I am in a book club which uses a curriculum from the Great Books Foundation (https://www.greatbooks.org). The last writings we reviewed were in a book called “Seven Deadly Sins” which was a compilation of various excerpts and short stories that illustrated the seven deadly sins — lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. The book in the photo is the sequel which is titled “Even Deadlier.” We have only had two meetings this year, reviewing Honoré de Balzac’s short story “La Grande Bretèche” and Frances Hwang’s short story “The Old Gentleman.” Both illustrated the sin of pride i.e., the sort of pride that harms other people. I’m sure all of us have been guilty of one or more of the seven deadly sins at one time or another. Human fraility is always possible. People tend to have more trouble with some sins than others. For example, I have considered the sins of sloth and gluttony to be a source of pride in the past. Oops! I guess that’s another sin — pride. Let’s learn more about the seven deadly sins.
According to Wikipedia, the seven deadly sins — also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins — is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings, although they are not mentioned in the Bible. Behaviors or habits are classified under this category if they directly give rise to other immoralities. According to the standard list, they are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth which are contrary to the seven heavenly virtues — prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity.
This classification originated with the Desert Fathers, especially Evagrius Ponticus, who identified seven or eight evil thoughts or spirits to be overcome. His pupil John Cassian — with his book “The Institute” — brought the classification to Europe, where it became fundamental to Catholic confessional practices as documented in penitential manuals, sermons like Chaucer's "Parson's Tale" and artistic works like Dante's “Purgatory” where the penitents of Mount Purgatory are grouped and penanced according to their worst sin. The Catholic Church used the framework of the deadly sins to help people curb their evil inclinations before they could fester. Teachers especially focused on pride — thought to be the sin that severs the soul from grace and which is the very essence of evil — as well as greed, with these two underlying all other sins. The seven deadly sins were discussed in treatises and depicted in paintings and sculpture decorations on Catholic churches, as well as in older textbooks.
The seven deadly sins — along with the sins against the Holy Ghost and the sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance — are taught especially in Western Christian traditions as things to be deplored.
Greco-Roman antecedents
The seven deadly sins as we know them had pre-Christian Greek and Roman precedents. Aristotle's “Nicomachean Ethics” lists several excellences or virtues. Aristotle argues that each positive quality represents a golden mean between two extremes, each of which is a vice. Courage, for example, is the virtue of facing fear and danger; excess courage is recklessness, while deficient courage is cowardice. Aristotle lists virtues like courage, temperance or self-control, generosity, greatness of soul or magnanimity, measured anger, friendship and wit or charm.
Roman writers like Horace extolled virtues while listing and warning against vices. His first epistles say that "to flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom."
Origin of the currently recognized seven deadly sins
The modern concept of the seven deadly sins is linked to the works of the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus, who listed eight evil thoughts as follows:
1. Gluttony.
2. Prostitution, fornication.
3. Avarice or greed.
4. Sadness, rendered in the “Philokalia”
as envy, sadness at another's good
fortune.
5. Wrath.
6. Acedia, rendered in the “Philokalia”
as dejection.
7. Boasting.
8. Pride, sometimes rendered as self-
overestimation, arrogance,
grandiosity.
They were translated into the Latin of Western Christianity largely in the writings of John Cassian — thus becoming part of the Western tradition's spiritual pietas or Catholic devotions — as follows:
1. Gula or gluttony.
2. Luxuria/Fornicatio or lust, fornication.
3. Avaritia or avarice/greed.
4. Tristitia or
sorrow/despair/despondency.
5. Ira or wrath.
6. Acedia or sloth.
7. Vanagloria or vainglory.
8. Superbia or pride, hubris.
These "evil thoughts" can be categorized into three types:
- Lustful appetite (gluttony, fornication,
and avarice).
- Irascibility (wrath).
- Corruption of the mind (vainglory,
sorrow, pride and discouragement).
In AD 590 Pope Gregory I revised this list to form the more common list. Gregory combined tristitia with acedia and vanagloria with superbia, and added envy, in Latin, invidia. Gregory's list became the standard list of sins. Thomas Aquinas uses and defends Gregory's list in his “Summa Theologica,” although he calls them the "capital sins" because they are the head and form of all the others. The Anglican Communion, Lutheran Church and Methodist Church — among other Christian denominations — still retain this list. Modern evangelists such as Billy Graham have explicated the seven deadly sins.
