Sinners, Saints, and Monsters

There are three kinds of characters: saints, sinners, and monsters.

To put it another way: good people, ordinary people, and bad people.

It is easy to make a story about saints and monsters, but the real heart of drama lies with the sinners.

If you are not comfortable with the word sin with its religious implications, by all means call it something else. Perhaps call it a transgression. Transgression is putting a foot deliberately across a line in violation of whatever contract or obligation binds you to others. This is the literal meaning of transgress, from the Latin gredi to walk and trans across.

These days, people who have done something wrong tend to confess to having “made a mistake,” as if lack of judgment or information were the only thing that led them to transgress. Had they had the correct information and training, they implicitly claim, they would not have stepped across the line. They are still a good person, they implicitly plead, because their transgression was not intentional. It was a mistake.

That’s not likely so. Most of the time that we transgress, it is not by mistake. We transgress because our appetite overcomes our charity. We sin because keeping our feet on our own side of these lines is hard. To do so, we must wrestle with appetite, and appetite is a formidable and tireless foe.

If it were not hard to keep ourselves from transgressing, it would not be a transgression. There is no need to fence a boundary no one has any desire to cross. Sins are sins because it is hard to refrain from sinning. And it is in this struggle between charity and appetite that we find the drama in the story of a sinner.

Much as we would all like to think we are good people, the truth is good people are rare. The best that can be said about us is that we are mostly harmless. It is common today to hear people say, “I am a good person.” But no good person ever said those words. They are only ever said by sinners and by monsters. To be genuinely good, to consistently seek the good of others, to love your neighbor as yourself, is rare and difficult. And it never occurs to good people to claim that they are good. They are thinking about other people, not themselves.

Thankfully, being genuinely bad, consistently seeking to do ill to others as an end in itself, is rare as well. Most of us lie in the middle, mostly concerned with our own good, the good of our families and friends, and in peaceable coexistence with our neighbors. In times of crisis, ordinary people sometimes rise to heights of extraordinary generosity, and sometimes they sink to deeds of monstrous depravity. But these are exceptions, not the norm. Mostly we look after our own and let the world and its troubles roll on.

The very natural desire of ordinary people to think they are good can affect how we tell stories and the kinds of stories people want to read. The sort of reader who likes to identify with the main character of a story, to see the world through their eyes, generally wants that character to be a good person, a saint. And since there is something in all of us that fears the darkness, they want that good person to defeat the darkness, which means that the antagonist must be a bad person, a monster.

There is nothing wrong with stories of saints and monsters. They constitute a large portion of our literary heritage as well as the current fiction market. If well crafted, they can encourage sinners to behave like saints, which is a good thing. On the other hand, if crafted to do so, they can encourage sinners to think that they are already saints, which is not a good thing.

But the problem with tales of saints and monsters is that the saints never cease to be saints, and the monsters never cease to be monsters, and this takes so many dramatic possibilities off the table. There are so many more dramatic possibilities in the lives of sinners, of ordinary people. Ordinary people can turn out in their thousands and give of their treasure and their time when people they have never met have had their lives devastated by fire or flood. But ordinary people can also be assigned to be guards at death camps where people they have never met are being herded into gas chambers and never lift a finger to help or protest. This is the drama of ordinary people. Which way will they turn when the pressure is applied? Will a crisis turn them into saints or into monsters?

It might be tempting to suppose that ordinary people are either proto-saints or proto-monsters waiting for a crisis to reveal their true character. All the evidence seems to be the other way, that we are all both proto-saints and proto-monsters able to turn one way or the other in a moment of crisis. This is a bad thing for humanity, as it can turn whole populations into monsters on occasion. But it is a good thing for dramatists, for it is upon this possibility of an ordinary person turning either saint or monster that much of drama depends.

It is what James Scott Bell calls the mirror moment, the moment when the protagonist looks in the mirror and asks themselves, “When the moment comes, will I turn saint or monster?” It is the reason the reader keeps reading past their bedtime, desperate to know, when the moment comes, will the protagonist turn saint or monster?

And yet, there is a catch in this. The reader is only kept on tenterhooks by this question if it is a question that they ask about themselves. While they are asking, “Will the protagonist turn saint or monster in this moment?” they are also asking themselves, “Would I turn saint or monster in this moment?”

