Wages

A quick look at a very famous line from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “For the wages of sin is death.” The wages are the payment, the wages of work is cash which then opens up the doors to food, somewhere decent to live, then onto pleasures such as eating out, holidays, etc. So here the wages are the harvest of the work, and in this case an expansion of the available spectrum of life to the worker. The last thing one would want is the dimishing of this spectrum, rather than its expansion.This would be a very poor form of payment! - but of course would be the reality within for example the 20th century slave camps of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. The payment of one’s labour would be the exhausting of the body, it not being replenished even in the way of food for its efforts. So the wages here of this slave labour, if pushed to its ultimate outcome, as it often was, is physical death.

Unfortunately I see I’ve failed to keep this reined in, and it’s expanding beyond the quick, short point I’d hoped to make . . . Anyway, trying to get back to “the wages of sin is death.” From delving somewhat into the Orthodox Christian world, one sees that the spiritual path intrinsically involves “spiritual warfare”, not focused primarily on the external world, but internally, and the most obvious manifestation of this is the world of “the passions”, which is vice at a very powerful carnal level. Thus, putting it very obviously, someone who is in the grip of dreadful alcoholism, cannot simultaneously be a deeply spiritual person, as otherwise this spirituality is just some meaningless abstraction pm and in reality he is a slave to his alcoholism, this passion or sin is master of him. And what are the wages of this sin? Ruination at all levels from emotional, physical, one’s family life, etc. So this is the pay off here of sin, or the passions. Rather than the expansion of possibilities, such as in the healthy wages/work dynamic, the wages here is, if pushed to its logical conclusion, death of everything. This can of course be very similarly extended into other areas of the passions; for example, the wages of a gambling addiction, if pushed to its conclusion, is economic ruination, but also all the other damage surrounding that, including black shame and despair. So these are the wages! The wages are death, not a happy land of rainbows and teddy bears.

Even for an ordinary person who isn’t an alcoholic, think of the wages at a physical level of getting heavily drunk.  Getting drunk is the “work”, one’s physical being had been literally poisoned, and now the wages is the hangover. If the drunken state was pushed to the extremity, the wages would actually be death on the very same night. So whilst one is physically alive, these “hangovers” - depending on the passion or vice - are a foretaste of the ultimate wages of sin or the passions. It isn’t a punishment, it’s the harvest.