgy, during the Penitential Act at the start of mass, a prayer is read called the Confiteor (“I Confess”). In that prayer is the line peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere which means “I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed.”

I have sinned. We are all sinners. But…this leaves a question. What is sin? What does it mean to sin? Like many of the theological concepts presented in the biblical story, this is very much a diamond with many facets. Can any one person explain in such as way as to, in the phrasing of the phenomenologists, capture all sides of the idea? I don’t know. I know I cannot. I can, however, discuss one side which I find particularly relevant and which makes sense to me.

From origins to eschatology, the biblical library focuses on orientation towards God as the primary objective for mankind. It is in the radical shift of orientation from human concerns to God that man is properly construed. This is an idea that has permeated every level of society. We see it in quotes from Mike Tyson where he says “I’m going to try to reach the stars. If I miss, I’ll land on the moon” or in Pinocchio when Geppetto wishes upon a star. What does it mean to wish upon a star? We all know. Why does it make sense? That’s a harder question.

In some ways it is helpful to think of God as a receding horizon. The move is something like this: what do you want? You want what’s best, right? That makes sense. But do you know what’s best? Of course not. So what do you aim at? You aim at the highest point. You wish upon a star. Yes, it is true that you can’t see it because it is an ever receding horizon, but you do your best. You aim for the highest.

What is the best way to fail? Well, you can fail to specify an aim. If you don’t specify your aim, your chances of getting what you want are pretty close to zero. But then you are left to ask what is your aim. Again, your aim should be the best. That is to say, God or the kingdom of heaven. Another good way to fail is to aim at the wrong thing. This is what Jesus points to as a mistake in the sermon on the mount when he says “therefore do not worry, saying “what shall we eat? or “what shall we drink” or “what shall we wear”…….but seek first the kingdom of God in his righteousness, and these things will be added unto you”( Matthew 6:31-32). We always want to keep our aim at what is highest. The biblical hypothesis revolves around human orientation towards God.

Here, at the end of paradise, with Adam and Eve walking towards an uncertain future in a harsh world, they are no longer walking with God. The world is no longer paradisal, it is a world in which we need proper orientation and a world in which there is sin.

So, what is sin?

I know the stock answer. Sin is when you do something bad or something wrong. But, I mean, really? We can’t do a little better than that? Why is sin wrong? What is wrong? Let’s actually think about sin in its biblical context. To do this we have to look back to the words written by the biblical authors. However, before we do I think it is important to point something out. The human being is built on a hunting platform. The way we approach the world is to specify an aim and then work towards its attainment. It doesn’t matter if that aim is a mammoth we are hunting, a house we are driving to or a job we are trying to get. Human beings are aiming creatures. It bears mentioning that there is a mountain of scientific research showing that the dopamine cycle has its greatest release when we actively and successfully pursue a goal, not when we attain one. We are hunters. That is the low resolution pattern of our being. Everything else needs to be understood in light of that.

The authors of the Old Testament knew this and it is imbued in every page of every book. In fact, the Hebrew word for the first five Books of Moses is Torah. Torah means instruction or teaching. But words in Hebrew are an interesting thing. Torah has a verbal root, the word yarah. The Hebrew verb (or verbal root) yarah means “to instruct” but also it means “to shoot” and “to aim.” If nothing else I write anywhere on this website sticks with you let the one thing be this: the authors of the Torah don’t use words accidentally.

Now that Adam and Eve are in the world, paradise behind them, they have to have an aim and they have to sacrifice. The biblical moral hypothesis is that if you set your aim (Torah) properly, towards the kingdom of heaven, and you make the proper sacrifices, things will work out as best they can for you. This isn’t a  promise of a yacht or relief from chronic pain, it’s an invitation to the cross…something we will discuss in detail in the future.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at the biblical notion of sin, first by looking at what the word means.

The word in the Old Testament Hebrew for sin is chet (Heb: חטא) What does chet mean. Chet is an archery term in Hebrew which means “to miss the mark.” I find that the more I think about this the more sense it makes, especially considering the word Torah can mean “to take aim.” What else would be considered improper action for a primate built on a hunting platform which needs to set an aim? Of course it is to miss the mark.

The earliest Greek translation of the seventy books of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, renders the Hebrew word chet, with (h)amartia (Gr: αμαρτία) which is the Greek archery term for missing the bullseye. Thus, the word we know as “sin” maintained  the metaphoric notion of missing the mark from the Hebrew to the Greek and this is the same Greek word used in the New Testament.