In order to ask this question, you have to be in some doubt about the answer. You have to have some doubt in your heart about whether you would plunge into a raging river to try to save a child that had been swept away by a flood. You have to have some doubt in your heart about whether, if an SS recruiting office ordered you to enlist as a guard at Treblinka, you would go and stand in your uniform holding your rifle and help herd Jews into gas chambers or if you would refuse and perhaps end up in a camp yourself or else summarily shot. In short you have to acknowledge that you are not, in fact, a good person, but an ordinary person; not a saint but a sinner.

The great moral good that a novel can do is to make the reader ask themselves this question. Having asked it in the context of a story might just make a difference when a real crisis comes, and we are faced with the question in real life. Having stood upon this precipice in stories, perhaps we will be a little more calm, a little more courageous, a little less astonished by the emotions that surge through us, a little more the masters of our fear. And perhaps that will make the difference in whether we turn saint or monster in that moment.

But being asked to face this question makes us uncomfortable. At least, it should. If it does not make us uncomfortable, we are monsters already.

A story of saints and monsters does not trouble us in the same way as a story of sinners. There is no question that a saint will act like a saint in any such situation. And because there is no doubt, their actions call us to admiration but spare us the scourge of self-examination. Yes, admiration of saints can help us choose the saintly path in times of crisis. But compared to the story of the sinner, it is perhaps not so effective a vaccine against the triumph of the monster within because it does not force us to examine the possibility that we might become monsters rather than saints.

Saints of this type are, of course, literary inventions. Real saints were all born as ordinary people, as sinners. They at some point faced this choice to turn saint or turn monster and chose the path of sainthood, often to their very great cost. If we are to turn saints, it may perhaps be the stories of sinners rather than the stories of saints that give us the courage and experience to turn saint when the moment comes.

Or perhaps we will choose not to think about it. Another way to shrink from facing the question of whether I would prove to be a saint or a monster is to redefine my responsibilities. The fewer boundaries I recognize, the less likely I am to transgress, at least in my own estimation.

The ultimate expression of this is to stop thinking in terms of responsibilities at all and instead to think about rights. When you see your life in terms of responsibilities, you worry about whether you are transgressing. When you see your life in terms of rights, you worry about whether you are being transgressed against. This introduces a new type of character into the discussion: the victim.

Saints, sinners, and monsters are all defined in terms of their capacity for transgression. The saint heroically refrains from transgressing. The sinner sometimes yields to the temptation to transgress. The monster revels in the act of transgressing. But the victim is defined solely in terms of their being transgressed against. There is no question of the victim transgressing. The possibility of a victim also being a transgressor is discounted entirely, which makes the victim into a strange kind of saint, a saint of whom no positive virtue is required since they are sanctified sufficiently by their victimhood.

The claim of victimhood, however, depends on the ability to define a victimizer, a transgressor against the rights of the victim. Just as no positive virtue is required of the victim, no positive virtue can be ascribed to the victimizer. They must be a monster, pure and simple.

This takes us back to the saint-and-monster story again, but its drama is now all reversed. No virtue or heroism is required of the victim saint, therefore all of the action must come from the victimizing monster. The appeal to the reader here is that by sympathizing with the victim, they too are sanctified, by their sympathy alone, without the need for any act of positive virtue.

The saint-and-monster story also removes all troubling questions about the rightness of a cause and the rightness of actions taken in that cause. If the antagonist is a monster, the saint need have no qualms, and we will have no qualms on their behalf, about slaying the monster. But if the protagonist and the antagonist are both ordinary people, both sinners, the question of who is transgressing against who, of whether the protagonist is right or wrong, or of whether they are justified in their actions becomes fraught.

But while the absence of moral complexity in the saint-and-monster story makes it easy on the reader’s conscience, it still makes for lesser drama. The will they / won’t they question becomes moot because it is a foregone conclusion that, as a saint, they will. What remains is the can they / can’t they question, the question of competence. But that’s a foregone conclusion as well. Of course they can. We know they can. All the pleasure to be had from the tale comes from watching them do it, thus affirming our faith in competence to mend the world.

The saint-and-monster story can thus be both inspiring and comforting, but it does not have the same drama as the story of the sinner, nor can it be edifying at quite the same level.

