Catholic Commentary
The Universal Indictment: All Are Under Sin (Part 2)
17The way of peace, they haven’t known.”18“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
Romans 3:17–18 presents two interconnected indictments: sinful humanity has neither found the way to peace nor maintains reverence for God. Paul draws these accusations from Isaiah and the Psalms to demonstrate that both Jews and Gentiles stand equally under divine judgment, their moral disorder rooted in the fundamental absence of God-consciousness.
Sin doesn't just make us do evil—it blinds us to peace and erases God from our line of sight.
"Fear of God" (yir'at Elohim; φόβος θεοῦ) is one of the most foundational categories of Old Testament wisdom and covenant theology. It is "the beginning of wisdom" (Prov 9:10), the disposition that orients the whole person rightly toward the Creator. It is not servile terror but filial reverence — the recognition that God is God and I am not, that I stand before One to whom I owe my existence and before whom I am accountable. In the Catholic tradition, fear of the Lord is counted as one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (cf. Isaiah 11:2–3), precisely because it is not merely a natural moral sentiment but a supernatural disposition infused by grace.
The phrase "before their eyes" is telling. In biblical anthropology, the "eyes" signify the direction of attention, the fundamental orientation of the person. "No fear of God before their eyes" means that God simply does not factor into the sinner's field of vision. The sinner's gaze is turned entirely inward or horizontally outward — toward self-interest, toward the approval of others, toward temporal goods — but never upward. This is the theological root of all the sins catalogued in verses 10–17: when God disappears from the horizon of the human heart, every other disorder follows.
Paul places this verse last in the catena deliberately. The other indictments described the outward symptoms — corrupt speech, violent deeds, destructive paths. Verse 18 names the disease: the eclipse of God from the human heart. It is the fons et origo of the entire indictment. And in doing so, it sets up, by contrast, Paul's announcement of the remedy: the righteousness of God (Rom 3:21) — the way of peace humanity could not find, God himself opens.
Catholic tradition reads these two verses as a precise diagnosis of the condition of fallen human nature — what the Church calls the vulnera peccati, the "wounds of sin." The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§405) teaches that original sin has left human nature "wounded in its natural powers, subject to ignorance, suffering, and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin." Verse 17's declaration that humanity has "not known" the way of peace maps directly onto the wound of ignorance, while verse 18's "no fear of God before their eyes" maps onto the wound of disordered will — the heart turned away from its proper end.
St. Augustine, whose entire theological career was shaped by Paul's letter to the Romans, saw in the absence of the fear of God (timor Dei) the very definition of pride (superbia) — the primal sin. In The City of God (XIV.13), Augustine identifies the root of all human evil as the soul's turning away from God toward itself. "There is no fear of God before their eyes" is, for Augustine, a description of the city of man in its essence: the self enthroned where God should be.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on Romans, notes that Paul ends this catena with the interior cause precisely because causes are always more fundamental than effects. The outward sins of tongue, foot, and hand (vv. 13–16) are symptoms; the Godward blindness of verse 18 is the malady.
The gift of fear of the Lord, one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (CCC §1831), is thus exactly what is described as absent in verse 18 — and it is precisely what Christ's redemption restores. The fear of the Lord that grace gives is not the servile fear of punishment but what the tradition calls filial fear — the reverent love of a child who dreads offending a beloved Father. John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor (§18) speaks of moral renewal as beginning precisely here: in a restored vision of God as the source of all good and the ultimate end of human action.
Peace (shalom/εἰρήνη), as verse 17 implies by its absence, is likewise a gift of the Holy Spirit and the fruit of right relationship with God — "The fruit of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace" (James 3:18). The Church teaches (CCC §2304) that peace is not merely the absence of war but "the tranquility of order" (tranquillitas ordinis, Augustine, City of God XIX.13) — the very ordered wholeness that sin destroys and only grace restores.
These two verses confront the contemporary Catholic with a searching diagnostic question: Is the fear of God actually before my eyes? In an age of therapeutic religion — where God is routinely imagined as an affirming life coach rather than the Holy One before whom the seraphim veil their faces — verse 18 is a jarring corrective. The loss of a sense of the sacred, of genuine awe in liturgy, of confession approached as an encounter with the Holy rather than a bureaucratic formality, are all symptoms of exactly what Paul diagnoses here.
Verse 17 speaks with equal force. Catholics are called to be makers and bearers of peace — in families fractured by resentment, in parishes divided by culture-war anxiety, in workplaces corroded by competition. But Paul reminds us that peace is not a technique or a temperament: it is a way that must be known — that is, walked intimately, relationally, in union with the Prince of Peace himself. Where we have failed to be peacemakers, Paul suggests the root cause: we have not known the way because we have not known the One who is the Way.
Practically: examine where the fear of the Lord has grown cold in your prayer, your liturgical participation, and your moral decision-making. Ask the Holy Spirit for the gift of filial fear — not anxiety, but reverence — as the foundation for every other Christian virtue.
Commentary
Romans 3:17 — "The way of peace they have not known" (Isaiah 59:7–8)
Paul draws this line almost verbatim from the Septuagint of Isaiah 59:8 ("they do not know the way of peace"), itself the conclusion of a passage describing Israel's catalogue of social and moral collapse — bloodshed, injustice, deceit, oppression. Isaiah's original context is striking: it is the covenant people themselves who are indicted, not merely pagan nations. Paul's genius in this catena (Rom 3:10–18) is that he has gathered texts which, in their original settings, were directed at Israel, and deployed them to show that both Jew and Gentile stand under the same condemnation. No one — no nation, no tradition, no religious heritage — is exempt.
The word "peace" here translates the Hebrew shalom (εἰρήνη in the LXX), a term far richer than the mere absence of conflict. Shalom in the Hebrew Bible denotes wholeness, right relationship, flourishing — the condition of a person or community properly ordered toward God and neighbor. To say that sinful humanity has "not known" the way of peace is to say that sin has not merely disrupted peace but has destroyed the very path to it. This is a condition of moral and spiritual disorientation: the sinner does not merely fail to walk in peace — he cannot even find the road.
The word "known" (ἔγνωσαν) carries the full biblical weight of da'ath — covenantal, intimate, relational knowledge. To "not know" the way of peace is not an intellectual deficiency but a relational rupture. It recalls Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden: humanity was made for shalom, communion with God and one another, but sin has severed the path back.
At the literal level, Paul is cataloguing the social consequences of godlessness: the violence described in verses 15–16 (swiftness to shed blood, ruin and misery) leads naturally to Romans 3:17 — those who deal in destruction have never learned what peace truly is. The moral life is described here not as a single act but as a way — a habitual orientation, a direction of walking — and sinful humanity has never truly entered it.
Romans 3:18 — "There is no fear of God before their eyes" (Psalm 36:1)
This final verse of the catena comes from Psalm 36 (35 in the LXX), which opens: "The transgressor speaks falsehood to himself in his heart; there is no fear of God before his eyes." Where verse 17 described the consequence of sin in the social and relational order (the loss of peace), verse 18 drives to its root cause in the interior life: the absence of .