Delphic Maxim 101: Repent of sin
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
101. Repent of sins
Perhaps you can understand why I left today’s maxim until 9:30 at night. It’s a tough one.
I’m not a religious person — we’ve been through this on previous posts. So the idea of sin is loaded with connotations that aren’t particularly meaningful to me. Even when I was very young and still Catholic, I was more fascinated by the stories and the idea of a tripartite God and all of that stuff than I was with the idea of sin. Maybe that’s what caused me to love Science Fiction so much.
Sin is loaded because it goes further than crime or doing the wrong thing. There’s a kind of spiritual lowness to it. It’s a transgression not just against another person or their property, but against divine law: sin is essentially a crime against God himself. This is obviously a bit of a problem for an atheist.
It’s not that sin isn’t a useful concept. Almost everything in the bible gets recycled and repurposed for our secular age, and that’s a good thing. Like the mythologies of Greece and Rome, the great faiths of the world are also rich with narrative and meaning, and that’s useful for understanding, describing and adding colour to our interpretations of the world.
But I think a maxim that asks us to repent of sins is pushing into territory so religious, so steeped in the language of faith, that for many of us it becomes meaningless. I’d be doing it a disservice if I simplified it to something like ‘ask for forgiveness’ or ‘apologise for doing wrong’. Both of those are appropriate things to do (even if they contradict the call to act without repenting), but they aren’t as weighty as repenting for sin.
The easy thing, of course, is to remember last week’s maxim to act without repenting. This simplifies matters, since we need to ensure if we don’t want to repent, that we don’t sin in the first place. But repentance for sin pre-supposes that we accept the category of sin — and that’s not something many of us do.
I’ve said from the outset that I won’t necessarily agree with every maxim: they’re victims of translation, of cultural context, of ageing and changing social conventions. And most significantly, of course, is that we live in a plural society. The idea that one set of advice, of ‘rules for living’, would be generalisable to everyone is just silly.
So for some, this is a meaningful maxim. For others, like me, it serves as a reminder that these maxims aren’t rules, or even guidelines, but reminders of principles by which we can govern our lives. They are modes of good conduct — tips for living, and whether or not they are valuable depends, as always, on context.
