Are Evil Thoughts Sin in Orthodoxy?
Note: This article is an automatically generated transcript of an audio lecture. It was transcribed and lightly reworded for readability using automated tools, so it does not reproduce the speaker’s exact words. For the original, listen to the recording linked below.
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Key takeaways:
- Evil thoughts are temptations, not sins unless they are welcomed and consented to
- Conversing with a tempting thought gives it power and begins the path to sin
- Repeated consent builds habit that enslaves the soul to passion and unconscious sin
- Christ treats thought and deed as belonging to the same moral arena
Thoughts Determine Our Lives
It seems so much of our struggle is in our thoughts in the mind.
Is the appearance of a bad thought in the mind—Is that a sin? It's a wonderful question.
And yes, our thoughts determine our lives. There's a wonderful book on the life of Elder Thaddeus with that title, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives. Many of the saints say this: our whole spiritual life is, as it were, reducible to the level of thought, because from thought proceeds words and deeds.
Christ himself gave us this framework for thinking about things. He said, "out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, and so on." When he gave his commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, you heard it said, don't do this, but I say to you, "Don't do this, but I say to you, even the thought of that is on the path." It is in the same arena as the deed itself. So yes, first, our thoughts do determine our lives, but you asked...
Evil Thoughts and Sin
Is a thought in your mind a sin? Yes. A negative thought, an evil thought: this is a temptation, an assault, but not itself a sin. We can take comfort in this, I think, because many grow rather anxious when evil thoughts come and think that it must mean they are. But we are not necessarily our thoughts. Remember that even in the garden, Adam didn't fall until he accepted a thought. The thought itself was not the issue. And St. Mark the Ascetic tells us that "a bad thought in someone who destroys it is a sign of love for God and not a sin."
Could you say that again, nice and slow, so I can remember it?
"A bad thought in the one who destroys it is a sign of love for God and not a sin."
This is a very comforting word, I think, for people who are in disarray when evil thoughts come and they don't want that to be what they do. But without knowing how these things work, it can lead to destruction. So no, evil thoughts are not of us unless and until we welcome them and make them our own.
The Process from Temptation to Enslavement
What is that process? You've spoken about the process, the steps by which an evil thought becomes a sin in our life. Yes. Again, my beloved St. Mark the Ascetic, St. Mark the monk, was the first to provide the kind of mechanism for this process of temptation, which the fathers took up. St. John Climacus, for instance, uses this. It's a five-step program. It begins with assault, the temptation, the first sign of an evil thought. It then moves into a kind of momentary disturbance as the second step. At these first two steps, we do not have sin.
But what happens next? We converse with it. This is the beginning of the end, especially for those who are not free of the passions. We do not have the strength to converse without harm with such thoughts. As soon as we start chatting with the evil thought—considering it, mulling it over—we begin to defile the mind. We begin to give power and rights to the thought and to the evil one who gives the thought over us. That, then, is the third step.
The fourth step is when we do not merely talk with the thought but identify with it. We unite with it. From there we reach the fifth and lamentable stage of full consent: we unite with the thought and then do what the thought is telling us to do in word and deed. For most of us this happens far more quickly than I have described. St. Mark deliberately slows it down to give us a clear picture, because temptation is often pushed into hyperspeed from thought to sin.
He explains that, in principle, there is a large distance between the thought itself and our sinning. But the more we sin, the more we predispose ourselves to sin. We pave the highway; we make it smooth and quick. The more we train up our predisposition, the more we train up a habit, a bad habit, an evil habit—habit, as St. Basil says, is second nature. We end up enslaving ourselves to passion. This ongoing building up of predisposition to evil enslaves us to a passion such that we then sin without even knowing it. That is why, in the prayers of the church, we often ask for forgiveness for sins witting and unwitting, known and unknown. How could they be unknown, unwitting? Well, because we're acknowledging that we have these.
Habit, Enslavement, and Unconscious Sin
Passions—these enslavements—make it so we don't even know we're sinning anymore. That's true even if, technically, the process always involves an assault and that whole thing is happening. It becomes unconscious in us because of our slavery to passion.
