Reverse psychology: understand goodness then sin

Psychologist Roger Bretherton concludes our series on the seven deadly sins with a subversive proposition: we don’t understand sin because we don’t understand goodness.

Roger Bretherton

Roger Bretherton is Associate Professor of Psychology, at the University of Lincoln. He is a UK accredited Clinical Psychologist.

An abstract shadow of a human reaching an hand skyward is overlaid by a trace of orange line that becomes a circle

Jr Korpa on Unsplash.

Over the last month or so, here at Seen & Unseen, we have been writing together about the seven deadly sins: greed, lust, gluttony, pride, sloth, anger, envy. If you have seen the David Fincher film, you probably have the grisly murders that illustrate them etched on your retina. But if there is one theme that comes up in all our articles on the subject, it is the fact that sin as a concept no longer carries any weight in our culture. A word that once bore all the heft of heaven and hell, is now the branding for a mildly indulgent discount day at the local health spa.

One way of responding to the downgrading of sin as a meaningful and useful term, is to argue that we need a return to sin. Sin needs a come-back tour, a conceptual rehabilitation. We need to re-populate the word with meaning to make it current and plausible again. Without a consistent shared language of moral failure, of falling short, of ethical deficiency, it is difficult to imagine how responsible human community can be viable. Alasdair MacIntyre, the virtue ethicist, suggested that the problem with our culture is that multiple ethical games are being played. We are not just disagreeing about what the rules should be, but moreover what game it is we are meant to be playing. Our culture is a babel of voices, proposing conflicting versions of what a good life looks like. Consequently, in moral dialogue, we often fail to understand one another. As MacIntyre puts it: ‘my move to queen-bishop-three, is countered by your lob over the net.’

The etymology of the word sin is that it is an old English word originally derived from archery, meaning to miss the mark.

I am no etymologist. Very occasionally I dabble in a bit of New Testament Greek. But to be honest, I don’t know what I’m doing, and whenever I pronounce Greek root words they sound like items from the IKEA stocklist. And, given my tendency to talk to myself when I write, it’s almost inevitable that sooner or later the ever-attentive Alexa will accidentally order me a bedside lamp in response to what I thought was the Greek for bowels. That said, my understanding of the etymology of the word sin is that it is an old English word originally derived from archery, meaning to miss the mark. Miss by an inch, a foot, a mile – it’s all called sin (assuming archers in Old England preferred imperial units of measurement). Shoot the entire quiver in the opposite direction – that’s sin too. Linguists may tell us that this is an apocryphal origin myth, but it doesn’t matter. Whether in archery or ethics, the point remains the same. Sin is a relative term. It is relative to whatever it is we wanted to do, or aspired to become, but missed.

Could it be then, that the root of our current cultural anomie is not so much that sin as a concept has been emptied of meaning (though it has), but that we no longer have any consensual agreement on what a good person should look like? We have no shortage of imagination when it comes to inventing new contents for the empty container of sin, but our thinking about goodness is woefully uninspired. Without a target to aim at, sin becomes vacuous. To illustrate this point, I’d like to tell you about two of the most eminent psychologists of the last hundred years.

Hobart Mowrer and the psychology of sin

Let’s start with a history lesson. O. Hobart Mowrer (1907-1982) is perhaps one of the most eminent, innovative and bemusing contributors to the short history of academic psychology. At the pinnacle of his career in 1953, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (APA), the largest and most esteemed society of psychologists in the world. But as a life-long sufferer of recurrent depression, the announcement sent him into a deep psychological crisis that left him incapacitated for nearly four months. In 1959, he addressed the APA convention in Cincinnati with one of the most unusual and controversial papers of the decade, Constructive Aspects of the Concept of Sin in Psychotherapy, in which he argued that the euphemisms for sin preferred by psychologists (wrongdoing, immorality, irresponsibility etc.) were not sufficiently powerful to convey the distress of a guilty conscience. He had an ambivalent off-again/on-again relationship with institutional religion, but he was nevertheless impressed with the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount that we should do our good deeds in secret. This principle – you are your secrets – became central to his development of Integrity Therapy, a group approach to psychological distress through confession. In the 1970s, the tide of cultural opinion turned against Mowrer, his Integrity Groups were accused of brainwashing their participants, and their popularity waned. Some say he subsequently retracted his views on sin. His episodes of depression continued to dog him, and in 1982, at the age of 75, he died of suicide, having long advocated this as a reasonable course of action in certain circumstances.

This thumbnail sketch hardly does justice to the sensitive suffering genius of O. Hobart Mowrer. There is no space to recount the academic innovations that make him still one of the most cited psychologists in history. He coined the term ‘pathogenic secret’, the idea that sin – by which he meant the things that secretly bother our consciences – makes us sick. I think he was probably right about that. Take for example a freely available open-access list of what might be considered sin. It includes sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, intoxication, orgies, and things like that. It is not a particularly systematic or comprehensive list. It just happens to be the list of examples that Paul the apostle came up with in a first-century letter to residents of what is now central Turkey. They hardly make pleasant reading, but they make a great episode of Succession.

