Classical theology is often charged with dealing in static timeless categories, and there is no doubt something to this in some writers. But, not all by any means. In his account of sin, Athanasius says that sin has momentum because of the nature of the soul. The soul is “mobile” ( eukinetos ) and “she cannot at all cease from movement.”

This, of course, is what makes sin so dangerous: Like a mad charioteer, she drives “the members of the body beyond what is proper, or rather, driven herself along with them by her own doing, sins and makes mischief for herself . . . [having] swerved from the goal of truth.”