The Dark Side of the Soul review – an insider’s guide to sin, by a priest

How did wickedness become so alluring? The Anglican author suggests that vice is not to be prohibited, but is ‘something with which we need to develop a constructive relationship’

Some people think sex is sinful, while others think sin is sexy. The glamour of evil is the reason half the postgraduate English students in the world seem to be working on vampires and the gothic. Traditionally, however, it is virtue that is beguiling and vice that is boring. For Aristotle and Aquinas, the good life is about living as exuberantly as you can, whereas wickedness is a lack or defect. The wicked are those who have never quite got the hang of being human. They are botched imitations of real human beings, flashy but depthless. Then there are the genuinely evil, who destroy others not for some practical purpose but just for the obscene delight of it. The immoral are two a penny, but the evil are as rare a species as Tea Party intellectuals.

How, then, did wickedness become so alluring? Part of the answer may lie in that legendary phenomenon: the rise of the middle classes. Once the merchants and accountants got their hands on virtue, redefining it as prudence, thrift, chastity, meekness, sobriety, self-discipline and so on, vice was bound to appear alluring by contrast. Dickens’s Fagin has a larger fan club than Oliver Twist. There is also the English tradition of the devil-may-care patrician, from Byron to Boris Johnson, whose appeal lies in his roguery.

The conceited 'are in many ways like the arrogant', and politeness is, apparently, the most fundamental of the virtues

Continue reading...