If you make your peace, your reconciliation, or even your quarrel, with your life in this world in terms only of what you yourself presently know or can understand, you almost certainly are going to be surprised. “Life,” said Erwin Chargaff, “is the continual intervention of the inexplicable.”
By contrast with the little handful of public or newsworthy sins, the traditional lists of commandments, sins, and virtues have a human and a humanizing amplitude. They serve as a working definition of our species: Here is what is expected of us and what we are to expect of ourselves as human beings, and here are the ways we succeed or fail. The public sins, by proposing one or two things that good people don’t do, make goodness easy. But the traditional lists, by their amplitude, stand resolutely in our way. They have seen us coming. To know them, to take them seriously, measuring ourselves by them and remembering the commandment against lying, is to take a real test that lasts a life time. Honest answers may not come either easily or finally. For example, you yourself may not have killed anybody, you may have nobody’s actual blood on your hands, but to whom may you have given your proxy to do your killing for you? Or if you think you have no prejudice, can you remember that other people’s memories of you may be truer than your own? And which is most important: innocence of prejudice by the standard of political correctness or the ability to do the right thing even if you are prejudiced?
Taking that test is likely to reveal to us that we may recognize sinners less by their sins than by our own. If this doesn’t make us more virtuous or more humble, it ought at least to improve our sense of humor. A sense of humor and what Alexander Pope and Jane Austen called “sense” are in fact ways of knowing and taking seriously our inescapable involvement and complicity in the good and the bad that human beings do.