Day: March 26, 2009

Sermons

Lenten Meditation: Envy

Lenten Meditation on The Seven Deadly Sins
Envy

“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

Envy and anger complete the triad of perverted love, the first of Dante’s threefold classification of the Seven Deadly Sins as forms of disordered love: love perverted, love defective and love excessive. From the standpoint of the theology of amor, everything comes down to what and how we love. That we love belongs fundamentally to our identity as spiritual beings.

As Dante sees it, pride, envy and anger constitute the forms of perverted love, the love that swerves to evil. Sloth is lukewarm love, a defective love, while avarice, gluttony and lust are the forms of excessive love, “love too hot of foot.”

We have already seen how pride is in all of the seven deadly sins. But of all of the seven sins, envy is the most unique and in some ways the most destructive. Why? Because, as one commentator (Graham Tomlin) puts it, there is no joy in it, no fun in envy at all. It is singularly perverse. Its only satisfaction is endless self-torment. (more…)

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Sermons

Lenten Meditation: Pride

Lenten Meditation on The Seven Deadly Sins
Pride

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

“Pride goeth before a fall,” the old saying goes, and of course, it is true. “Ante ruinam exaltur,” Augustine says, “the heart is exalted before its destruction,” its ruin. But it a way, it is worst than that. Pride is the Fall in us. That is why pride is not only the first and the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. It is what is deadly in all of them!

Augustine called pride the foundation of sin. “Pride made the soul desert God to whom it should cling as the source of life, and to imagine itself as the source of its own life.” Pride always signals a kind of obsession with self.

Aquinas speaks about pride as “inordinate self-love [which] is the cause of every sin.” This is the point. Pride is in every sin. (more…)

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