Paul called these ‘works of the flesh’. Works, because they are things we do, situations we manufacture. Flesh, not in opposition to physical pleasure, but because these kinds of responses (strife, envy, rage etc.) seem to be patterned bodily reactions, part of our conditioning, written into our muscle. The fact that Paul refers to them in plural (works of the flesh) is more significant than it initially appears. For him the unethical life is an incoherent ragbag of reactions, a series of plays and tactics designed to gain immediate personal gratification. As long as we come out on top, or at least think we have, they have done their job. But if we live by them, if we hand ourselves over to the universe of their self-centred cynical logic, our identity fragments, our sense of coherence shatters. We can no longer imagine who we would be if our greed, pride, lust or whatever, was taken away from us. Our appetites become our identity.

This is why I tend to think that the instincts that led Mowrer to develop a therapy emphasising integrity was right. Provided of course, that we embrace the full definition of integrity, rather than simply taking it as a synonym for honesty. The integrity to which Mowrer’s groups aspired was not just the truthfulness that comes from the disclosure of secrets, but the inner harmony that comes from the restoration of wholeness. What looked superficially like an unhealthy preoccupation with sin, was in fact Mowrer’s pursuit of the unified state of self that accompanies goodness. A sentiment that leads us to psychologist number two.

Martin Seligman and the psychology of goodness

Fast forward four and half decades from Mowrer’s election as APA president. It is 1998 and another newly-minted APA president, Martin Seligman – arguably the most famous clinical psychologist in the world – is making his inaugural address. Seligman is unique among world-famous psychologists in many ways, not least of which being his claim that he was ‘called’ to be a clinical psychologist. He later told a conference at Lambeth Palace that as a young research scientist, during his deliberations on whether to follow the path into clinical practice, he woke one night from a dream of visiting the Guggenheim Museum in New York. As he admired the architecture of the iconic building, God himself – a giant bearded old man – lifted the roof and boomed: I want you to be a clinical psychologist. Of course, as a secular Jewish academic, Seligman doesn’t believe in God, but this doesn’t deter him from openly admitting that his vocation in clinical psychology was not wholly chosen but issued from the unspoken depths of his being.

This deep-seated sense of vocation may go some way to explaining why his 1998 inaugural address has gone down as a turning point in the history of psychology. His central assertion was that up until then psychology had been obsessed with the negative (what’s wrong with us) and that it was time to rebalance the discipline with a refocus on human flourishing, which at the time he formulated as the pleasant life, the engaged life, and the meaningful life. This is viewed by some as the birth of Positive Psychology, which according to Seligman was a corrective to the ‘rotten to the core’ view of human beings that had dominated the discipline since Freud. It is difficult to imagine a proposal more diametrically opposed to that of Mowrer. While Mowrer argued for a renewed awareness of ‘sin’, Seligman asserted to the contrary that it was the vast ignorance of goodness that bedevilled contemporary psychology. We already had a rich, ever-expanding science of what was wrong with people, what we needed was an equally detailed, every bit as expansive science of what was right with us. The explosive growth of positive psychology over the last few decades has been a response to that call, to develop a full-blown science of goodness.

In the years that followed, Seligman revised his idea of the good life multiple times, perhaps his most ambitious proposal being the concept of Prospective Psychology; the idea that we as a species are best defined not by our past but by our future. He held this future-orientation to be so characteristic of human nature that we could name the species after it- homo prospectus. We are defined not by what we have been, but by what we are yet to be. It is an insight he shares with many of the thoughtful people who have pondered ethics over the years. Take for example a freely available open-access list of what might be considered virtue. It includes love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. It is not a particularly systematic or comprehensive list. It just happens to be the list of examples that Paul the apostle came up with in a first-century letter to residents of what is now central Turkey. I often feel better about life, just reading it.

Paul called these beautiful qualities, ‘fruit of the Spirit’. It is significant that in the original New Testament Greek, the word fruit is singular: καρπὸς (No! Alexa! I don’t need garden furniture!) He doesn’t write fruits, but fruit of the Spirit. He points toward some kind of unity, harmony, consistency in these qualities. Mowrer no doubt would have called it integrity. Goodness is much more than the avoidance of naughtiness; it is the restoration of wholeness to our shattered and divided selves. Sin is much more than the cheeky indulgences we succumb to at the end of a bruising day at work; it is the misdirection and derailment of all we could become. And this is where the tale of two psychologists terminates. Contrary to what the marketing executives may have conspired to tell you, sin is not your friend; it is the enemy of your genuine divine magnificence. That’s what makes deadly sin so deadly.

