At Books and Culture, Stephen Prothero examines the Oxford University Press book series on the seven deadly sins. Though the volumes vary, Prothero notes that most of them tend to turn toward advocacy of the ways in which the particular sin mentioned has received bad press.
“Flannery O’Connor, the sin-obsessed novelist of the once sin-obsessed South, wrote, ‘The Catholic novelist believes that you destroy your freedom by sin; the modern reader believes, I think, that you gain it in that way.’ The Seven Deadly Sins series was written for this modern reader. But what has been lost as sin has been sacrificed to freedom?
“The stock answers are close at hand. What has been lost are guilt and fear, Catholic bishops who worm their way into our bedrooms, Puritan divines who take sadistic pleasure in dangling us over a fiery pit. But such answers are too pat.
“What is missing from these books–and from contemporary American culture–is a sense that something is missing from this world. With the notable exception of Thurman’s Anger, there is little awareness here of the incompleteness and unsatisfactoriness that Augustine took for evidence of another life, and that saints from Mary to Mother Teresa have taken as a charge to make this life conform to our imaginings of the next. Quoting Baudelaire, O’Connor once wrote that ‘the devil’s greatest wile …is to convince us that he does not exist.’ If so, this is a wily series indeed.”
