Spiritual Sunday
Today’s Gospel reading includes Jesus’s pronouncement about “the eternal sin” ((Mark 3:30), which some people call “the unpardonable sin” or “the unforgivable sin.” It’s a concept that fascinated Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The passage reads,
Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.
Jesus says something comparable in Matthew 12:31-32:
And so I tell you, every kind of sin and slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.
As I understand the process, given that God enters out hearts in the form of the Holy Spirit, we essentially kill God if we harden our hearts because we deny God entrance. Under normal circumstances, our sins are forgivable because our hearts can soften and we can repent. But the process must start with the heart, without which nothing else is possible. That is why, in a poem like “The Altar,” George Herbert compares his heart to a stone and prays to God to soften it:
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Christophere Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, by contrast, revels in the fact that “my heart’s so harden’d, I cannot repent.” When one is proud that one has killed the god within, one had cut oneself off from divinity.
One sees this pride in Hawthorne’s Ethan Brand, who goes out in search of “the unpardonable sin” and returns years later to give his account of having found it:
It is a sin that grew within my own breast,” replied Ethan Brand, standing erect with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp. “A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims! The only sin that deserves a recompense of immortal agony! Freely, were it to do again, would I incur the guilt. Unshrinkingly I accept the retribution!”
Brand notes the intellectual component to the eternal sin. In an act of pride–notice Brand’s defiant boast–the mind overrides any of those precious feelings we associate with being human, such as compassion, empathy, and “the sense of botherhood with man.” When we take pride in overriding what is best about being human, we—well—override what is best about being human.
Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter also appears to sin against the Holy Spirit. In this he differs from Dimmesdale and Hester, who only sin against God. The almost dispassionate way that Chillingworth toys with Dimmesdale’s guilt makes him an utter monster.
Hawthorne’s Richard Digby, meanwhile, is a “Man of Adamant” whose sense of righteous superiority over all other humans prompts him to retreat into the woods, where he prays incessantly. When a young woman whom he once converted, Mary Golfe, comes out to plead with him to return to humanity, he spurns her:
“Perverse woman!” answered Richard Digby, laughing aloud,—for he was moved to bitter mirth by her foolish vehemence,—“I tell thee that the path to heaven leadeth straight through this narrow portal where I sit. And, moreover, the destruction thou speakest of is ordained, not for this blessed cave, but for all other habitations of mankind, throughout the earth. Get thee hence speedily, that thou mayst have thy share!”
Later they have this interchange:
“Richard,” she said, with passionate fervor, yet a gentleness in all her passion, “I pray thee, by thy hope of heaven, and as thou wouldst not dwell in this tomb forever, drink of this hallowed water, be it but a single drop! Then, make room for me by thy side, and let us read together one page of that blessed volume; and, lastly, kneel down with me and pray! Do this, and thy stony heart shall become softer than a babe’s, and all be well.”
But Richard Digby, in utter abhorrence of the proposal, cast the Bible at his feet, and eyed her with such a fixed and evil frown, that he looked less like a living man than a marble statue, wrought by some dark-imagined sculptor to express the most repulsive mood that human features could assume. And, as his look grew even devilish, so, with an equal change did Mary Goffe become more sad, more mild, more pitiful, more like a sorrowing angel. But, the more heavenly she was, the more hateful did she seem to Richard Digby, who at length raised his hand, and smote down the cup of hallowed water upon the threshold of the cave, thus rejecting the only medicine that could have cured his stony heart. A sweet perfume lingered in the air for a moment, and then was gone.
“Tempt me no more, accursed woman,” exclaimed he, still with his marble frown, “lest I smite thee down also! What hast thou to do with my Bible?—what with my prayers?—what with my heaven?”
At that point Digby’s heart ceases to beat and Hawtorne tells us that
the form of Mary Goffe melted into the last sunbeams, and returned from the sepulchral cave to heaven. For Mary Golfe had been buried in an English churchyard, months before; and either it was her ghost that haunted the wild forest, or else a dream-like spirit, typifying pure Religion.
Those who glory in their triumph over the heart have blotted out their souls. While technically they could repent—God, after all, cannot be killed—their sin is unforgivable because they won’t allow it to be forgiven.