Inordinate Concupiscence

In the Summa Theologica, colloquially known as the Summa of All Fears, Aquinas inquired whether drunkenness was a sin and, if so, whether it was a mortal sin. It all depends. Drunkenness as the “the defect itself of a man resulting from his drinking much wine, the consequence being that he loses the use of reason” is not a sin at all but a “penal defect resulting from a fault.” This is only the beginning of the inquiry, of course, because drunkenness may also denote “the act by which a man incurs this defect,” and this act can happen in two ways: by accident (“though the wine being too strong, without the drinker being cognizant of this”) or with all deliberation (“from inordinate concupiscence and use of wine”).

In short, if you have no reason to be aware you’re drinking the hard stuff, or if someone spikes your drink, you’re in the clear, but if you drink to get drunk it’s a sin. It is, in fact, “comprised under gluttony as a species under its genus.”

So is it a venial (forgivable) or a mortal (dead soul) one? Again, it depends, this time on whether the drinker “perceives the drink to be immoderate, but without knowing it to be intoxicating,” in which case it’s venial, or whether the drinker is “well aware that the drink is immoderate and intoxicating, and yet he would rather be drunk than abstain from drink,” in which case you might want to get to a priest before taking any further risks.

This is a distinction with a big difference. Unless remitted by prayer, contrition, fervent communion, and other pious works, venial sin “lessens the fervor of charity,” “displeases God,” and obliges the sinner “to temporal punishment in either this life or in Purgatory.” Forgiveness of mortal sin, on the other hand, is a matter of greater urgency: absent a conversion of heart through the Sacrament of Confession to reinstate the grace obtained through the Sacrament of Baptism, the penalty is suffering which “may be inflicted in this life through the medium of medicinal punishments, calamities, sickness, temporal evils, which tend to withdraw from sin; or it may be inflicted in the life to come.” The suffering is twofold: the pain of loss (pæna damni) and the pain of sense (pæna sensus). Neither is likely to be much fun. As the Catholic Encyclopedia succinctly states: “One mortal sin suffices to incur punishment. (See HELL.)”




Purgatory is for the just, those who die in venial sin or who still owe a debt of a temporal punishment for sin and need cleansing by suffering before admission to heaven. The Ancient Greeks might still be there, and, while the processing prescribed is painful, you get to graduate, so one can picture it as a kind of university. Think of it (albeit as your feet are fried) as taking a course in Aquinas. In Hell, however, “the torments of the damned shall last forever and ever (Revelation 14:11, 19:3; 20:10)” And it’s all Hieronymus Bosch, third panel, all the time.

Over a period of twenty years, I moved with all due speed from the occasional penal defect to unabated inordinate concupiscence. And now I’m trying to get out from under the genus. An agnostic, perhaps, here I am in a kind of purgatory after all, reading Aquinas.