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
Attention
Creed
Education
Psychology
6 min read

We miss so much when we only see what we are looking for

Explaining why we don't see the unseen - with the help of a gorilla.
A blurred image of a blindfolded man.
Manuel Bonadeo on Unsplash.

In a thriving Pentecostal Church on an English city street, a room full of worshippers are singing, clapping, dancing and throwing their hands in the air. The preacher cries “Come, Holy Spirit!” and there are cries of “Amen!” and “Yes Lord!” One person has tears on their cheeks.  

A few doors down, a few dozen Anglicans also gather. Heads bent over their liturgy books, there is a hum of responses and an air of reverence. “Give us the joy of your saving help: and sustain us with your life-giving Spirit.” The altar candles flicker as the community settles itself into pews. The Holy Spirit is no less present to these worshippers, although they respond in a completely different way.  

Both churches share one creed, in which they commit to their belief in God as the source of all things, seen and unseen. Whilst Pentecostal theologies tend to focus on the observable and unpredictable signs of the Spirit at work, many Anglicans would describe the Spirit in terms of an inner experience, perhaps one that is cognitive rather than physical. But either way, Christians share one belief – that God is present in the world, and we call that the Holy Spirit.  

However, there are also hundreds of people who walk past both of these churches, week by week, who would never dream of setting foot inside. Many of them will think that anyone who believes in God is deluded or deceived. Such rationalist thinkers often have a strongly monist view of the world, in which everything, even mysterious things such as human consciousness and perception of non-physical entities, must have a physical or biological basis. As Ebenezer Scrooge says to the apparent ghost of Marley in Charles Dickens’ book, A Christmas Carol, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” 

It is almost impossible to convince someone who hasn’t had a first first-hand experience of God that anything like the Holy Spirit exists. Many nay-sayers, I suspect, quietly (or maybe not so quietly) believe that their unbelief is because they are more rational and maybe even more intelligent than those who get excited by such things. But there is another possible explanation for why some people apparently cannot, or will not, see the unseen.  

The British education system is heavily orientated towards STEM. Even when more creative subjects such as literature find their way into the syllabus, they are often studied in a rather dry and analytical way. Notwithstanding the efforts of the occasional maverick teacher, I recall much time spent learning how to identify the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, and little (if any) time learning to articulate how his sonnets made me feel. Such a system turns out good scientists, but it may be that in doing so it trains our young people out of being able to perceive a whole raft of things which are arguably just as important to human flourishing.  

The world around us contains significantly more sensory input than our minds can process, so we simply don’t pay attention to most of it. 

A “selective attention test” can quickly prove this point. I did one recently with a room full of psychology undergraduates, almost all of whom had identified as monists. “Since you guys are the brightest and the best,” I simpered “let’s do a little intelligence test. Apparently only five per cent of the general population get the answer right to this puzzle, but in this room, I expect the success rate will be a little higher…”  

Having primed them by flattering their egos, I proceeded to show them a video called “The Monkey Business Illusion”, designed in 2009 by scientists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. During the short film, a group of people pass basket balls to each other, and viewers are asked to count how many times the players wearing white shirts pass the ball. It seems simple enough, and when the film ended, I asked the students how many counted the right number of passes. Almost every hand in the room went up. No surprises there.  

Then I asked the more important question – who saw the gorilla? There was a smattering of laughter, and this time only about half of the hands went up. Meanwhile, the other half of my students were looking around at their peers, utterly confused… 

But it was true. In “The Monkey Business Illusion”, a person in a 6ft gorilla costume walks right across the middle of the scene, weaving through the players in the game. However, because most viewers are intently focussed on watching the players in white, they simply don’t perceive it. You can try this for yourself - the video I’m talking about can be found easily on YouTube, and if you follow the search term “selective attention test” there are many others like it.  

The material point is that the world around us contains significantly more sensory input than our minds can process, so we simply don’t pay attention to most of it. If you pause for a moment right now, you might notice that there is the hum of a heater in your room, or the noise of traffic outside, or the smell of an air freshener, or that a piece of your clothing that is too tight – things you were simply not aware of until I pointed them out. It’s common that we don’t perceive things until something else makes us think that they are important. If someone tells you that your house might have structural damage, you will suddenly start to notice every creak that comes from your walls and ceilings, even though those creaks have probably been happening for years.  

As social beings, we can be easily conditioned into paying attention to certain things and ignoring others. If I tell a group of students that intelligent people are highly attentive to the players in white shirts, I increase the likelihood that they simply will not notice a gorilla.  

There is good research to show that children, even in our modern and secular society, are inherently spiritual – most young kids believe in God, or gods, fairies and the existence of many things unseen. But this is not celebrated in our STEM focussed education system, wherein young minds are highly conditioned to let go of such “irrational” beliefs and trust in the full explanatory power of science. It is so effective that, by the time they get to my classroom at university, I’ve got little hope of persuading any of my monists that there was a 6ft gorilla without showing the video again and letting them see it for themselves.  

But there are always some people who are willing to challenge the idea that Marley was just an undigested bit of beef. There are always some people who attend churches of one type or another, or practice other forms of spirituality and religion. Some pray, some meditate, and many take part in rituals. This trains them in what anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann calls “micro-processes of attending”, leaving them more ready to perceive spiritual things instead of screening them out of their conscious awareness. How they respond might depend on preferred tradition – dancing, liturgy, or a little bit of both. But all agree that there is something going on that is unseen and important.  

Many STEM educated, highly rational and fully committed monists no doubt think that those who attend churches are deluded and deceived into perceiving unseen things are simply just not there. These nay-sayers have been taught, implicitly and explicitly, that it is more intelligent to believe in the all-explanatory power of science. But perhaps it is they who have been deluded and deceived? As the Monkey Business Illusion demonstrates, if you flatter someone’s intelligence enough, it becomes entirely possible to hide a 6ft gorilla in plain sight.  

Watch the Monkey Business Illusion

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