Seven deadly sins

• 1. Introduction

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  The seven deadly sins form a short, famous list of major vices within Christian teaching. They are also called the capital vices or the cardinal sins. In the standard Catholic version they are pride, envy, wrath, gluttony, lust, sloth, and greed. Yet the Bible never lays them out as a list. Later Christian thinkers built it themselves, drawing on scattered biblical passages. That raises some questions. Who first gathered these vices into a group of seven? Why do older versions contain entries that have since disappeared? And why do so many writers insist that one of the seven stands above all the rest?

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• 2. Desert Monks

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  Eight temptations, not seven, filled the list handed down by the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus. The habit of sorting vices into a group of seven is traced to Tertullian, and Evagrius continued that work. He reduced the logismoi, the forms of temptation, from nine to eight.

  In Greek the eight were gastrimargia, or gluttony; porneia, or fornication; philargyria, or greed; and lypē, or sadness. The Philokalia renders that last word as envy, meaning sadness at another person's good fortune. The remaining four were orgē, or wrath; akēdia, or apathy and neglect; kenodoxia, or boasting; and hyperēphania, or pride.

  Evagrius also sorted evil thoughts into three families. Physical thoughts came from the appetites for food, sex, and possessions. Emotional thoughts came from depressive, irascible, or dismissive moods. Mental thoughts came from jealous, boastful, or hubristic states of mind.

  One of his students, John Cassian, carried the list into Latin through many writings. Western Christians therefore met the vices as gula, luxuria or fornicatio, avaritia, tristitia, ira, acedia, vanagloria, and superbia. In English these are gluttony, lust, greed, sorrow, wrath, sloth, vanity, and pride. The Latin list had eight entries and no entry called invidia. A later pope would change that.

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• 3. Gregory's Revision

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  In AD 590, Pope Gregory I reworked the Latin list into the form that became standard. He merged tristitia into acedia, and he merged vanagloria into superbia. Then he added envy, which in Latin is invidia. Eight entries had become seven.

  His arrangement matches the traits that Pirkei Avot describes as "removing one from the world." Thomas Aquinas later used and defended the list in his Summa Theologica. Aquinas preferred the name capital sins, because in his view these vices are the head and form of all other sins.

  The list outlived the medieval church. The Anglican Communion, the Lutheran Church, and the Methodist Church still retain it. The evangelist Billy Graham explained it to modern audiences. The Lutheran divine Martin Chemnitz urged clergy to remind their congregations about these sins.

  Henry Edward Manning, a Catholic prelate, put the stakes bluntly. He called the seven deadly sins seven ways to eternal death, or Hell. Gregory ranked them in order of increasing severity, and the ranking begins with lust, the vice generally thought mildest.

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• 4. Sins Of Appetite

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  Henry Edward Manning warned that the impurity of lust turns a person into "a slave of the devil." Lust, or lechery, means intense longing. It is usually understood as unbridled sexual desire that can lead to adultery and other sinful acts. It can also describe unbridled desire for money or power. Aquinas treated it as an abuse of a faculty that humans share with animals. For that reason he judged sins of the flesh less grievous than spiritual sins.

  Gluttony takes its name from the Latin gluttire, which means to gulp down or swallow. It means indulging in anything to the point of excess. One reason for condemning it is practical: gorging by prosperous people may leave needy people hungry.

  Aquinas read gluttony more broadly than overeating. He counted an obsessive anticipation of meals, and a taste for delicacies and costly foods. He listed five forms. Laute means eating too expensively. Studiose means eating too daintily. Nimis means eating too much. Praepropere means eating too soon. Ardenter means eating too eagerly.

  Manning wrote that avarice "plunges a man deep into the mire of this world, so that he makes it to be his god." When Gregory revised the sins, he defined greed as "treachery, fraud, deceit, perjury, restlessness, violence and hardnesses of heart against compassion." That definition shifted over time toward the modern sense of wanting more than one needs, especially in material wealth. Aquinas believed that greed, like pride, can lead to evil.

  The next vice on Gregory's list differs from these three in a way that surprised later theologians. It involves no reckless doing at all.

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• 5. Sloth And Acedia

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  Fourth-century monks blamed acedia on a state of melancholia that cut them off spiritually, rather than on simple laziness. The word is the negative form of the Greek kēdeia, a narrower term that refers to spousal love and respect for the dead. It can be translated as apathetic listlessness, and it is related to melancholy. Acedia describes the behavior, while melancholy names the emotion behind it.