The story of the sinner used to be the staple of our literature. MacBeth is about a sinner. King Lear is about a sinner. The Power and the Glory is about a sinner. Cannery Row is about sinners. Dickens filled his novels with sinners, saints, and monsters all. And lest we miss the point, both Pride and Prejudice are sins.

But somehow the stories of sinners seem to have gone out of fashion these days. Joseph Bottom suggests that we have ceased to see the novel as a form that can help us to understand our lives. Perhaps this is why the story of the sinner has waned in popularity. Or perhaps it is the other way round, and as the story of the sinner waned, people lost faith in the novel as a way to help understand their lives.

To be clear, when I talk about the story of the sinner, I am not talking about morality tales. Indeed, the morality tale is almost the antithesis of the story of a sinner. People with a taste for morality tales tend to be very clear that the last thing they want to read about is any kind of sin or sinning. Sins are to occur off stage and be condignly punished. I am talking about stories in which sin lies at the heart of the drama and is the source of that drama. Those who want morality tales seldom have the stomach for such works.

The story of a sinner is about how hard it is to refrain from sinning, and about how hard it is to live with the consequences of having sinned, and to reestablish the bonds of trust that are broken by the sin. This is where the drama is found in the story of a sinner. This is what makes the story of a sinner a prime subject for literature.

The story of a sinner is not about innocence turning to experience, naivety turning to wisdom, or incompetence turning to competence. It is about doing the wrong thing, knowing it to be wrong, and doing it anyway because we want to do it, and we don’t care enough in the moment about the damage it will do to others or to ourselves to keep ourselves from doing it.

The key thing in writing about sinners is not how much the author hates the sin but how much they love the sinner. The author who is motivated by hatred of the sin writes ghastly moralizing stories with no drama in them, stories that succeed only with readers who hate the same sin just as much or who feel sanctified merely for hating it. It is the author who loves the sinner who produces a good story. It is the author who loves the sinner who sympathizes not with the sin, but with the act of sinning.

Indeed, I take it to be a general principle that the first requirement of a good novel is that the author must love their characters. If the author hates their characters, or is indifferent to them, or, as in so much literary fiction, looks down on them, it is instantly and painfully obvious, and the story is ruined, at least for me. It can appeal to no one, I think, but the readers who hate the same people the author hates.

My novels are all about sinners. That is to say, about people who are sinners, not saints, and I love them all, even in their sinfulness. They are not monsters, except one. They understand that their actions are transgressive, though they do not all live by the same creed. They transgress because they lose the battle between charity and appetite, at least in the moment. And to lose that battle in the moment is all that it takes to unfold a great drama.

In The Wistful and the Good, Elswyth, while engaged to one man, falls in love with another, and in one weak moment, appetite wins the battle with charity in the slightest of ways, and yet from this tragedy follows.

In St. Agnes and the Selkie, Elswyth attemps to reconcile herself to the consequences of her transgression and to find a place in a community again. Yet in the end is called to a sacrifice out of all proportion to her sin.

In The Needle of Avocation, Elswyth’s sister, Hilda, is faced with a different conflict between appetite and charity in which she transgresses more by inaction than by action. But in the end, she cannot resist the call to act and must choose.

In Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, Isabel’s yielding to temptation transforms her into a literal monster.

In The Wrecker’s Daughter, which is currently available for preorder, Hannah seeks to justify to herself and others the murderous practices by which her people keep themselves from starvation. She too, in the end, must choose whether to be saint or monster.

In The Wanderer and the Way, the next book in the Cuthbert’s People series, which I will shortly begin to serialize here, a young man raised by a monster strives to master his nature and love a young woman according to her needs rather than his desire. (Yes, that young woman is Elswyth!)

There is a certain peril in writing stories about sinners today. One reader described Elswyth as a Narcissist. Another described Hannah as a psychopath. Both of these judgments are false. The modern tendency to see sin through the lens of psychology also serves to diminish the drama of stories. There is more drama at least (and more truth, I believe) in saying that transgression is a matter of appetite triumphing over charity. Which is, I think, all the more reason for the author and the reader both to love the protagonist sinner, for they do but go before us a step to that moment in which it will be asked of us whether we will choose to be a saint or a monster.