James E Hartley

Opium and Reptiles

Confessions of an English Opium Eater is one of those oddly compelling titles. “Confessions” has that hint of allure, and the phrase “English Opium Eater” is quaint with a touch of scandal.

I picked up my copy many decades ago at a library book sale. But alas, the title was compelling enough to part with a quarter to purchase it, but not tantalizing enough to actually read the book. Until now.

Hearing the tale, you will be forgiven for thinking this is a penny dreadful, but while having that style (and indeed, the original publication was a magazine serial), it is an autobiography. The timing of his life matters, so bear with me for a minute. Thomas de Quincey was the smart kid from a rich family, who was bored in boarding school and so ran away. A third of the book relates his early life in school and wandering homeless for a couple of years, all with nary a bit of opium in sight. Eventually, he goes off to Oxford, and then (finally) in 1804 discovers the substance which led to the title which was the only reason anyone ever cared enough to read his autobiography. Until 1812, it was a once a week habit. Then came the breaking point, and from 1813 through 1819, he was a full-scale addict, taking high doses daily. In 1821, Confessions was serialized in three parts, relating his fall into addiction and his rise out of it. It was a hit.

Obviously, the next step was to put it into book form in 1822, where De Quincey added an appendix that noted many readers had the impression he had kicked the opium addition because, well, he wrote the narrative in a manner that pretty much said he had done so. However, he reveals that he still takes opium, just not as much. He spent the rest of his life as a low grade addict. So, the feel good ending turns out not to be so feel good after all.

The autobiographical details aren’t really enough to turn this into a classic; there are no horrifying stories of the dastardly deeds done by the English Opium Eater prowling the dark back alleys of London. So what keeps this book on the fringes of “Books worth Reading”? The prose is good, so that helps. But the heart of the book is De Quincey’s lengthy descriptions of the Pleasures and the Pains of opium.

One way to read this book, then, is as a cost-benefit analysis of picking up an opium addiction. I know that makes me sound like an economist, but, honest, it is De Quincey who is writing like an economist. The timing of what follows is, let’s say, curious. Recall that his daily opium use was from 1813 to 1819. Shortly before that, De Quincey discovered an amazing subject: “I had been led in 1811 to look into loads of books and pamphlets on many branches of economy.” Huzzah! (“Huzzah” is the kind of word thy used in 1811.) Ah, but we rejoiced too soon: “I saw that these were generally the very dregs and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungus heads to powder with a lady’s fan.” Ouch. A year later, De Quincey is an opium addict. Let us hope this was not causal.

But wait, there’s more. In 1819, De Quincey breaks his habit. What else happened in 1819?

At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. Ricardo’s book: and recurring to my own prophetic anticipation of the advent of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had finished the first chapter, “Thou art the man!” Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I wondered once more: I wondered at myself that I could once again be stimulated to the effort of reading: and much more I wondered at the book. Had this profound work been really written in England during the nineteenth century? Was it possible? I supposed thinking had been extinct in England. Could it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what all the universities of Europe, and a century of thought, had failed even to advance by one hair’s breadth? All other writers had been crushed and overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents; Mr. Ricardo had deduced, à priori, from the understanding itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.

Who knew David Ricardo was such a magnificent writer? I always thought he was tedious.

But, despite this fascinating foray into economic analysis, the real subject matter of the book is opium. De Quincey clearly thinks his book will convince you of the horrors of opium, that the cost-benefit analysis is heavily weighted on the cost side. He was wrong about his own book; I think it is fair to say that the benefits seem larger than the costs.

De Quincey waxes quite poetic about the benefits:

Oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for “the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,” bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood; and to the proud man a brief oblivion for
Wrongs undress’d and insults unavenged;
that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for the triumphs of suffering innocence, false witnesses; and confoundest perjury, and dost reverse the sentences of unrighteous judges;—thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and temples beyond the art of Phidias and Praxiteles—beyond the splendour of Babylon and Hekatómpylos, and “from the anarchy of dreaming sleep” callest into sunny light the faces of long-buried beauties and the blessed household countenances cleansed from the “dishonours of the grave.” Thou only givest these gifts to man; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!

Contrast that to the pains of opium: it gives you bad dreams and hallucinations. He found himself surrounded by a menagerie of ugly birds and reptiles:

The cursed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to live with him, and (as was always the case almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses, with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into a thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated.