Historical and modern definitions, views and associations
Most of the capital sins are defined by Dante Alighieri as perverse or corrupt versions of love: lust, gluttony and greed are all excessive or disordered love of good things; wrath, envy and pride are perverted love directed toward other's harm. The sole exception is sloth, which is a deficiency of love. In the seven capital sins are seven ways of eternal death. The capital sins from lust to envy are generally associated with pride, thought to be the father of all sins.
Lust
Lust or lechery is intense longing. It is usually thought of as intense or unbridled sexual desire, which may lead to fornication (including adultery), rape, bestiality and other sinful sexual acts. However, lust could also mean other forms of unbridled desire, such as for money or power. Henry Edward Manning says the impurity of lust transforms one into "a slave of the devil."
Dante defined lust as the disordered love for individuals. It is generally thought the least serious capital sin, as it is an abuse of a faculty that humans share with animals, and sins of the flesh are less grievous than spiritual sins.
In Dante's “Purgatorio,” the penitent walks within flames to purge himself of lustful thoughts and feelings. In Dante's “Inferno,” unforgiven souls guilty of lust are eternally blown about in restless hurricane-like winds symbolic of their own lack of self-control of their lustful passions in earthly life.
Gluttony
Gluttony is the overindulgence and overconsumption of anything to the point of waste. The word derives from the Latin “gluttire,” to gulp down or swallow.
One reason for its condemnation is that gorging by the prosperous may leave the needy hungry.
Medieval church leaders e.g., Thomas Aquinas took a more expansive view of gluttony, arguing that it could also include an obsessive anticipation of meals and overindulgence in delicacies and costly foods.
Aquinas listed five forms of gluttony:
- Laute – eating too expensively.
- Studiose – eating too daintily.
- Nimis – eating too much.
- Praepropere – eating too soon.
- Ardenter – eating too eagerly.
Of these, ardenter is often considered the most serious, since it is a passion for a mere earthly pleasure, which can make the committer eat impulsively or even reduce the goals of life to mere eating and drinking. This is exemplified by Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage, a "profane person . . . who, for a morsel of meat, sold his birthright" and later "found no place for repentance, though he sought it carefully, with tears."
Greed
Greed — also known as avarice, cupidity or covetousness — is, like lust and gluttony, a sin of desire. However, greed as seen by the Church is applied to an artificial, rapacious desire and pursuit of material possessions. Thomas Aquinas wrote, "Greed is a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things." In Dante's “Purgatory,” the penitents are bound and laid face down on the ground for having concentrated excessively on earthly thoughts. Hoarding of materials or objects, theft and robbery — especially by means of violence, trickery, or manipulation of authority are all actions that may be inspired by greed. Such misdeeds can include simony — where one attempts to purchase or sell sacraments, including Holy Orders — and, therefore, positions of authority in the Church hierarchy.
In the words of Henry Edward, avarice "plunges a man deep into the mire of this world, so that he makes it to be his god."
As defined outside Christian writings, greed is an inordinate desire to acquire or possess more than one needs, especially with respect to material wealth. Like pride, it can lead to not just some, but all evil.
Sloth
Sloth refers to a peculiar jumble of notions, dating from antiquity and including mental, spiritual, pathological and physical states. It may be defined as absence of interest or habitual disinclination to exertion.
In his “Summa Theologica,” Saint Thomas Aquinas defined sloth as "sorrow about spiritual good."
The scope of sloth is wide. Spiritually, acedia first referred to an affliction attending religious persons, especially monks, wherein they became indifferent to their duties and obligations to God.
Mentally, acedia has many distinctive components of which the most important is affectlessness, a lack of any feeling about self or other, a mind-state that gives rise to boredom, rancor, apathy and a passive inert or sluggish mentation. Physically, acedia is fundamentally associated with a cessation of motion and an indifference to work; it finds expression in laziness, idleness and indolence.
Sloth includes ceasing to utilize the seven gifts of grace given by the Holy Spirit — wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, piety, fortitude and fear of the Lord; such disregard may lead to the slowing of one's spiritual progress towards eternal life, to the neglect of manifold duties of charity towards the neighbor and to animosity towards those who love God.[5]
Sloth has also been defined as a failure to do things that one should do. By this definition, evil exists when "good" people fail to act.
