Seven Sins and Seven Virtues: A Visual History

A captivating artistic and philosophic exploration of humankind’s complex moral codes

A companion piece to Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, Seven Sins and Seven Virtues will complete this moral trilogy and finally consider God’s most enigmatic of creations: None of the conundrums of metaphysics are as baroque as the motivations of the human soul. Unlike the devils condemned to perdition and the angels compelled to paradise, humans are divine creatures that house within them warring impulses.

Seven Sins and Seven Virtues will examine the literary, philosophical, theological, and most of all artistic expressions of the seven deadly sins and their respective seven cardinal virtues, drawing upon millennia of history to gather a compendium of humanity at its best and its worst. As a volume, the book will explore the Manichean nature of the human animal in all of its grandeur and canker, motivated by the faith that tales of damnation and salvation are the only stories that are ultimately worth telling.

A staff writer for the Millions, which the New York Times calls the ＂indispensable literary site,＂ as well as the editor of Belt Magazine, Ed Simon has contributed his characteristically engaging cultural criticism to almost every major American literary publication, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review Daily, the New Republic, and the Washington Post. Simon’s articles have covered everything from the intersection of robotics and religion to the heretical origins of the sonnet, from Thomas Morton’s forgotten pagan settlement in colonial New England to a cultural history of the color black. Simon is the author of several books, including the top-selling An Alternative History of Pittsburgh, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, and, in fall 2023, Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology, which promises to be the standard text on the subject for popular readers.