Interview

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Creed

S&U interviews

9 February 2024

9 min read

The Devil's perspective

Seeing through a rebel angel’s eyes opens up some surprising new angles on faith. Jonathan Evens interviews author Nicholas Papadopulos.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A statue of an angel crouching and gesturing with one hand.

With The Infernal Word: Notes from a Rebel Angel, Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, is challenging the accepted narrative of faith “through the eyes of a rebel, an angelic non-believer with plenty of attitude.” His book enables readers to see the Biblical story in an unusual light - from the perspective of a devil who took up arms against heaven under the leadership of Satan.

Papadopulos, who worked for seven years as barrister specialising in criminal law prior to ordination, says: “I have always been more interested in questions than answers, both as a criminal lawyer and as a priest. Posing difficult questions identifies the real issues. Writing in the rebel angel’s voice has allowed me to have fun whilst at the same time compelling me to work out what faith in God really means to me. They say the devil has all the best tunes – well, what better way to challenge the accepted narrative of faith than through the eyes of a rebel, an angelic non-believer with plenty of attitude.”

“To admire Satan … is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography”

C.S. Lewis.

His central character is a rebel angel who sided with Satan in his insurgency and was cast out of Heaven. He is, as a result, an unhappy devil, perplexed by the triumph of good over evil and the stories of salvation. With eternity to ponder why God emerged triumphant from the struggle, this rebel angel has turned to the Bible, the record of God’s dealings with ‘the humans’ to find out why his side was defeated. Through his conversational and sardonic style, this rebel angel discusses a dozen of God’s significant encounters with humanity - each of which takes place on a mountain top, from Mount Ararat where Noah’s ark pitched up, to the Mount of Ascension where Jesus returns to heaven. Each of these infernal reflections reveals an aspect of God’s inexplicable and unfathomable love for humans and engages deeply with the reality of a loving God who is made visible and vulnerable in Christ.

The Devil and his rebel angels have a significant cultural history. From his earliest known appearance in the Book of Job - probably the oldest book in the Bible - the figure of the devil has haunted Western culture being understood “as the embodiment of evil, a figure of temptation, and a potential foil to God”. In The Devil: A Very Short Introduction, Darren Oldridge describes Christian art as representing the Devil “using naked, dark forms with bestial features, committing revolting acts in a Hellish landscape”. He continues, in relation to literature: “In Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles' character is conveyed in words of nullity and darkness. Milton's Paradise Lost describes a fiend whose defiance towards God makes him a kind of perverse hero. The Devil is often described as an appealing character who tricks people into committing sins.” However, there is an opposite view, as set out by Erik Butler in The Devil and His Advocates, in which Satan has, since his first appearance, “pursued a single objective: to test human beings, whose moral worth and piety leave plenty of room for doubt.” Butler suggests that, while Satan can be manipulative, “at worst he facilitates what mortals are inclined to do, anyway”.

Responses to John Milton’s Paradise Lost exemplify the debates that rage around the depiction of the Devil in literature. Two rival “interpretive traditions” exist in relation to Milton’s depiction of Satan.

The romantic tradition, understood to have been begun by William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, “contends that Milton unconsciously favoured Satan and that Satan was the true hero of Paradise Lost”. Blake famously wrote that Milton “was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. He views desire and energy as characteristics of the Devil and sees these as being opposed to reason, which is equated with God and the power appropriated by institutional Christianity. Similarly, Shelley in his Defence of Poetry writes: “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy.”

Unlike Shelley, however, Blake also believed that Jesus, through artistic imagination, harmonises the binary opposites that Blake viewed as being characterised by the Devil and God and, as a result, advocates a revolutionary form of Christianity. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is a more recent imaginative engagement with this side of the Paradise Lost debate, which sits somewhat uneasily between Shelley and Blake.

Set against the romantic view of Milton’s Satan as the true hero of Paradise Lost is a view, exemplified by C.S. Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost, which sees Milton’s account of the Fall as being similar to that of Augustine’s City of God, with Satan portrayed, not only as “morally evil but also supremely egotistical … even showing himself in some ways to be foolish and tedious”. Lewis wrote that “To admire Satan … is to give one’s vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography”. While Lewis was writing A Preface to Paradise Lost, he was also working on The Screwtape Letters in which, by means of a fictional intercepted correspondence of diabolical counsel from a senior devil to an apprentice devil, seeks to show what the temptation of our souls looks like through the eyes of demons. Bruce L. Edwards suggests that “Screwtape’s timeless brilliance lies in depicting the everyday and showing how from a demonic point of view, the devotion and care Christians show to their fellow men and women, mirrors of the love God has shown to them, is unfathomable to the desperately lost and unreflectively wicked”.

