An Introduction to “The Seven Deadly Sins”
Lenten Meditations
Fr. David Curry
Lent 2009
(A detail from a larger painting by Hieronymous Bosch (c. 1480) on the Seven Deadly Sins.
The original is now at the Museo del Prado, Madrid)
Peccatum poena peccati. Sin is the punishment of sin, St. Augustine observes. The contemplation of sin is an important feature of the moral life of Christians. After all, one cannot speak about sin without reference to God. The confession of sin is equally a confession of praise to God.
The Christian moral tradition speaks of seven deadly sins. Why seven?
In the ancient world, groupings of seven are commonplace. In The Book of Genesis, in the story of creation, God rested on the 7th day; the liturgical pattern of our lives follows a 7-day week; Noah brings 7 pairs of pure animals into the ark; the Temple contains the 7- branched candelabra and so on. In Deuteronomy, the Lord delivers into the hand of Israel the 7 Canaanite nations to be destroyed.
The Book of Proverbs 6. 16-19 gives an explicit reference to seven sins. “There are six things which the Lord hates, seven which are an abomination to him” and goes on to mention these: proud eyes, false tongues, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wickedness, feet that are swift to do evil, a false witness that breathes out lies, a sower of discord.
In later Jewish tradition, too, there are references to seven, such as in Hellenistic Judaism’s Book of Reuben which identifies “seven spirits of deceit.” For the Graeco-Roman traditions of antiquity, there are classifications of the virtues and the vices: Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, for example, or Horace, who actually lists seven vices similar to later classifications.
Jesus, too, in St. Luke’s Gospel, speaks of seven wicked spirits. It serves as the Gospel for Lent III. Lots of reference to sevens (without even mentioning sevens in rugby!)
The idea of 7 vices or sins parallels, too, the concept of 7 virtues. There are the four cardinal or classical virtues of temperance, courage, prudence and justice along with the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity (love). But the parallels in the moral tradition are not exact. There is no one-to-one correspondence between each vice and each virtue. That would be too simplistic, too static, and misses the essential point about sin. Sin is always messy and complicated! It is about the disorder and disarray of our souls!
This larger moral tradition drawn from pagan antiquity, Judaism and Christianity, (and Islam too, I suspect, though I haven’t had the opportunity to explore the Islamic traditions on the classification of sin) argues for a kind of chain of causality of sins, the idea that one sin leads to another. One might recall the biblical story of David and Bathsheba: the sin of the eyes (lust) leading to the sin of the flesh (adultery), leading to the attempts to cover it up (deceit), leading to the further extreme of plotting the death of Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah (murder). “Oh what a tangled web we weave,/ When first we practice to deceive!” as Sir Walter Scott trenchantly puts it! Of course, the story of David is that of everyman. As John Donne puts it, “David shows us not only the slippery ways into sin but also the penitential ways out of sin”. Nathan the Prophet convicts David’s conscience by way of a parable: “Thou art the man.” David repents. We are meant to see ourselves in such stories, too, and pray his song of repentance, Psalm 51.
A rabbinic midrash (Jewish commentary tradition) illustrates the causal chain of seven deadly sins this way: (1) One who doesn’t study Torah (the Law) will (2) cease to do the Torah, will (3) despise others who observe the Torah, will (4) hate those who teach the Torah, will (5) be led to prevent others from observing the Torah, will (6) deny that the Torah is divine (given by God) and will (7) deny the very existence of God. Quite a chain, and one which reveals a fundamental feature of sin: ultimately, it is atheism, acting as if there was no God!
Such things provide the larger background and intellectual context for the establishment of the moral tradition of the Christian Church. The designation of the cardinal, capital or chief sins for Christians begins in the ascetic and early monastic communities (or solitaries!) in the Egyptian desert. In a way, the tradition echoes exactly what we see on the First Sunday of Lent. Jesus is led into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be tempted by Satan. The story illustrates a threefold classification of our temptations and the overcoming of them. Notice, too, that it comes down to worship, to what is most worthy of respect.
Evagrius Ponticus (364-399AD) provides the first list of sins, not seven but eight! Gluttony (gula), lust (luxuria), avarice (avaritia), sadness (tristitia), anger (ira), spiritual lethargy (acedia), vainglory (vana gloria), and pride (superbia). The Latin terms are later and enter into the spiritual vocabulary of the moral discourse on sin. For the Desert Fathers, in general, sin has a strong objective character captured in the language of demons and, as already noted, there is a clear sense of a chain of sins, a hierarchy of one thing leading to another, sin begetting sin. Gluttony leads to lust and lust leads to avarice and so on. Much of the moral discourse over the centuries concerns the hierarchy and the inter-relation of the sins.
John Cassian (c.360-435AD) follows Evagrius and brings his ordering of the sins into the Latin West. But it is Gregory the Great (540-604), Pope in Rome from 590, who modifies Cassian’s list and provides what becomes the classical Christian tradition for the Middle Ages right through to Modernity, becoming the stock in trade of piety and pastoral care, and entering into the literary fabric of European culture, witness Dante and Chaucer. With Gregory, pride becomes the head of all sin. He adds, perceptively, envy (invidia) to the list and merges sadness with spiritual lethargy – sloth (acedia). His list becomes the proverbial seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust.
The list will receive, perhaps, its finest articulation in the greatest work of the Christian moral and philosophical tradition, Dante’s Divine Comedy, particularly in the Purgatorio. There we see the dynamic of the Christian life of penitential adoration: declining from sin and inclining to virtue as The Book of Common Prayer (Cdn., 1962) puts it in the Penitential Service (p. 614). The tradition of the seven deadly sins has a long history and is there to be recovered and reclaimed as a supplement and even a corrective, perhaps, to the contemporary therapeutic culture which identifies all manner of syndromes, neuroses, dispositions and complexes but offers little in the way of a spiritual analysis of human personality captured in the wisdom of the moral tradition of “the seven deadly sins.”
Fr. David Curry