Now that doesn’t sound too good. But, compare it to the encomium to the “just, subtle, and mighty opium” above, and it isn’t hard to see that the book might induce many a soul to decide that the good outweighs the bad. After, all, you get the good with the small doses, right? The bad only becomes a problem when you take a lot, right? So, just don’t take a lot, see, and everything will be OK. All of which leads me to wonder how many other attempts to dissuade a person from taking a hallucinogenic substance led to an increase in the use of the substance.

Part of the problem with De Quincey’s book is that if you really want a literary experience of drug addiction, Confessions of an English Opium Eater doesn’t even compare to Hunter S, Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (To be fair: the strongest mind altering substance I have ever used is coffee, so I am not an expert on whether De Quincey or Thompson is more accurate, just which is more literarily interesting.) An example? How about this:

Terrible things were happening all around us. Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge – impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. “Order some golf shoes,” I whispered. “Otherwise, we’ll never get out of this place alive. You notice these lizards don’t have any trouble moving around in this muck – that’s because they have claws on their feet.”

Are reptiles a constant occurrence in hallucinogenic episodes?

Art of the Quip

The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s only novel…for good reason. Literary genius is not necessarily adept at all forms.

Here is a parlor game: which authors wrote excellent novels, short stories, plays, essays, and poems? Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone. Or, make the game easier by aiming at 4 out of 5. Or would it have to be 3 out of 5 to get any entrants?

Wilde’s forte was “The Quip.” He was a manufacturer of one-liners; indeed his only rivals in that form might be Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker. Accounts of his performances, and that is the right word, at dinner parties were the stuff of legends.

Alas, “The Quip” is not a very marketable literary form. It can easily, however, be incorporated into a play, and Wilde wrote a few good plays. But, if you a Master of Quips, how do you write a novel? The first step is to write yourself into the novel. You can give yourself another name, and if you are going to do that, might as well make yourself a Lord! Therein lies the real secret of The Picture of Dorian Gray; it would be more accurately entitled Admiring the Quips of Lord Henry Wotten. So much of the novel is simply setting up excuses for Lord Henry Wotten to make clever remarks in the presence of dull-witted figures.

There is, of course a plot, but the whole of the plot is easily summarized. Dorian Gray, young and beautiful, has his portrait painted. He then notices that as he commits immoral acts, the effects of that immorality show up on the portrait instead of on his own visage. Knowing that he can stay young and beautiful no matter how depraved he acts, he indulges himself. It’s not hard to imagine the effects.

A story like that can generate a great deal of discussion about virtue. This is a book well worth reading. But, taken as a whole, it is really obvious that the things about the plot which might attract our attention are not the reason Wilde wrote the book. Lord Henry Wotten and his endless quips occupy a vast amount of space, but are terribly unrelated to the story of Dorian Gray. Indeed, the connection between the two is that Wotten exhibits what can best be described as a dispassionate lust for the young and beautiful Dorian. (Inserting Freudian psychoanalysis of Wilde is child’s play.)

What did Wilde think he was doing with this novel? There is a rather bizarre Preface to the novel. It begins “The artist is the creator of beautiful things” and it is not a leap of faith to think Wilde is talking about himself in that line. He has created a beautiful thing, this book you are about to read. But, the Preface ends with the line “All art is quite useless.”

The last line is puzzling. Is it an indication that Wilde realizes how utterly useless he is, that all those clever quips amount to nothing? Not exactly, the immediately preceding sentence is “The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.”

Bernulf Clegg (presumably named after Saint Bernulf!) was puzzled enough about that last line to write Wilde and ask what it meant. In reply, Wilde sent an extraordinary letter. Here it is in its entirety.

Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.
A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.

If Wilde is right, what then? You read The Picture of Dorian Gray and your sole response is to admire it. But what exactly would you admire? The cleverness of Wilde’s stand in? Do you have toward this book the same sort of crypto-erotic joy that Wilde feels toward Gray? Put the whole work of a pedestal, don’t overthink it, just worship the creator? That is not the sort of response this novel engenders.

