Explainer
Creed
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.  

Article
Art
Creed
1 min read

How the Creed connects us to a bigger history

Faint shadows in literature and dawning art give glimpses of greater things.

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

Painting of hand of God touching hand of Adam.
Sistine Chapel ceiling detail.
Michelangelo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Singing the Nicene Creed on Sundays in Latin, a language I do not understand, does not detract from its meditative power. Admittedly not reading music, means attempts to pin the syllables to the blobs on the stave part company with the sounds of the choir and congregation, around the time we turn the sheet over, at ‘sedet ad dexteram Patris’. Sometimes I get back on track by ‘qui locutus est per prophetas’, and sometimes I wait until Amen. Either way it is a meditative experience, on a different level to day-to-day information processing. 

Even in a first language the Creed’s surface is oblique for the modern mind. This initial impenetrability accounts for why, outside the Church, celebrations for the Creed’s 1700th anniversary are niche.  

BBC Radio 4 is running a six-part series Lent Talks, with thinkers and theologians expanding on aspects of the text through personal experience.  

In the first episode theologian Frances Young perceived God’s almightiness in caring for her son Arthur, who was born with profound, life-limiting disabilities. Arthur’s presence in Young’s later-life, ordained ministry, underlined how almightiness is experienced through gentleness: “A hidden, elusive Loving and redeeming presence, gently transforming everything through sheer grace.”  For astrophysicist and theologian David Wilkinson, contemplating ‘That God made all things seen and unseen’, validated science as a Christian endeavour. Wilkinson recalled uncharacteristically hugging a fellow astrophysicist on a Durham street in 2015, at the news of the first direct observation of gravitational waves. The observation captured the earth moving a fraction due to a ripple in spacetime. Incremental glimpses of the workings of the universe serve as stepping stones to fully appreciating creation, and the awe of our place in it. 

Glimpsing a part of a concealed whole, leading to the understanding of greater things, features throughout the Bible. In the King James version of Hebrews we learn: “Who serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things”. More modern translations use ‘copy’ instead of example. Endeavours on earth, done in the right spirit, can serve as a foretaste or shadow of heaven, of eternal life.  

While the language of the King James Bible offers all things to all men and is woven through literature, the Nicene Creed’s presence is scant. 

As a literary device, a part serving for the whole, or foreshadowing future events works in drama or poetry, but in novels there is less to see. Rectory-raised Jane Austen would have heard the Creed throughout her church going life, but church service scenes are missing from her fiction. Charles Dickens’ faith journey from criticising the established Anglican church of the mid-nineteenth century, to exploring Unitarianism, make the absence in his novels of the Creed, with its centrality of the Trinity, of a piece with his spiritual outlook. Raskolnikov’s glimpse of an icon in the pawnbroker’s home in Crime and Punishment, points to Dostoevsky’s greater ease with fragments momentarily illuminating the bigger picture: ‘in the corner an icon-lamp was burning before a small icon’. 

Modern artists also offer transcendent moments of faith gesturing towards an overarching framework of belief

Visual art's capacity for rendering the invisibility of the past, the distant, the imagination and the metaphysical, make it a more likely medium for extending the Creed beyond the walls of the church. 

In 1541 Pope Paul III allegedly fell to his knees in wonder in the Sistine Chapel, at the presentation of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement fresco on the altar wall. Michelangelo’s unorthodox, for the times, meditation on personal salvation depicted a cowering Virgin Mary, a beardless Christ, an unbiblical, pointy-eared Charon, the ferryman in Greek mythology, appearing in the underworld, and cascades of nude bodies tumbling towards their eternal fate. By the late1550s Michelangelo’s friend Daniele de Volterra was ordered to paint draperies on some of the naked figures, to correct indecencies. But the devout Michelangelo’s personal vision of the Creed’s ‘judge the quick and the dead’, had already been copied by numerous artists since its unveiling. Giulio Bonasone’s engraving, after Michelangelo, The Last Judgement, 1546, is just one example of the Renaissance artist’s contemplation of ‘the life of the world to come’, as he entered his seventh decade, taking flight into the wider world. 

Modern artists also offer transcendent moments of faith gesturing towards an overarching framework of belief. In turn of the century France, as the country underwent a Catholic revival, Gwen John was one of many artists working on making modern art full of religious meaning. Conventional paintings of the Annunciation show Mary with the Angel Gabriel, with the white-robed angel, spreading their wings. Drawing on her friend Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Annunciation (Words of the Angel), John created an Annunciation scene, with no visible angel. In Girl Reading at the Window, 1911, a young woman in contemporary dress, is illuminated by light coming through the window, as is the white lace curtain, gently blowing out to touch her dress. Setting aside the expected haloes and wings, John brings to life the Creed’s teaching ‘was incarnate of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary’. 

A dawning realisation heralding a far greater truth is also apparent in Emil Nolde’s Paradise Lost, 1921. In bright, unnaturalistic, colours and in a heavily outlined, naïve style, Nolde catches Adam and Eve’s expressions, as the full consequences of their banishment from Eden become apparent. A moment in time indicates the long road ahead to the promised world of the Creed. 

At the height of the Cold War in 1971, nearly three million Soviet citizens went to see Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic portrait of medieval icon painter Andrei Rublev, five years after the film’s original release. Despite censorship, monochrome projection and no posters advertising the screenings, people found a way to engage with a depiction of belief, creativity and a search for meaning, set against the viscerally brutal backdrop of Tartar pillaged,1400s Russia. 

In an age of Netflix narratives and individualism, connecting with the collective wisdom of churchmen in Constantinople from 1700 years ago can, unavoidably, feel like a stretch. But like the best art, the Creed offers the chance to step out of time, braiding us into us into the faith and vision of others, in ways none of us can understand. 

 

Listen to the BBC Lent Talks

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