Explainer
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Seven Deadly Sins
Sin
7 min read

Sin: explained

From rottweilers to North African bishops, Graham Tomlin kicks off the Seven Deadly Sins series with an introduction to the unpopular idea of ‘sin’.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Seven Deadly Sins
Illustration generated by Dan Kim using Midjourney.

A little while ago I went for a health check. They took a blood test, weighed me on the scales, poked me around a bit. Soon afterwards, I got a printout of my general health. It told me that my blood pressure and liver function was pretty good, but I ought to watch my cholesterol, my calcium levels could be a bit higher, and my folate result was not great (whatever that is). 

It told me a lot about my physical health. What it didn’t tell me was anything useful about my spiritual and moral wellbeing. I began to wonder where I could get a spiritual health check? Is there a way of telling whether I am in danger of diseases that might affect my soul rather than my body?  

As it happens, the Christian church has long had a spiritual health check - a kind of ticklist for spiritual and mental wellbeing – it’s called the Seven Deadly Sins. And over the next few weeks, here on Seen & Unseen, we’ll be running a series on it – think of it as a chance to check out your own spiritual wellbeing.  

Of course, the word ‘Sin’ has a chequered past. Peccatio, Pèche, Sünde, Sin – whatever language it came in, it was once a terrifying word – a word that struck fear into the heart of almost every European. It had the same kind of emotional effect as words like ‘Nazi’, or ‘cancer’ do for us today. It was something you wanted to avoid at all costs, something dreadful and dangerous.  

Now, it has changed from a rottweiler into a poodle. ‘Sin’ has been calmed down, domesticated, neutered. The word is now usually spoken with a smirk, or a heavy dose of irony. Describing something as ‘sinful’ usually means you think it is naughty but nice, or even seductive. We get perfumes called ‘My Sin’, or even a bakery called ‘Sinful Cakes’. Po-faced people who denounce something as ‘sinful’ seem to just want to stop other people enjoying themselves.  

They waged a constant, subtle and undermining war against the inner self – they were the deadly enemy of the soul.

Yet there were reasons why the word ‘sin’ had such a ghastly aura about it in the past. Sin was not harmless transgression of some random moral code invented by repressed and frustrated medieval clerics. For our ancestors, ‘sin’ described a pattern of life that was quite simply destructive. Each of the seven deadly sins were a sign of spiritual poor health just like a raised PSI count might be a sign of prostate cancer, high blood pressure a sign of the risk of a heart attack and so on. Sins like greed, anger, lust and pride could destroy families, friendships, happiness, peace of mind, innocence, love, security, nature, and most importantly, our bond to our Creator. They wrenched us out of our proper place in the world, which is why it’s worth knowing whether you’re suffering from them or not.  

A passage in the Bible talks of “sinful desires, which wage war against the soul.” That captures it well. These impulses or patterns of behaviour were not just arbitrarily wrong, but self-destructive. They waged a constant, subtle and undermining war against the inner self – they were the deadly enemy of the soul. Sin was a like a virus that got into everything, so that although life carried on, it never quite worked in the way you felt it ought to. Life always had that grit in the oyster, the nagging soreness of a shoe that doesn’t fit, the reminder of a dark secret that wouldn’t go away.  

In many people’s minds, ‘sin’ means simply ‘breaking the rules or the law’. The difficulty with this idea is that it fails to get to the heart of the issue. An insistence on rules alone is often a sign of a shrivelled, arid moral vision. It’s what makes disapproving busybodies and prudes. Laws exist to protect things that are more important than laws, like human lives, families, marriages, reputations, communities and peace. They are not ends in themselves. Rules and laws are vital for the protection of goodness, but do not itself go to the heart of goodness – they simply try to ensure its survival.  

Life would be simple if things that were bad for us were ugly and things good for us were beautiful. 

One traditional way of thinking about sin was to classify it into types. Our ancestors were shrewd enough to know they needed to know their enemy. The idea of the ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ emerged from the early centuries of the Church as a neat way of remembering the some of the chief ways in which this deadly pattern of behaviour manifested itself.  

A glance through the traditional list of the seven deadly sins raises an obvious issue for anyone with any sense of contemporary life and morals: these are not the ones we’d identify as the chief causes of evil in our world. If anything, our culture tends to admire these qualities, not avoid them. Lust is a sign of a healthy sexual appetite, Pride a perfectly valid pleasure in our own achievements, and Greed an essential motor for the economy. Lust, envy and gluttony sell porn websites, cars and food, so naturally there are powerful forces dedicated to encouraging these habits to grow as rampant as possible in our souls and societies.  

Of course, our forebears were not all as innocent as we might think. Of course they didn’t all detest sin because it has always carried a very real and powerful attraction. And unless we grasp this, we will never understand it. Life would be simple if things that were bad for us were ugly and things good for us were beautiful. But life isn’t like that. As the great St Augustine said of his own younger tendency to steal just for the sake of it: “It was foul, and I loved it”.  

