On Good Friday in 1300, Dante Alighieri set out with his travelling companion, the Roman poet Virgil, to navigate the nine circles of Hell.
Wrongdoing has never been quite the same since, for it is to Dante and his Inferno - being the first cantica of the epic poem the Divine Comedy - that credit is given for popularising the notion of the seven deadly sins, first laid down in the 6th century by Pope Gregory the Great.
So, for the last 700 years or so, sin has been synonymous with lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, anger, envy and pride.
And these particular transgressions, post-Inferno, came to acquire a pretty colourful range of punishments in the popular imagination: those guilty of pride, for instance, might be broken on the wheel; gluttons forced to eat rats, toads and snakes; the greedy thrown into cauldrons of boiling oil; the lusty smothered in fire and brimstone.
It can't have been much fun being a Christian back then.
Sin has recently been given something of a facelift, by the Roman Catholic Church. There are now seven deadly new ones although they are not quite as punchy as the originals, and in this indulgent age one can't imagine the punishments are nearly as spectacular either.
A week or so ago, Bishop Gianfranco Girotti told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that ‘‘priests must take account of the new sins which have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalisation''.
‘‘You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming, or coveting your neighbour's wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos,'' he said.
Furthermore, causing social injustice, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy and taking drugs all now count as deadly transgressions. And while the popular and secular response has been to have a bit of a chuckle about this belated worldly awakening, one imagines that the pronouncement has got the knickers of serious theologians in something of a twist.
To the amateur observer it seems a radical change of position. Far from being simply an individual matter, sin now clearly has a certain ‘‘social resonance''. Others might argue it always has had: camels, rich men and the eyes of needles? Jesus kicking the money-changers out of the temple?
Being obscenely wealthy is not something that the current rash of ‘‘prosperity theologists'' are unduly concerned about: on the contrary, to be wealthy, they preach, is a sign of God's favour. Mostly, they are American television evangelists and their financial affairs have been put under the spotlight by Republican Senator Charles Grassley, of Iowa.
The good senator wants to know whether the Rolls-Royces, private jets, multimillion-dollar homes, plastic surgery and all the other accumulated trappings of wealth ostentatiously displayed by the likes of Creflo Dollar - nothing too subtle about this guy - and his wife, are all primarily the property of their ministries, and thus exempt from federal taxation.
If they are, then gullibility should be declared a sin, too. Because no matter how clever the book-keeping and the ministries' taxation lawyers, ‘‘prosperity theology'' is evidently a perversion of just about everything that Jesus stood for, including: render to Caesar that which is Caesar's.
While he's about it, Senator Grassley should have a look at the antics of the American mortgage and banking sector. For the last decade or so they have been conjuring truly obscene fortunes out of nothing - well, truth be told, out of less than nothing: debt, bad debt, endlessly repackaged and sold off along a chain of ticket-clipping financiers.
Only now are the chickens coming home to roost.
One of the handful of largest banks in the United States, Bear Stearns, is the latest casualty, sold to JPMorgan Chase & Co at firesale prices; the US Federal Reserve has set an emergency interest rate cut; and the markets' confidence is in tatters. Despite protestations to the contrary by President George W. Bush, America seems well on the way to a full-blown recession - and to the misery of poverty and social injustice for many; much of the rest of the world may be sucked into the vortex.
By the new measures of Rome, the ‘‘prosperity theologists'', and the money-changers of Wall Street, deserve a little dance through Dante's inferno.
But there's a case to be made that even that sort of Hell might be too good for some of them.
- Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