Look again at the letter above, though, and replace “Art” with “Quip.” It is a perfect description. Quips create a mood, are sterile, are not to be pondered, and have no use at all beyond the momentary pleasure of hearing them. The real point of The Picture of Dorian Gray is to provide the platform for elevating Wilde’s Quips into High Art.

Another fun parlor game is to decide on who was the most conceited figure in history. Lots of candidates. My favorite is Dante, who meets Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Virgil in the Inferno and notes, “And then they showed me greater horn still,/ for they made me one of their company,/ so that I became the sixth amidst such wisdom.” (Hollanders’ translation) But, then again, maybe this isn’t so conceited. Dante is obviously superior to Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, and I don’t think may people would rate him below either Homer or Virgil. Maybe Dante is being modest there.

Wilde, however, is not in that pantheon. He said a very many clever things. (Asked by a customs agent if he had anything to declare, he replied “I have nothing to declare but my genius.”) A surfeit of quips deserves our admiration. We can even go as far as to say that a great quip is a work of art. But, to compare a quip by Wilde to a play by Shakespeare or a novel by Dickens or a poem by Eliot is, quite literally, laughable.

Cixin Liu Joins the Pantheon

In its relatively short history, science fiction has had a fair number of books which could be considered Classics, books that are so interesting in what they do, it is reasonably certain that people will still be reading them in the future. Take Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, for example. The idea of imagining what would happen if the laws of social science were as stable as the laws of physical science and then going forward through time was clever; the stories were well done and reasonably well-written, and the books were fun.

There is a new trilogy in town that is every bit as good as Asimov’s trilogy. I don’t know any higher praise than that for a work in science fiction.

Cixin Liu’s The Remembrance of Earth’s Past is brilliant. If you have even a nodding like of science fiction, you’ll want to read this.

There is one annoying problem however. The trilogy is formally called The Remembrance of Earth’s Past, but it is often called The Three-Body Problem Trilogy, since that is the name of the first book. An interesting question of nomenclature; if the author has one name for his trilogy, but popular discussion of it uses a different name, which name wins out in the end? The publisher is already stuck; there is a nice slip cover edition of the trilogy and the slip cover uses the popular name, not the actual name.

What makes this book so great? Therein lies another problem. Part of the joy of reading these books is watching the story unfold. This series has more twists and turns than any work I have read in a very long time. The more you know about the plot in advance, the less surprising and wonderful it all would be. If you know nothing about the plot, do your best to keep it that way as you venture into the world Liu has crafted.

What will you find? Here is one way of describing it which does not give away plot developments. After reading this trilogy, for the first time in my life I have a reasonable definition of “science fiction.” Science fiction at its best creates a plausible word in which the mechanics of that world bring philosophical problems into a new light.

The best science fiction is a novel and interesting way to do that; most science fiction is terribly derivative. What is incredible about The Three-Body Problem trilogy is that it manages to create a new world and a new philosophical problem every couple of hundred pages. Just when you think you have settled into the world and are wrestling with the problems inherent in that world, you realize that the world has morphed and the problems you thought you were solving were not the real problems to be solved.

This wouldn’t work if every morphing of the world felt like a simple restart—it would seem like a series of unrelated short stories then. But, in this work, the world seems to morph organically—of course this world is morphing into this next world and the philosophical problems are obviously really the ones you are now facing. In other words, the trilogy just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

Moreover, the development of the world arises from constant thinking about the laws of physics. This is the rare since fiction work in which the science part and the philosophical musing part are both vital to the structure of the plot.

Just as the science underlying the book develops naturally, the philosophical questions the book raises throughout are related. It is an exploration of the individual and society. At no point is it really obvious that is what is going on, though. I only realized it when I started thinking about the trilogy after finishing it.

Lest this review seem like unbridled praise, I can note that the prose style could use some work. The book was originally written in Chinese, so the problem may be entirely in the translation. But, there are moments of ridiculously ham-handed style that will make you cringe a bit. Just ignore them and move along. The story is worth it. And, don’t even be tempted to look at the explanatory footnotes in the first volume. The translator decided that you really do need to have all the references to Chinese history and politics explained to you in footnotes which are totally irrelevant to understanding the story and totally incomprehensible to anyone who didn’t underhand the reference already.

