Mortal and Venial Sin

The Catholic distinction grades sin by what it does to the sinner rather than by how the act ranks on a scale of wickedness. Mortal sin is held to destroy charity in the heart and so to end the life of grace in a person; venial sin wounds charity without breaking it. The names carry the claim: mortale from mors, death, and veniale from venia, pardon. The text traditionally cited for the distinction is the first letter of John, which sets sin unto death beside sin that is not unto death.

What makes a particular sin mortal is stated as three conditions that must hold together. The matter must be grave, of the kind the commandments specify. The person must know that it is grave. And the consent must be deliberate. Remove any one and the sin is venial. Ignorance narrows imputability; so does a will that was overwhelmed rather than engaged, by fear, by habit, by compulsion or by the ordinary disorders of a human mind. The tradition draws the obvious conclusion and draws it firmly: no observer can pronounce on another person's state, and very often the person acting cannot pronounce on their own.

Thomas Aquinas supplied the structure behind the rule. On his account mortal sin turns the will away from its last end, while venial sin leaves the end in place and disorders only the means chosen toward it. The two therefore differ in kind and not in degree, which is why the tradition holds that any number of venial sins does not accumulate into a mortal one. They are not small quantities of the same thing.

The remedies follow the diagnosis. Mortal sin is ordinarily remitted through sacramental confession and absolution, and the Council of Trent required that such sins be confessed by kind and by number. Venial sin is remitted by that route too, and also by prayer, by receiving the Eucharist and by acts of charity.

The seven deadly sins are not the mortal sins, and the two are confused constantly, including in works that ought to know better. They are different classifications answering different questions, and the atlas holds both.

The seven are capital sins, and the word is doing precise work. Capital comes from caput, a head, and they are so called because they are heads or sources from which other sins spring. Pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony and sloth are named as roots of further sin rather than as a ranked schedule of offences, and nothing about membership of that list makes an act mortal. Whether a particular flash of anger or a particular indulgence is mortal is settled by the same three conditions as any other act: grave matter, full knowledge, deliberate consent. Most instances of most of the seven fail at least one of them.

The lineage of the list also lies outside this doctrine. It descends from the eight thoughts catalogued by Evagrius Ponticus in fourth century Egypt as assaults on a monk, carried west by John Cassian and reworked by Gregory the Great, where they were diagnostic categories in an ascetic programme rather than a penitential code. That history is treated in the atlas under the Orthodox reading of sin as illness.

There is a third layer, later again, and it should not be mistaken for either. The correspondences that pair each of the seven with a planet and a commanding demon come from the Renaissance and early modern esoteric tradition, not from the theological literature. The atlas carries them on the vice entries because they are a real feature of that tradition, and they are no part of the distinction described here.

The Reformation confessions rejected the mortal and venial scheme in the form the medieval penitential system had given it, holding that every sin is of itself worthy of God's wrath, while still allowing that not every sin extinguishes faith.