I’m continuing to respond to Lindsay’s comment on Part II of this series.

At one point Lindsay says,

The body can sin, when the Ego is what is driving the “bus” but the Ego is not the true nature of the person themselves. I don’t believe that God makes junk. The soul is perfect, but an intellect that identifies itself with the Ego will miss the mark again and again.

Here Lindsay is drawing a distinction between the Ego on the one hand, and the Intellect, the Soul, and the Person on the other. Here’s what I draw from this passage:

• The Ego is not the true nature of the person.
• When the Ego is given free rein, the person cannot help but sin again and again.
• The Soul is perfect, and cannot sin, except that the Ego gets in the way.

The difficulty is that I’m not sure quite what Lindsay means by the Ego. I don’t think in Freudian categories, and I’m not at all sure the Lindsay using the word in the Freudian sense anyway. So what follows is pure conjecture on my part.

She might mean my conscious self, that is, the I that can say, “I think, therefore I am.” Alternatively, she might mean ego in the colloquial sense, i.e., arrogance and selfishness.

If she means the latter, then yes, when Ego is driving the bus, everything goes wrong. If she means the former, which is, I think, more likely, then I’m puzzled. I mean, there’s only me in here. I am a conscious agent, responsible for my actions, which I choose. I am, sadly, afflicted by a tendency to sin, and by a plethora of vices and bad habits, including a hearty serving of selfishness garnished with a dollop of arrogance. But if you get rid of that “I”, there’s nothing left of me to be moved to either vice or virtue.

I can’t allow a distinction between the “I” and the Soul, either. The soul is the form of the body: when the soul departs the body is so much meat. In one sense, everything I do is spiritual, in that my soul is involved in even the slightest movement of my little finger. But, per St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, my Intellect and Will are wholly spiritual, aspects or functions of my soul, and though I hope they are perfectible they are most assuredly not perfect as I write. (Your mileage may vary, I suppose.)

I agree that the “Ego is not the true nature of the person”, but probably not in the way that Lindsay means. I am I; it is my nature to be human. In fact, it is my nature to have an I, to have an intellect, to be rational, to have a body, to need to eat, and so on. It is not my nature to be a sinner; sin is deeply unnatural, a perversion of what we are meant to be.

Pope Benedict points out over and over again in his writings that what God wants of every creature is that it be fully itself, that it be entirely true to its God-given nature. It is in this sense that the very stones cry out with praise for God: they are most perfectly and entirely stones, just as God made them. It is our task, with Christ’s help, to be most perfectly and entirely human. It is precisely this that we fall short of when we sin. And what it means to be perfectly and entirely human is to attain our true and final end, that which will crown our lives with true happiness: union with God in the body of Christ Jesus, with Christ himself as our head, a union of love in which we become one with God while remaining wholly and completely ourselves, and wholly human.