“Why does God bother about such a crowd of undesirables? The angel’s writing is the lens through which I uncover the absurdity of God’s relationship with them.”

With these ongoing debates in mind, I asked Papadopulos where he thought The Infernal Word sits in relation to this diabolical heritage and how the book interacts with it. He responded by saying that: “This rebel angel is concerned with the Biblical narrative and what it discloses of God and of God’s relationship with humanity. He is not principally a tempter (as was Screwtape); nor is he a tragic hero plotting his revenge (as was Milton’s Satan); he is instead something of an investigative journalist – an armchair general, commentator, and amateur theologian, keen to ascertain why on earth God seems so keen on the creation that so regularly lets him down. He is also a realist: he harbours no illusions about the place of his kind in God’s economy. The cross was Christ’s decisive victory – the rebels have been beaten.”

This represents a key difference between Papadopulos’ protagonist and Lewis’ Screwtape. As Edwards notes: “Screwtape never understands why the Enemy [God] loves the patient [human beings], even to the point of giving up His life for another. This is not even ponderable for Hell-bent or Hell-bound dwellers, who are the ultimate egotists and self-aggrandizers.” This difference of approach also raises a question as to why Papadopulos’ protagonist is undertaking his investigation. As he recognises Christ’s decisive victory on the cross, what purpose is served by his investigation? That question takes us to the heart of the book’s purpose which is also linked to the challenges it provides to some accepted narratives of the faith.

We do know, however, why Papadopulos began the book. His ministry, prior to Salisbury, included time as Vicar of St Peter’s Eaton Square, London, and at Canterbury Cathedral as Canon Treasurer and Director of Initial Ministerial Education for the Diocese. The Infernal Word began as addresses preached on Good Friday in those earlier settings. Good Friday, of course, is the moment in the Christian story when the Devil appears to have won. So, I asked Papadopulos what was it about Good Friday that inspired him initially and which called his rebel angel into being: “The devil did not win on Good Friday, and he knows he did not win! Christ’s faithfulness sees to that. But - stuck for a sermon when serving as a parish priest I tried preaching from the vantage point of faith’s opponent - as a devil. Arriving in Canterbury, and needing a theme/motif for a Good Friday Three Hours Devotion, I remembered the experiment, and wrote the series from that vantage point. It obviously needed to culminate with the crucifixion, and that event’s location on a hilltop prompted the addresses which preceded it.”

Writing in the rebel angel’s voice allowed him to have fun while, at the same time, compelled him to work out what faith in God really means to him. He says he has always been more interested in questions than answers and that posing difficult questions identifies the real issues. As a result, I asked what it is about testing or exploring faith in this way that enables the essence or the essential to be identified: “The barrister’s skill is identifying the right questions, and that part of my formation lives on in me, jostling with the faith that has been real since I was very young. Theology is faith seeking understanding – the book is an account of faith in which sharp questions are posed, to which (ultimately) a fairly simple ‘answer’ is offered. But that’s in the Epilogue and I wouldn’t want to give it away! Asking questions is not something for people of faith to be afraid of – but we do have to have trustworthy places to ask them and to receive answers. My dearest hope is that a reader might identify with some of the questions posed in The Infernal Word, and find answers that are at least coherent and perhaps compelling.”

Martin Luther once said that “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn” while Thomas More wrote, “The devil…that proud spirit…cannot endure to be mocked.” Papadopulos’ talk of having fun while writing in the rebel angel’s voice reminded me that creatives from Lewis to Bono have utilised this approach, so I asked whether it one he also endorses: “The rebel angel targets humanity and specifically ‘the Christians’. They are the object of his unremitting scorn and the source of his perpetual puzzlement – why does God bother about such a crowd of undesirables? The angel’s writing is the lens through which I uncover the absurdity of God’s relationship with them.”

Mountain-tops, as significant places of encounter with God, become important in providing a structure for his book: “The choice of mountain tops was actually triggered by the need to end on one (if Golgotha counts as a mountain top). As that was the destination, I looked for precursors and, of course, there are plenty – from Ararat onwards. I could have picked a different theme: Biblical encounters in cities, or beside water. But mountains serve the purpose, as they do throughout Scripture, as places of encounter between the human and the divine.”

I ended our conversation by asking in what ways the book challenges the accepted narrative of faith by providing a fresh perspective on familiar Biblical stories and why that is needed: “I hope the book is profoundly orthodox, but it poses some of the questions about faith that have fascinated me and that I believe fascinate others. Because it’s narrated by a rebel angel it can dare to be irreverent and occasionally downright rude. Don’t we always need fresh perspectives on the tradition? That’s what keeps it alive. It was the quest for a fresh perspective that first pushed me in the rebel angel’s direction when I was stuck for a sermon.”

The Infernal Word: Notes from a Rebel Angel is published by Canterbury Press.