Nomenological, conceptual and theo-logical clarifications with regard to (1) the notions of sin and sensuality; (2) their relation to one another and (3) two fundamental human needs: food (corresponding to the drive to preserve oneself as an individual) and sex (corresponding to the drive to preserve oneself as a member of the human species). Ad (1): Theo- logically speaking, sin is guilt in relation to God and as such implies a transgression of a divine law; the awareness of the latter is a suffi-cient condition for the possibility of the former; the ability to sin is, as such, part and parcel of the human nature as having been created in the image of God. Sensuality can be understood as the ability to acquire perceptions in a specific way: Sensual perceptions are not only mediated by sensation and imagination alone, so that their content is, on the one hand, propositionally and/or conceptually unmediated and, on the other hand, unconditionally evident and unquestionable – if only in the first-person perspective. Moreover, they also and simultaneously trigger the disposition to experience the perceived object as either pleasant or (if only in a derivative way) unpleasant. Ad (2): Every sinful act entails an element of sensuality, but not vice versa. Ad (3): Although hunger and sexual desire have a lot in common, neither form of sensuality can be reduced to the other. Rather, sexuality is to be considered as the extreme of sensuality. Hence, it seems understandable both phe-nomenologically and historically that Christianity, by establishing ‘spirit’ as opposed to sensuality as a principle of human existence, has always – though to its own disadvantage – focussed on sexuality as coextensive with or at least as a paradigm of sin.