Recently you wrote about the supposed “new” seven deadly sins and you mentioned the traditional ones in passing. Can you write a little more about the traditional ones and tell me where they come from and why they are important?
The phrase “seven deadly sins” is well known and has found its way into secular culture, with a television series and books making use of the title, and numerous paintings in the Middle Ages depicting them.
While the name seven “deadly sins” is perhaps the most well known, the sins are also known as “capital sins”, from the Latin word caput, or head.
They are called this because they are the principal ones from which others follow, or to which others are related.
They are also known as “capital vices”, which is perhaps a more appropriate term. As I wrote in this column last week, vices are bad habits which lead to sins.
Likewise, they are sometimes called “cardinal sins”, from the Latin word cardo, meaning hinge. The other sins hinge on these seven.
The list of deadly sins seems to have its origin in the eight “evil spirits”, or thoughts, listed by the fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus.
He gave them names in Greek, with the closest translation being gluttony, lust, avarice, pride, sadness, wrath, boasting or vainglory, and acedia or sloth.
St John Cassian (360-435), who spent a few years in a monastic community near Bethlehem before going to southern France to found the Abbey of St Victor, brought the list of eight evil spirits to the West and translated them into Latin.
Finally, Pope St Gregory the Great in 590 gave the list that we know today as the seven deadly sins (Moralia in Job, 31, 45).
Instead of sadness he listed envy, which is usually defined as sadness at another’s success, and he included boasting or vainglory in pride.
The order of his list, which was also used by Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy, is lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy and pride.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church lists them in a different order: “pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth or acedia” (CCC 1866).
It says of them: “Vices can be classified according to the virtues they oppose, or also be linked to the capital sins which Christian experience has distinguished, following St John Cassian and St Gregory the Great.
They are called ‘capital’ because they engender other sins, other vices” (CCC 1866).
Two things should be said about these vices or sins. First, even though they are known as deadly or capital sins, not all the sins of these seven vices are mortal sins.
Some of them are mortal, like fornication and adultery resulting from lust, and stealing a large amount of money as a sin of greed.
But many sins, like eating a little too much (gluttony), a degree of laziness (sloth) and envy of another’s talents need not be mortal.
Second, the fact of having these vices is not itself sinful. In some way they are a disorder in our nature resulting from original sin, and as such they are not sinful.
It is the acts that these vices engender that are sinful. I will write another column on this important distinction.
Looking at the sins one by one, pride may be defined as an exaggerated consideration of one’s own worth.
It is perhaps the most deadly sin of all since it makes the person rely on his own power rather than on God: “The beginning of man’s pride is to depart from the Lord” (Sir 10:12).
Avarice, or greed, is the disordered love of material things, and we know the havoc this sin has brought about.
Envy, or jealousy, is sadness over another’s good and it often leads to hatred for that person and to the desire to obtain the good by immoral means.
Wrath, or anger, is the disordered desire to seek revenge when we have been wronged. It too can lead to great harm in human relationships.
Lust, the disordered desire for sexual pleasure, again leads to serious harm, both to oneself and to others. Gluttony, the disordered desire for food and drink, shows a lack of moderation in these earthly goods.
And finally, sloth, or laziness, leads to a failure to fulfill our duties, sometimes with serious consequences.
It is good to be aware of these vices or sins so that we can strive to avoid them and to grow in such virtues as humility, detachment, kindness, meekness, chastity, temperance and industriousness.