Edmund Burke (1729–1797) wrote in “Present Discontents,” "No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united Cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
Unlike the other capital sins, which are sins of committing immorality, sloth is a sin of omitting responsibilities. It may arise from any of the other capital vices; for example, a son may omit his duty to his father through anger. While the state and habit of sloth is a mortal sin, the habit of the soul tending towards the last mortal state of sloth is not mortal in and of itself except under certain circumstances.
Emotionally and cognitively, the evil of acedia finds expression in a lack of any feeling for the world, for the people in it or for the self. Acedia takes form as an alienation of the sentient self, first from the world and then from itself. Although the most profound versions of this condition are found in a withdrawal from all forms of participation in or care for others or oneself, a lesser but more noisome element was also noted by theologians. From tristitia, asserted Gregory the Great, "there arise malice, rancour, cowardice, [and] despair." Chaucer, too, dealt with this attribute of acedia, counting the characteristics of the sin to include despair, somnolence, idleness, tardiness, negligence, indolence, and wrawnesse, the last variously translated as "anger" or better as "peevishness." For Chaucer, human's sin consists of languishing and holding back, refusing to undertake works of goodness because, he/she tells him/herself, the circumstances surrounding the establishment of good are too grievous and too difficult to suffer. Acedia in Chaucer's view is thus the enemy of every source and motive for work.
Sloth not only subverts the livelihood of the body, taking no care for its day-to-day provisions, but also slows down the mind, halting its attention to matters of great importance. Sloth hinders the man in his righteous undertakings and thus becomes a terrible source of human's undoing.
In his “Purgatorio” Dante portrayed the penance for acedia as running continuously at top speed. Dante describes acedia as the "failure to love God with all one's heart, all one's mind and all one's soul"; to him it was the "middle sin," the only one characterized by an absence or insufficiency of love.
Wrath
Wrath can be defined as uncontrolled feelings of anger, rage and even hatred. Wrath often reveals itself in the wish to seek vengeance. In its purest form, wrath presents with injury, violence and hate that may provoke feuds that can go on for centuries. Wrath may persist long after the person who did another a grievous wrong is dead. Feelings of wrath can manifest in different ways, including impatience, hateful misanthropy, revenge and self-destructive behavior, such as drug abuse or suicide.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the neutral act of anger becomes the sin of wrath when it is directed against an innocent person, when it is unduly strong or long-lasting or when it desires excessive punishment. "If anger reaches the point of a deliberate desire to kill or seriously wound a neighbor, it is gravely against charity; it is a mortal sin." (CCC 2302) Hatred is the sin of desiring that someone else may suffer misfortune or evil and is a mortal sin when one desires grave harm. (CCC 2302–03)
People feel angry when they sense that they or someone they care about has been offended, when they are certain about the nature and cause of the angering event, when they are certain someone else is responsible and when they feel they can still influence the situation or cope with it.
In her introduction to “Purgatory,” Dorothy L. Sayers describes wrath as "love of justice perverted to revenge and spite."
In accordance with Henry Edward, angry people are "slaves to themselves."
Envy
Envy, like greed and lust, is characterized by an insatiable desire. It can be described as a sad or resentful covetousness towards the traits or possessions of someone else. It arises from vainglory and severs a man from his neighbor.
Malicious envy is similar to jealousy in that they both feel discontent towards someone's traits, status, abilities or rewards. A difference is that the envious also desire the entity and covet it. Envy can be directly related to the Ten Commandments, specifically, "Neither shall you covet ... anything that belongs to your neighbour" — a statement that may also be related to greed. Dante defined envy as "a desire to deprive other men of theirs." In Dante's “Purgatory,” the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut with wire because they gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the struggle aroused by envy has three stages: during the first stage, the envious person attempts to lower another's reputation; in the middle stage, the envious person receives either "joy at another's misfortune" (if he succeeds in defaming the other person) or "grief at another's prosperity" (if he fails); the third stage is hatred because "sorrow causes hatred."
Envy is said to be the motivation behind Cain murdering his brother, Abel, as Cain envied Abel because God favored Abel's sacrifice over Cain's.
Bertrand Russell said that envy was one of the most potent causes of unhappiness, bringing sorrow to committers of envy while giving them the urge to inflict pain upon others.
In accordance with the most widely accepted views, only pride weighs down the soul more than envy among the capital sins. Just like pride, envy has been associated directly with the devil, for Wisdom 2:24 states: "the envy of the devil brought death to the world."