Let’s not end on the sour note, however. This is a long work. The volumes are 390, 512, and 610 pages long. All together that is longer than War and Peace, but, then again, the scope of this work rivals the scope of Tolstoy’s magnum opus. The Three-Body Problem is likely not a Great Book, but it will have a very long shelf life. Set off on the journey; you’ll be glad you did.

The Art (and Cure) of Love

“Should anyone here in Rome lack finesse at love-making let him
Try me—read my book, and results are guaranteed!
Technique is the secret.”

How many books have been written for which that could be the back-cover blurb?

Technique which is guaranteed to bring good results! Now, you ae thinking that is just hyperbole, but the author is happy to double down.

The first thing to get in your head is that every single
Girl can be caught—and that you’ll catch her if
You set your toils right.

Could you ask for a better example of e problems of the modern age than this? Reducing that ancient art of courtship to a matter of applying the proper technique to attain a realizable goal? All peppered with that cheesy tone of “You can do this! We can Help!” Home Depot meets Jane Austen. The decadence of the 21^st century.

Then again, the book wasn’t written in the 21^st century. Is was written two thousand years ago. Ovid, The Art of Love (Peter Green translation). Some things really do never change.

I heard about the book from a student I know who had been reading it in her Latin course. It was, she told me, incredibly funny. So, I bought it. She was right—it is extremely funny. (Also amusing: I bought it with funds from a research account I have at the school. The title of Peter Green’s Ovid translation in which the work is found is, most unfortunately, The Erotic Poems. I had to think twice about whether I really wanted to send in the receipt for this book for reimbursement. Ovid would laugh at my conundrum.)

What makes the book so amusing? First off, Ovid’s unrelenting fishing for praise. “And when you’ve brought down your/ Amazon, write on the trophy Ovid was my guide.” “As once the young men, so now let my girl-disciples/ Inscribe their trophies: Ovid was my guide.”

To what end was Ovid their guide? There are three parts to the poem. Ovid first tells men how to woo the girl of their dreams. Having won her, part 2 is devoted to how to keep the girl of your dreams. But, then Ovid pulls a fast one on the young men he has been advising, and in part 3 tells women how to thwart the lovers of the first two parts and find the man of their dreams.

It is all a lot of work. “Love is a species of warfare/ slack troopers, go elsewhere!/ It takes more than cowards to guard/ these standards. Night-duty in winter, long route-marches, every/ Hardship, all forms of suffering: these await/ The recruit who expects a soft option.”

Of course, you already knew all this. The most amazing thing about Ovid is not that he has an amusing way to give advice on love, but how familiar all that advice sounds. You can pick just about any part at random and set it to music and never know it wasn’t a pop song written in 2020. Indeed, these lyrics would be far better than those in many a contemporary pop song.

Not up for all this work at love? Fear not, Ovid has you covered. Positioned immediately following The Art of Love is another Ovid masterpiece: Cures for Love.

Attend to my precepts, then, you disappointed gallants,
All those whom their loves have utterly betrayed.
Let him who taught you to love now teach you love’s cure—
Take succor from the hand that struck the wound!

The trick? Well, the best option is to never let love start growing. But, if you fail at that, Rule Number One is: No Leisure! Keep busy. And the best way to do that: farming! No leisure there—always something to do down on the farm. Also hunting! And if that doesn’t work, travel!

Now you may not be able to head to the country to farm or to distant lands, but fear not, Ovid is not out of advice. Start dwelling on the flaws of your beloved! Magnify the deformities; encourage the object of your love to engage in activities which expose all those deficiencies.

It turns out curing love is at least as much work as indulging in love.

Why read Ovid? In an age in which we can all use more opportunities to smile and chuckle at life, Ovid is right there ready to be your guide. Love is indeed a mysterious and amusing thing; who can explain it? If you are young, read Ovid to help put your wooing into perceptive. If you are old, read Ovid to remember and perhaps even rekindle those flames of love. Read Ovid because he is wise, not in the advice he gives, but in reminding us that all of life is not serious, that some parts of life are meant to be treated with a lighthearted raillery.

The Logic of Bureaucracy

Back in my US History class in 8^th grade, my teacher (Mr. Boxdorfer) made one of those odd, throw-away remarks which I am certain that nobody else who was in that room remembered even a day later. Yet, it not only deeply troubled me at the time, it stuck with me all these years, and has had a curious effect on my life.