The great works that have dealt with sin in the past had a simple aim, to uncover the ugliness of sin, and unmask the veneer of attractiveness that it wears. Dante’s great Divine Comedy did it by showing what these patterns of behaviour led to. It showed how each received its fitting punishment in a vision of such elegant symmetry that it seemed so obvious. In Dante’s imaginary hell, the angry are condemned to fight each other for eternity; the slothful or indolent are condemned to running constantly and breathlessly; gluttons are made to lie in mud, exposed to constant rain and hail just like pigs, and end up eating rats, toads and snakes, as a parody of their excessive greed. 

Illustration by Jennifer Strange Keller 

Illustration of Dante's Inferno

Yet strangely, each sin always has at its heart something good. Medieval artistic depictions of sins portrayed them as misshapen and deformed versions of some good quality. The reason is not hard to find. Lust takes the delights to be found in sexual desire and satisfaction and distorts it into an uncontrollable, damaging enslavement. Gluttony twists the pleasures of succulent roast beef and a glass of dark red Beaujolais and turns them into bloated, sickly over-consumption.  

There is always something of the grotesque about sin. In old fairgrounds, there was always one stall where you would place yourself in front of odd-shaped mirrors, which would exaggerate parts of your body and shrink others. The result was on the one hand funny but at the same time, slightly frightening. Sin does the same thing. It takes something beautiful and makes it ugly by twisting it out of shape, so that it bears enough resemblance to the original to retain its attraction, but when seen in its full light, is as ugly as… well, sin. On one level, it’s funny. Most of our jokes revolve around the grotesque - things out of place, misshapen, strange. Yet there is a dark side as well and it is that that these medieval imaginative poems tried to unveil. Theologian Cornelius Plantinga says: “a sinful life is a partly depressing, partly ludicrous caricature of genuine human life.” 

A woman in a hall of mirrors, circa 1935. 

Marilyn Monroe Funhouse Mirror

Although it can seem a monstrous and terrifying power that threatens to overwhelm everything, in the end, evil can only ever distort something that is at its heart good. Evil cannot create anything, it simply twists, caricatures, or destroys. Sin is always a parody, a type of behaviour that often looks vaguely like goodness, and often likes to pretend it is, and it sometimes takes some moral and spiritual discernment to tell the difference. Yet a difference there surely is, and the ability to tell good from evil is a real sign of human and personal maturity. But the reason why it is often difficult to tell is that sin always has at its heart something good. A fit of temper against a brother or sister or child usually justifies itself by the behaviour that provoked it in the first place, which probably was out of order; jealousy or envy persuades itself that it is really proper outrage against the deep injustice that has given to someone else what I really deserve.  

This means of course that however monstrous sin or evil are, in the Christian view of the world, they are ultimately trivial and pathetic when compared to real goodness. St Augustine struggled all his life to understand the nature of malevolence. Towards the end of that life, the reality of evil began to recede from his attention, to be replaced by something much bigger. As Cambridge historian Gillian Evans put it:

“Where first he had been aware of (evil’s) perverseness and emptiness, its huge darkness, its hopeless entangled knottiness, now at last perhaps he had come to feel its essential triviality in comparison with the light and power of the Good.” 

In the coming weeks, here on Seen and Unseen, we will be asking some of our regular contributors to write on each of the Seven Deadly Sins, analysing how they work their deadly poison, both in the past and in contemporary society. Keep an eye out for each article as they come – it might just be the spiritual health check you need.  

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6 min read

How to survive a culture war

Blaise Pascal shows us what really underlies our contemporary battles.

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Two goats lock horns.
Maxime Gilbert on Unsplash.

We often say these days that we are more polarised as a society than ever before. But we're wrong. Maybe the USA is experiencing a particularly sharp divide right now, but they have had their own, much more violent troubles in the past. And in Europe, and especially in Britain, we know a fair bit about culture wars that were literally that – wars.  

In the 17th century, we English had our own civil war where we literally killed each other over religion and politics. We even killed a king. The French did something similar and even more vicious just over 100 years later. That is real polarisation. However spiteful Twitter/X arguments may get, I don't think Charles III or even Kier Starmer is quaking in their beds expecting to be put on trial for treason.  

So maybe our history has something to teach us about how we navigate culture wars.  

The literary critic Terry Eagleton once wrote of our age:  

“the world is accordingly divided between those who believe too much and those who believe too little. While some lack all conviction, others are full of passionate intensity.” 

 We tend to think our contemporary divide between left and right, progressives and conservatives is something new. But we can find echoes of this in previous times.  

A case in point was the mid-17th century – the time of many other upheavals in Europe. Part of the febrile atmosphere of the time saw fierce arguments between rationalists and sceptics.  

