The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy & Anger
Lenten Programme I: ‘To decline from sin, and incline to virtue’
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025
The paradox of sin and love, those “two vast, spacious things” which, as George Herbert observes, most need to be ‘measured’ over and above what can be known through the human philosophical sciences, is captured concisely in the phrase “to decline from sin and incline to virtue” found in the Penitential Service (Cdn. BCP 1962, pp. 611-615). The paradox is that the awareness of sin and evil presupposes the knowledge of the radical goodness of God as prior and thus as that which moves us to seek that good in spite of our failings and follies. Love is the moving force or activity in the virtues of the soul.
Sin and love go together and belong to the necessity of what is made known most clearly through Revelation in the witness of the Scripture which is why Herbert points us to the two moments of Christ’s agony: the agony of Christ in Gethsemane and at Calvary. Those passages illustrate the “two vast, spacious things,” namely, “sinne and love.”
The virtues are activities of the soul which pertain to excellence of character in relation to the highest end of our humanity. Charity, as Paul puts it, is “the greatest of the three,” referring to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes that charity orders all of the virtues to man’s highest end which is God. That ordering is not a negating of the classical traditions of the virtues but a reordering of them to the highest good which is our participation in the life of God. Love or charity, as Thomas argues, is “the form, the mover, and the root of the virtues” (de caritate, 3).
But what exactly is the sin that opposes love or virtue? It is the vices. The Penitential Service provides for the reading of the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. They, too, illustrate this profound and necessary interrelation between sin and love. The confession of sin, as Augustine states, is equally and necessarily the confession of praise to God. Peccatum poena peccati. “Sin is the punishment of sin,” he says, a point which reveals the self-contradictory nature of sin and which really points us to God. Sin is its own penalty; the reward or result of virtue is God in his essential goodness. To know sin presupposes the goodness of God as that which sin attempts to negate and deny.
There are seven deadly sins in the Christian moral tradition that are drawn from Scripture and ancient ethical philosophy. Proverbs 6. 16-19, for instance, explicitly speaks of seven sins. “There are six things which the Lord hates, seven which are an abomination to him.” Hate means things which stand in opposition to the goodness of God. The images in Proverbs speak of the things of the spirit by way of the things of the body: 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. They provide an interesting and important insight into vice by way of these concrete images.
Hellenistic Judaism references “seven spirits of deceit” (The Book of Reuben in The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, c. 70-200 AD) and the Graeco-Roman traditions undertake a classification of the virtues and the vices found in the works of Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, and in such poets as Horace (65 BC-8 BC), who lists seven vices. All these examples may have influenced Luke’s mention of “seven wicked spirits” in the Gospel reading for Lent III.
The seven vices or sins parallel the idea of seven virtues which is a dominant theme in the Christian moral discourse. They are the four cardinal virtues of temperance, courage, prudence, and justice and the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity with charity being not just the greatest of the three theological virtues but of all the virtues. This is expressed in the Quinquagesima Collect where charity or love is “that most excellent gift, the very bond of peace and of all virtues,” without which “all our doings are nothing worth” and without which we are counted dead rather than alive. Why? Because it is only through charity, the divine love in us, that we participate in the true end of our humanity which is the life of God.
There are different ways of understanding the order of the virtues and the hierarchy of their relation but it is largely a question of emphasis. For the most part the classical and theological virtues are all seen as forms of love. As Augustine says in his treatise ‘On the Morals of the Catholic Church’ (de moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae), “I hold virtue (meaning human excellence) to be nothing else than perfect love of God.” He sees the four cardinal or classical virtues as four forms of love.
“Temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object; justice is love serving only the loved object, and thus ruling rightly; prudence is love distinguishing with sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it” (Augustine, de moribus, ch. 15). While Plato seems to suggest that justice is the ‘greatest’ of the four, Aquinas perhaps following Aristotle argues for the primacy of prudence, giving emphasis to knowing, though for Plato all the virtues and especially justice depend upon the primacy of knowing which is why he makes the famous claim that the state or political community cannot be ordered rightly unless philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers. At the very least this suggests a necessary and intimate connection between knowledge and power; not their opposition nor the annihilation of the former in favour of the latter.
Thomas argues for the reciprocal relationship between all the virtues but especially, in terms of the cardinal virtues, between prudence and justice. “Now among all the moral virtues it is justice wherein the use of right reason” – meaning prudence – “chiefly appears.” Their interrelation turns on the relation to the good. “Prudence has the good essentially. Justice effects this good”; suggesting that the one pertains primarily to the intellect, the other to the volitional but as interdependent (Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues). Following Aristotle, “the good of man consists in being in accord with reason”, truth being the good of our knowing (Pieper on Thomas).
Prudence in this understanding has more to do with our relation to the absolute goodness of God than to our immediate practical concerns. Prudence is about far more than determining the means to the ends of self-interest; in this sense it is essentially connected to justice, to what belongs to the good of all and, ultimately, to God and our good in God.
There is no one-to-one correspondence between the seven virtues and the seven vices but there is a chain of the causality of sins – the idea that one sin leads to another. It is illustrated in the story of David and Bathsheba in which David is understood to have violated almost all of the Ten Commandments, the universal moral code for our humanity. The sin of the eyes, lust as a kind of idolatry, leads to the sin of the flesh, adultery, which in turn leads to the sin of deceit, lies or false witness, and to the sin of murder, but all as violating the principle of God. Psalm 51 is regarded as David’s confession in which all sin is against God himself, against the good upon which all action depends. “Against thee only have I sinned and done that which is evil in thy sight” (Ps. 51. 4).
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.
Like the vices or sins, the virtues connect and complement one another in various ways. The classification or designation of what comes to be known as the cardinal or capital sins has its beginnings in the ascetic monastic communities or solitaries known as the Desert Fathers in the wilderness of the deserts of Egypt from the 2nd century onwards.
Evagrius Ponticus (364-399 AD) provides the first list of sins, not seven but actually 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, sin has a strong objective character captured in the language of demons and there is a clear sense of a chain of sins, the 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 interrelation of the sins.
John Cassian (c.360-435 AD) 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 (tristitia) with spiritual lethargy – sloth (acedia). His list becomes the proverbial seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust.
Dante, in the Purgatorio of The Divine Comedy, provides a sense of the dynamic of the Christian life of penitential adoration: “to decline from sin, and incline to virtue,” as the BCP Penitential Service puts it. There is a long history and tradition of reflection upon the qualities of soul which contribute either to the dissolution of human character or to its perfection by grace and in ways which either counter or complement the characteristics of the dominant therapeutic culture of the contemporary world. This kind of spiritual analysis of human personality speaks profoundly to the unease and uncertainties of our current culture. The wisdom of the ages and the sages might have something to say to us.
Our Lenten programme will focus on the three most deadly of the seven deadly sins, namely, pride, envy, and anger. Following Dante, at least in Dorothy L. Sayers reading of the Purgatorio, the seven deadly sins fall into three categories of disordered love: love perverted, love defective, and love excessive. It is really all about the nature and direction of our loves: what is loved and in what way and to what extent and to what end. Pride, envy, and anger (or wrath) twist or pervert our relation to what is properly or truly to be loved, hence ‘love perverted’. In so doing they reveal what is the true or proper relation of love to the objects of love, and, ultimately, to our love of all things as embraced in the love of God. Our consideration of ‘the deadly three’ is one way of measuring or understanding those “two vast, spacious things”, namely, “sin and love.”
Fr. David Curry
Lenten Programme I
March 20th, 2025