We were talking about the Civil War, and the teacher mentioned Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He then noted that this was a book that everyone still heard about in school, but hardly anyone actually read. I was puzzled; if people had heard about the book and knew it was important, why hadn’t they read it? I toyed with the idea of getting my mom to drop me off at the Tyler Mall some afternoon so I could do a survey asking people if they had heard of the book and if they had read it. (I really could not imagine my teacher was right.) I think that remark is the source of the vague guilt I feel about all the books that people know about that I have not yet read.

Catch-22 is even further out on the Uncle Tom’s Cabin scale. The title is now a common phrase, but I am not sure everyone knows it is the title of a book, let alone has read the book. (Indeed, there are undoubtedly people who now think it is just the title of a series on hulu.)

The book is certainly highly praised. From the back cover: “To my mind, there have been two great American novels in the past fifty years. Catch-22 is one.” That was Stephen King. Norman Mailer called it “the rock and roll of novels,” which is presumably praise, though I have no idea what it means.

It’s a World War II story. A bomber squad on a small island in the Mediterranean. The plot? Uh… Good luck with that one. The book is episodic—42 chapters’ worth of episodes. The episodes are not in chronological order. But, that makes no real difference; the point of the book is not to watch a plot unfold. What is the point? Well, let’s take an example.

Yossarian, the closest thing to a protagonist in the book, is an American bombardier. Clevinger is another American at the base.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”
[…]
“Who’s they?” He [Clevinger] wanted to know. “Who, specifically, do you think is trying to murder you?”
“Every one of them,” Yossarian told him.
“Every one of whom?”
“Every one of whom do you think?”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“Then how do you know they aren’t?”
“Because…” Clevinger sputtered, and turned speechless with frustration.
Clevinger really thought he was right, but Yossarian had proof, because strangers he didn’t know shot at him with cannons every time he flew up into the air to drop bombs on them, and it wasn’t funny at all.

Multiply that over 500 pages and you have Catch-22. That is not really an exaggeration. It is easy to imagine a 50 page version of Catch-22 which would convey the entire message of the book. It really wouldn’t matter which 50 pages you excerpted. So, another way to think about Catch-22 is that it is ten nearly identical 50 page novels strung together.

It’s a rather funny novel, but it is the same joke over and over and over and over. The same stylistic tricks (“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”). The same basic punchline. Reading the book from beginning to end is thus a bit of a chore. Is it worth it? If you had asked me that question two weeks ago, I would have said, “No. Just pick a few chapters and enjoy.” But, after discussing the book at a conference I was just at, I realized that answer was wrong. It is, indeed a book you should read.

Why the change of mind? Over the course of a couple of days, talking about the book (and other books) with a dozen people, assorted episodes from the book were brought up on a regular basis. What fascinated me was that the same episode was never brought up twice. While reading through the book it seemed like the same joke over and over, when people would bring up a particular episode, it was always obvious that the episode brought up was indeed the perfect one to illustrate a particular idea. Instead of being exactly the same joke over and over, it is a set of slight variations of the same joke, and the variation is important. Catch-22 is really a thesaurus; you use it to find the equivalent of the mot juste, the perfect word.

What is the general theme? Bureaucracies are crazy. Once you enter the world of the bureaucracy, nothing makes sense anymore. It is a bewildering array of incoherent and internally contradictory rules and action. Bureaucracies are full of bureaucrats, people who are using the vast bureaucracy to attain smaller, individual goals which may or may not aid the larger goals the bureaucracy is supposed to be working toward.

In other words, Catch-22 has an obvious sequel: Dilbert. It’s the same thing. Dilbert also endlessly mocks the bureaucracy by repeating the same basic joke over and over. Imagine reading straight through 500 pages of Dilbert cartoons, and you have the same basic experience as reading Catch-22. The difference is Dilbert is doled out one strip at a time. I suspect if you read one chapter at a time of Catch-22 spread out over 42 weeks, you’d get exactly the same joy from it that you get from reading Dilbert. (You do enjoy reading Dilbert, right?)

So, if you would like to join me is the Sisyphean quest to read all the books you have heard about, I am happy to recommend Catch-22 as a good place to start.

