This was often referred to as Christian Humanism. By the twentieth century the emphasis of mainstream theology had largely shifted from personal salvation to acts of charity and love, from religion as soteriology to a concern with living in this world. Issue of evil(s) in this world in favor of focusing the attention on one’s own personal salvation, which is, as Swift for example showed in his Tale of a Tub, self-centered and ultimately, in terms of everyday life, destructive of self and others. Deriving as it does from the justification for evil in Original Sin, the apparatus of salvation has (or has often had) the effect of sidestepping the xi The evils that were thought to follow from the Original Sin were, in Christian theology, redeemed by Christ’s Incarnation, which provided, in compensation for death and suffering here, eternal life and happiness in the hereafter-the notion that a more satisfactory life begins after death. The fires of hell, of course, are the ultimate evil consequent upon sin. Sin then involves a transaction between a human and his or her god evil between humans, or between gods and the humans on whom they impose evils. The originary sense of evil(s) as suffering-evil (death, disease, pain) in a god-created world was the basis for our understanding of doing-evil as well: to do evil is to make a sentient being, human or animal, suffer. The probable reason for this goes back to the so-called Problem of Evil. “Evil,” as distinguished from evil, is evil aggravated or exacerbated, and one way of placing the scare marks has been to add the vocabulary of sin. The confusion of sin and evil, of religious and moral transgression, is the subject of this book. The blatant (or unarguable) evil of the twentieth century has been followed by an evil that is more subjective in the twenty-first, more reliant on one’s point of view and, significantly, on the distinction between sin and evil. MODERN SIN AND EVIL 301 1 Ideology 301 2 War 313 3 Holocaust 329Į V I L I S A T E R M of particular poignance in our time. THE ORIGINAL EVIL AND THE ORIGINAL SIN 253 1 Doing-Evil 253 2 Suffering-Evil 264 3 Coping with Evil 281ĬHAPTER VIII. DEMONIC AND BANAL EVIL 192 1 Demonic Doubles 192 2 Those Who Burn and Those Who Rot: Conrad 211 3 Popeye and Gowan Stevens: Faulkner 224 4 Pinkie Brown and Ida Arnold: Graham Greene 236 CHAPTER VII.
THE DEMONIZING OF SIN 161 1 “Sin With the Capital Letter”: The Supernatural 161 2 The Supernatural and Moral Values: Henry James 175 CHAPTER VI. SIN/EVIL AND THE LAW: THE NOVEL 124 1 Fielding 124 2 Dickens 138 3 Hawthorne and Melville 147 CHAPTER V. SIN AND EVIL REDEFINED: THE ENLIGHTENMENT 69 1 The Popular Stage 69Ģ Graphic Imagery 81 3 The Aesthetics of Sin 92 4 The Aesthetics of Evil 106 CHAPTER IV. CLASSICAL AND CHRISTIAN EQUIVALENTS OF SIN AND EVIL 34 1 Greece and Rome 34 2 Christian Satire 45 3 Church of England Satire: Swift, A Tale of a Tub 53 CHAPTER III. EVIL, SIN, AND WRONGDOING 1 1 Evil 1 2 Sin 5 3 Wrongdoing 21 CHAPTER II. Is there any horror deeper than other horrors, This Oedipus has inherited. What grief can crown this grief? It’s mine alone, my destiny-I am Oedipus! If there be yet a woe surpassing woes, it hath become the portion of Oedipus. If there is any ill worse than ill, that is the lot of Oedipus. If there is evil beyond evil, that is the lot of Oedipus. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1Įi de ti presbuteron eti kakou kakon tout’ elakh’ Oidipous The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Com mittee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. PR149.E87P38 2007 820.9′38-dc22 2006022021 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. American literature- History and criticism. English literature-History and criticism. Includes bibliographical references and index. Sin and evil : moral values in literature / Ronald Paulson. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Paulson, Ronald. Printed in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore, Inc. Set in Scala and Scala Sans by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
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