There were at the time, two broad strands of thinking about the human condition. On the one had there were the ‘Dogmatists’ who were sure that they knew everything through use of reason or the application of philosophical or scientific method (like René Descartes). On the other hand, there were the ‘Sceptics’ who thought everything was random, or custom, and there is no final Truth to be found (like a figure from the century before – Michel de Montaigne). 

Of course, our own time has its fair share of people with an overwhelming confidence in the power of human knowledge, and the physical sciences in particular, to unlock the secrets of life, the universe and everything. The ‘new atheist’ project of Richard Dawkins and friends was hugely confident in reason and its capacity to tell us all we need to know, dispatching religion to the dustbin of history and instead placing an unshakable faith in the empirical methods of science. It had - and has - definite similarities with this picture of human knowledge.  

Yet on the other hand we also have, in the progressive postmodern project, those who reject any kind of underlying rationality or sacred order either above us or beneath us. For them, there is no underlying Truth to be discovered, and they delight in revealing the instability and illusory nature of any claim to truth. It sounds very much like the culture wars of our time. 

One enigmatic 17th century figure charted a way through this dilemma - Blaise Pascal. When he looked at his century’s culture war, he thought both sides had a point. There is, he observed… 

…open war between men in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the sceptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a sceptic par excellence…. Who will unravel such a tangle? This is certainly beyond dogmatism and scepticism, beyond all human philosophy. Humanity transcends humanity. Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed that truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry, that it is no earthly denizen, but at home in heaven lying in the lap of God, to be known only insofar as it pleases him to reveal it. 

So far, he says, the sceptics, like Montaigne, are right. Truth is beyond our grasp, it does not reside here on earth, openly obvious and ready to be found. If it exists, it exists in some world above us, beyond our reach. How do we even know if we are asleep or awake, given that when we dream, we are as convinced that we are awake as we are when we are truly awake?  

And so, modern progressives, looking to dismantle the assumed results of previous understanding, due to its inherent colonial, patriarchal or abusive past, delight in showing how random and arbitrary is so much of what we take for granted from the past. And, Pascal would add, they have a point. Many of our legal, political and cultural assumptions are purely cultural and arbitrary, and sometimes simply serve to the advantage of the rich and powerful rather than the poor and marginalised. 

Yet on the other side, the ‘dogmatists’, like Descartes, have their strong point, which is that we cannot doubt natural principles. The acids of deconstruction can only take you so far. The most sceptical philosopher still puts the kettle on assuming that it will boil to make a cup of tea. She gets up in the morning assuming that the sun will rise and set again at the end of the day. Despite the corrosive effects of scepticism, Pascal wrote,  

“I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”  

Despite all our doubt, we still live in a world with order and predictability. Scepticism keeps bumping up against reality.   

So, modern conservatives point to a deeper ‘givenness’ to things, an order within the natural world that we did not create, and yet, mysteriously, seems to be prearranged before we got here. Scientific exploration does make sense. There is a regularity to nature that we can, indeed have to, depend on. Sexual differences exist and can’t be ignored. We are not entirely free to override the natural order of things - there is a deeper rhythm to nature and its capacity for renewal that we only mess with at our peril, as climate change has taught us. As a result, the age-old battle between rationalists and sceptics, progressives and conservatives, will never find resolution, as the arguments flow back and forth.  

Christian faith includes both progressive and conservative impulses. Christians are aware of the brokenness of the world and therefore long to see it changed. The progressive impatience with the way things are, and the yearning for a better world has its roots in Christian faith.  

Yet at the same time, Christianity discerns a divinely created order to the world, a rhythm to the natural world, that cannot be broken and needs to be respected. Therefore, an inherent conservatism is part of Christian faith as well. In other words, the Christian story can explain both and offer a bigger picture than either.  

For Pascal, Christianity offers a diagnosis for this mystery of the human condition, the complex mix of grandeur and misery, infinity and nothing, sceptic and rationalist, in the simple, yet endlessly generative idea that we humans are gloriously created, deeply fallen and yet offered redemption through Jesus Christ. Our sadness is heroic and tragic. In Pascal’s suggestive image, it is “the wretchedness of a great Lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.” 

“We show our greatness,” says Pascal, “not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.” For him, the very existence of such culture wars points to the truth of the Christian diagnosis of the human condition. 

Pascal offers us a way between the Scylla of Progressivism and the Charybdis of Conservatism – or perhaps better, to embrace the best of both. Culture wars are tricky to navigate. Yet they might find resolution if we allow them to point us to a deeper reality - our strange mixture of greatness and sadness. And not losing sight of either side of this enduring truth.  

 

Graham Tomlin is the author of Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World  (Hodder) £25.  

Watch Graham explain why he is fascinated by Pascal.

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