Cierpienie człowieka na drodze grzechu według św. Katarzyny ze Sieny

Abstract

St. Catherine’s teaching about the sufferings on the way of sin is based on her concept of sin. In her opinion sin is groundded on the love of oneself and of temporal things - without God, against God and more than God. The essential cause of the suffering of sinners lies, therefore, in this sinful love which St. Catherine calls self-love. Man is the only creature on earth whose existence never ceases. Other earthly creatures are finite in their existence and in the ontological sense they are inferior to man. They were created for man, so that they might serve him (cf. Ps. 8,7), and not that man might serve them. As they are inferior they can never satisfy man’s infinite desires. And infinite desires are the only infinite thing that man has in himself, being a creature endowed with never ending existence. The desires, therefore, can be satisfied only by somebody who is superior to man, that is, by the infinite and eternal God. Man, therefore, when he loves and desires „finite things” in a disorderet way, that is more than God, can never be satisfied by them. Therefore „he is always hungry”, „always unsatiated”, and so he lives in continual torment and suffering because he has not and cannot have what he loves and desires, and he has not what he desires in the way he loves and desires it.