Seven Deadly Virtues

“The chaplain had mastered, in a moment of divine intuition, the handy technique of protective rationalization, and he was exhilarated by his discovery. It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”

That is from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, published in 1961. One way to think about John Koessler’s Dangerous Virtues is as a book-length treatment of that quotation.

Koessler’s book is a very clever examination of the Seven Deadly Sins. Quick test: Can you name all seven? Probably not, and the reason for that is one of the things Koessler’s argument explains. Oddly, your best hope at knowing all seven was seeing the thriller/horror movie Se7en. Knowing the structure of Dante’s Purgatorio would also work, but (alas) more people watch Brad Pitt movies than read Dante. So, before we get to Koessler, we need a refresher on the Seven Deadly Sins.

Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, Lust. The order is not random; they are listed from most to least serious. The first three are instances where love is misdirected to harming others; the last three are corruptions of the love good things; Sloth is a deficiency of love. If those descriptions seem odd, Koessler’s book explains why.

Here is another quick test: which book of the Bible contains the list of the Seven Deadly Sins? Answer: None of them. A version of the list was first set down in the fourth century AD by the rather obscure Evagrius Ponticus. The list of seven we know was formalized by the much better known Pope Gregory I in the late sixth century. Dante and Aquinas cemented the Seven into a taxonomy of sin.

Why do we no longer think in terms of those sins? Koessler argues that we have collectively performed a fascinating inversion. In the modern age, we have recast all seven of those sins into virtues. We have done this by forgetting the actual nature of the sin and then recasting the manifestations of the sin into virtuous acts. In doing so, we no longer have a proper view of sin at all.

First, Koessler notes, we have a remarkable ability to treat sin as akin to being graded on a curve. I am not as bad as that person, so my sins are not so bad. If we are honest, we know better than this, so we actually have an even better defense mechanism:

Others treat sin the same way they do high cholesterol. They know that if they ignore it, things will go badly. But they hope that if they take certain basic measures, it can be kept under control. This approach to sin takes two primary forms: one is medical, and the other is athletic. The medical model sees sin as a kind of disease. The athletic model approaches sin like a weakness that can be remedied through discipline. Either view makes sin seem manageable. If sin is a sickness, it can be cured through treatment. If it is a weakness, that weakness can be eliminated with training

Note in both the medical and the athletic view of sin, it is an annoyance that needs to be overcome. We are basically doing alright except for a couple bad habits that either are out of our control (medical) or we can fix tomorrow with a bit of training (athletic). In neither case do we actually see sin for what it is. “Indeed, one way to understand the nature of any sin is to see it as a distortion of the good that God has provided.”

In a chapter devoted to each sin, Koessler artfully shows how we have converted the sin into a positive good. Pride? Self-esteem isn’t bad, is it? Envy? Why shouldn’t we be annoyed when evil prospers or that political party with the wrong views or that church with the bad theology is in the ascendency? Wrath? That’s righteous anger, honest. Sloth? Weekends and retirement are really nice. Greed? Why should we be satisfied with what we have? Gluttony? Why should we ever say “No” to enjoying good things? Lust? Well, it’s not like we can stop that.

The problem is even worse. By the time we have inverted all the sins, we have completely forgotten what virtue looks like.

However, contemporary interest in virtue seems to be primarily negative. Our ideas about what is good do not necessarily serve as a basis for self examination and personal improvement. Often, they merely provide the grounds for carping against others who fall short of our standard.

Therein lies the most intriguing part of Koessler’s argument. By thinking about sin instead of virtue, we have all been led astray. We focus on sin, ours or, even better, other’s. We downplay our own sins and amplify those of others. We feel a bit guilty about our own sin, but then try to rationalize it away. “I am not really envious, I just want my fair share.”

What we never really do is think about virtue. We play the game of thinking we are virtuous because we don’t commit the sins those other people are committing. But, while we ask how we can sin less, we rarely ask how we can be more virtuous. Why? Being virtuous is terribly hard. Thinking about wrath is easy; I just need to make sure I am only angry at the right things! But, instead, thinking about how to love my enemies, well, that is just too hard.

Koessler’s book is a marvelous read. Given its structure, it is also perfect for an eight week group discussion, one week on the introductory chapter and then a sin a week for the next seven weeks. Guaranteed to provoke all sorts of discussion.

(Moody Press sent me a copy of the book in exchange for this review.)