And, anyway, perhaps the ‘psychopath’ as I am conceiving of him is not so much the opposite of a saint as he is a person in whom saintliness is entirely absent. In the same way that zero is not the opposite of the integer 1, but is merely the absence of that integer. For the difference between virtue and sin is not the difference between something and its contrary, but the difference between something and nothing, or being and nothingness. For while virtue is what makes us real, sin is real only insofar as it has real effects. In itself it is a falseness, or a negation.