Pride
Pride is considered, on almost every list, the original and most serious of the seven deadly sins. Out of the seven, it is the most angelical or demonic. It is also thought to be the source of the other capital sins. Also known as hubris or futility, it is identified as dangerously corrupt selfishness, the putting of one's own desires, urges, wants and whims before the welfare of other people.
In even more destructive cases, it is irrationally believing that one is essentially and necessarily better, superior or more important than others, failing to acknowledge the accomplishments of others and excessive admiration of the personal image or self — especially forgetting one's own lack of divinity and refusing to acknowledge one's own limits, faults or wrongs as a human being.
What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
— Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,”line 203.
As pride has been labelled the father of all sins, it has been deemed the devil's most prominent trait. C.S. Lewis writes, in “Mere Christianity,” that pride is the "anti-God" state, the position in which the ego and the self are directly opposed to God: "Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness and all that are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind." Pride is understood to sever the spirit from God, as well as His life-and-grace-giving Presence.
One can be prideful for different reasons. Author Ichabod Spencer states that "spiritual pride is the worst kind of pride, if not worst snare of the devil. The heart is particularly deceitful on this one thing." Jonathan Edwards said "remember that pride is the worst viper that is in the heart, the greatest disturber of the soul's peace and sweet communion with Christ; it was the first sin that ever was, and lies lowest in the foundation of Satan's whole building, and is the most difficultly rooted out, and is the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts, and often creeps in, insensibly, into the midst of religion and sometimes under the disguise of humility."
In Ancient Athens, hubris was considered one of the greatest crimes and was used to refer to insolent contempt that can cause one to use violence to shame the victim. This sense of hubris could also characterize rape. Aristotle defined hubris as shaming the victim, not because of anything that happened to the committer or might happen to the committer, but merely for the committer's own gratification. The word's connotation changed somewhat over time, with some additional emphasis towards a gross overestimation of one's abilities.
The term has been used to analyze and make sense of the actions of contemporary heads of government by Ian Kershaw (1998), Peter Beinart (2010) and in a much more physiological manner by David Owen (2012). In this context the term has been used to describe how certain leaders, when put to positions of immense power, seem to become irrationally self-confident in their own abilities, increasingly reluctant to listen to the advice of others and progressively more impulsive in their actions.
Dante's definition of pride was "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbour."
Pride is generally associated with an absence of humility.
In accordance with the Sirach's author's wording, the heart of a proud man is "like a partridge in its cage acting as a decoy; like a spy he watches for your weaknesses. He changes good things into evil, he lays his traps. Just as a spark sets coals on fire, the wicked man prepares his snares in order to draw blood. Beware of the wicked man, for he is planning evil. He might dishonor you forever." In another chapter, he says that "the acquisitive man is not content with what he has, wicked injustice shrivels the heart."
Benjamin Franklin said "In reality there is, perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases; it is still alive and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history. For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility." Joseph Addison states that "There is no passion that steals into the heart more imperceptibly and covers itself under more disguises than pride."
The proverb "pride goeth before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall" (from the biblical Book of Proverbs, 16:18)or pride goeth before the fall is thought to sum up the modern use of pride. Pride is also referred to as "pride that blinds," as it often causes a committer of pride to act in foolish ways that belie common sense. In other words, the modern definition may be thought of as, "that pride that goes just before the fall." In his two-volume biography of Adolf Hitler, historian Ian Kershaw uses both “hubris” and “nemesis” as titles. The first volume, “Hubris,” describes Hitler's early life and rise to political power. The second, “Nemesis,” gives details of Hitler's role in the Second World War and concludes with his fall and suicide in 1945.
Much of the 10th and part of 11th chapter of the Book of Sirach discusses and advises about pride, hubris and who is rationally worthy of honor. It goes:
Do not store up resentment against your neighbor, no matter what his offence; do nothing in a fit of anger. Pride is odious to both God and man; injustice is abhorrent to both of them.... Do not reprehend anyone unless you have been first fully informed, consider the case first and thereafter make your reproach. Do not reply before you have listened; do not meddle in the disputes of sinners. My child, do not undertake too many activities. If you keep adding to them, you will not be without reproach; if you run after them, you will not succeed nor will you ever be free, although you try to escape.
— Sirach,10:6–31 and 11:1–10
In Jacob Bidermann's medieval miracle play “Cenodoxus,” pride is the deadliest of all the sins and leads directly to the damnation of the titulary famed Parisian doctor. In Dante's “Divine Comedy,” the penitents are burdened with stone slabs on their necks to keep their heads bowed.
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