Further, when chet and (h)amartia are rendered into Latin, the language of Rome and of the Catholic Church, it becomes peccare (as in the prayer Confiteor) which also means to miss the mark. The metaphor gets preserved from the Hebrew through the Greek and into the Latin. What is fantastic is that while this doesn’t translate into the German, French or Italian in this manner, the translation of chet and (h)amartia into the English word “sin” maintains this archery connection. For instance, in renaissance archery records we frequently see “sinned thrice” which would be our equivalent of three strikes and you’re out but for archery rather than baseball. Whether the English word “sin” was an archery term prior to the biblical translation into English is a matter which scholars debate, but regardless of the order that it happened in, the archery metaphor remains in English today.

Just to break the third wall a bit here, I think that that is really cool.

So why are we going over this?

For a few reasons.

Firstly, we are about to get to the postlapsarian world and the biblical focus will be, in large part, on proper orientation towards God and how sin is a missing of that ideal (for one reason or another). Second, I want to continually hammer home here…at the real start of the meat and potatoes of the biblical exegesis….that the casual and colloquial way we use words often undermines their original meaning. As my dear friend and mentor Peter Manchester once told me with regard to reading Empedocles, having a good working knowledge of the original language isn’t an important thing…it’s the only thing.

That chet and (h)amartia are archery terms for “missing the mark” and that Torah has a verbal root that means “to take aim” is not an accident. These words were chosen and written with great care. If the authors used an archery term to describe the falling short of a moral ideal they didn’t do it casually or accidentally. The metaphor is there for a reason and I argue that this reason will permeate all of the stories to come and find its absolute peak explication in the Sermon on the Mount.

We are investigating a series of ancient books written over the course of a thousand years in languages that the majority of readers do not know and speaking about them in a language that didn’t exist at the time of their writing. I think one of the

primary problems with misunderstandings of biblical texts comes from the casual use of words. If we say, for instance, that Moses sins when he strikes the rock and as such was barred from the promised land, how can we possibly even begin to figure out what that means if we don’t even know what the word sin means as it was written three thousand years ago. These stories are complicated enough on their own, we need to be willing to get our hands dirty and look hard at these ancient texts and, to the best of our abilities, mitigate the language issues.

I want to leave you with this final thought to hold on to as we begin to move through the biblical stories. The Scientific Revolution which began in earnest in 1620 with Bacon’s publishing of his Novum Organum in which he lays out the scientific method, was a radical departure from the narrative based interaction with the world and represents what I call here an epoch eclipse.

The scientific method, in short, was a way of studying the material world abstracted from the subjectivity of man. By eliminating the human component, the world was able to be scrutinized in a way that, over the next four hundred years would result in technological wonders that even Bacon’s wildest dreams could not envision. However, something would be lost in this scientific method. Our knowledge of the material world grew exponentially and as a result the knowledge of our humanity started to fade.

But 2500 years prior to the scientific method when these stories were being written down and for the ten thousand years prior to that where they were passed, generation to generation, as an oral tradition it was narrative, not scientific notation, that was the hallmark of our understanding of the world. While things like rockets to the moon would likely not come out of a narrative based ontology, there was an understanding about human beings that was deeper than we have now…maybe deeper than we can imagine. For all we’ve gained in our new epistemic interaction with the world, what we have lost left us with our modern crisis of meaning. This idea of aim and the archery metaphor for sin is not a hallmark cliche. It needs to be considered with no less seriousness than equations like E = mc^2. 

These ideas represent thousands of years of groups of absolute geniuses using the epistemological tools of their epoch to describe the world. The modern inclination to hallmark card these things will lead only to poor understanding. There is something in these stories that our ancient ancestors understood and it is high time we put aside the arrogance of the modern world which suggests that only in the objectivity of science is truth to be found, and try to understand what they are telling us on their terms…not ours. As we do this, I believe we will find that what they discovered about the world in their epistemological epoch fits very well with what we have learned in the modern world and it is only a matter of translation that makes it seem otherwise. Remember, the books that make up the Bible are not offering us advice, they are a description of reality explained through narrative.

So the fall of man has occurred and paradise is lost. Now we are in this messy world and it is our job to learn how to live. Learning how to live is intrinsically tied to learning what to properly aim at and sin is when that target is missed either through our fault in actions or in our fault in target specification. Living will require designating the correct target and making the proper sacrifices to reach it. In our next essay we will recap where we are and lay out the plans for the future. Play time is over, now we get serious.