Religious literature is filled with guilt-ridden devotees obsessed with sin and the fear of hell. Scholars of late medieval European history have come up with a list of 9,000 treatises on ‘penance’ and ‘sin’.

The list includes a treatise, On the Misery of the Human Condition, by Pope Innocent III: a morbid and gloomy disquisition on the wretchedness of human life in all its aspects – from our birth, “between dung and urine”, to the miseries of childhood and adult life, the vileness of the body, life’s terrors and worries, its brevity and its ugliness.

This pessimistic tone in Christianity was set way back at the beginning of the Dark Ages, when Pope Gregory the Great “preached with power that religion of terror which was to darken men’s minds for centuries... it was a world in which science was impossible and only a fearful faith remained” (Will Durant, The age of Faith).