  Early Christian thought read the lack of joy as a willful refusal to enjoy the goodness of God. Apathy was read as a refusal to help others in need. Aquinas called acedia an "uneasiness of the mind" that gives rise to lesser sins such as restlessness and instability. In his Summa Theologica he defined sloth as "sorrow about spiritual good." The Catechism of the Catholic Church now defines acedia as spiritual sloth, the belief that spiritual tasks are too difficult.

  The scope of the sin is wide. Mentally, it shows up as affectlessness, a lack of any feeling about oneself or others, with boredom, rancor, and apathy following behind. Physically, it means a cessation of motion and an indifference to work. Spiritually, it includes neglecting the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit: Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Knowledge, Piety, Fortitude, and Fear of the Lord.

  The other deadly sins are sins of committing immorality. Sloth is a sin of avoiding responsibility. It can grow out of any of the other vices; a son might neglect his duty to his father because of anger.

  Chaucer described the sin through a long list of symptoms. He named despair, somnolence, idleness, tardiness, negligence, laziness, and wrawnesse, a word best translated as peevishness. For Chaucer, people languish and hold back because they tell themselves that doing good is too hard to bear. Stanford Lyman adds that sloth neglects the body's daily needs and slows the mind, drawing its attention away from important matters.

  Gregory the Great traced the darker consequences of the sorrow he had folded into sloth. He asserted that "from tristitia, there arise malice, rancour, cowardice, and despair." Two of the vices on his list descend from that same soil.

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• 6. Wrath And Envy

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  The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats anger itself as a neutral act. It becomes the sin of wrath in three cases: when it is aimed at an innocent person, when it is unduly strong or long-lasting, or when it demands excessive punishment. The Catechism goes further: "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." Hatred is the sin of wishing misfortune on someone, and it is mortal when the wish is for grave harm.

  Anger tends to arise under four conditions. A person feels that they or someone they care about has been offended. They are certain about the nature and cause of the event. They are certain someone else is responsible. And they believe they can still influence the situation or cope with it. Manning summed up the cost in one line: "angry people are slaves to themselves."

  Envy is a sad or resentful covetousness toward another person's traits or possessions. It stems from vainglory and cuts a person off from their neighbor. Aquinas described its struggle in three stages. First, the envious person tries to lower the other's reputation. In the middle stage, success brings "joy at another's misfortune," while failure brings "grief at another's prosperity." The third stage is hatred, because "sorrow causes hatred."

  Bertrand Russell took a more psychological view. He called envy one of the most potent causes of unhappiness, since it brings sorrow to the envious while giving them the urge to inflict pain on others.

  Envy grows out of vainglory, a vice that Gregory folded into the one he placed at the very top.

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• 7. Pride At The Top

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  C. S. Lewis, writing in Mere Christianity, called unchastity, anger, greed, and drunkenness "mere fleabites in comparison" with pride. He described pride as "the complete anti-God state of mind" and recalled that it was through pride that Lucifer became wicked. Pride goes by the Ancient Greek name hubris. On almost every list it is treated as the original and worst of the sins, and as the source of the others. It is the opposite of humility.

  The author Ichabod Spencer judged spiritual pride the worst kind, saying the heart is particularly deceitful on this one thing. Jonathan Edwards wrote that pride is "the worst viper that is in the heart." He added that it often creeps into religion itself, sometimes in the disguise of humility.

  The Book of Proverbs supplies the best-known warning, in chapter 16, verse 18: "Pride goeth before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall." Political analysts borrow the word hubris for powerful leaders who grow irrationally self-confident and contemptuous of advice. Over time, they act impulsively.

  Vainglory, the sin Gregory merged into pride, is not quite the same thing. Professor Kevin M. Clarke observes that vainglory is when we seek human acclaim. Pride, by contrast, is taking spiritual credit for what one has done instead of crediting God. The Latin gloria roughly means boasting, though the English word glory now carries only praise. The word vain once meant futile, but by the fourteenth century it had taken on the narcissistic overtones it keeps today.

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• 8. Confession And Legacy

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  A 2009 study by the Jesuit scholar Fr. Roberto Busa looked at which deadly sins people confess. It found that the sin most often confessed by men is lust. The sin most often confessed by women is pride.

  The study could not say why. The difference might reflect how many transgressions each sex actually commits. It might equally reflect differing views about what matters or what should be confessed.

  Confession is only one place where the idea left its mark. Knowledge of the seven sins survives in treatises, in paintings and sculpture, in the architectural decoration of some Catholic churches, and in older textbooks. In later centuries the number seven also inspired streams of religious and philosophical thought, fine art, literature, film, and television.

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