They feed on each other, turning us toward ourselves. And they are deadly.
Comic book fans of a certain age, as well as some recent moviegoers, will remember that Billy Batson (a.k.a. Captain Marvel) was led into a disused subway tunnel where he found seven statues representing the seven enemies of humanity. He would fight those evils by invoking the mantra Shazam!, which turned him into his superhero self.
Well-trained Catholics will recognize that it was the seven deadly sins that inspired Billy’s initiation into his new life. Those sins have been a staple since ancient times. How did this ancient list enter into popular culture? How did it become the vehicle for television documentaries and the subject of crime films? It started in early monasticism.
Seven, the Perfect Number
Truth be told, the seven deadly sins started as eight. Late in the fourth century, the monastic writer St. John Cassian wrote that the goal of the monastic life was to attain “purity of heart” because Jesus said that those of a pure heart would “see God” (Mt 5:8). There were obstacles to purity of heart which Cassian (borrowing from an Eastern monastic writer, Evagrius of Pontus) numbered as eight: gluttony, lust, avarice, wrath, sadness, sloth, vainglory, and pride.
St. John Cassian did not consider these obstacles as sins as such but, rather, as illusions, or veils. They clouded over souls, keeping them from the purity of the heart where God dwells. The ascetic life of the monk, with prayer and work, helped to cultivate virtues to overcome these illusions.
In the sixth century, Pope St. Gregory the Great, himself trained as a monk, knew this tradition, but he changed the list to seven by combining a few and adding one (vainglory went into pride; sadness into sloth; he added envy). The list took its current form: pride, envy, sloth, avarice, wrath, lust, and gluttony.
It was Gregory who called them capital (from the Latin caput—head) sins because from these sins all other sins derive. Due to Gregory’s influence, seven became the norm. There is no such list of these sins in the Bible, nor is the list a matter of doctrine. Nonetheless, the number seven has a long-lasting cachet among theologians and writers.
It has often been juxtaposed to other sevens in sermons and theological treatises: the seven sacraments, the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, the seven penitential psalms, seven petitions of the beatitudes, and so on. Dante, in his Divine Comedy, from the Middle Ages, organized the Mount of Purgatory into seven terraces which, beginning with pride, the sinful mounted to expiate their sins and to learn of their opposing virtues. Dante noted that the climbers found themselves lighter as they ascended.
Sin vs. Psychology
What are we to make of this list and its significance? Some contemporary commentators (there is a surprisingly large literature on the topic) have argued that these vices are too individualistic. They argue for some list of social evils, such as racism. Others, by contrast, have noted that these social evils all are rooted in the traditional seven deadly sins.
Then there’s the way our language has changed—we often hear very benign meanings attached to some of these words. For example, we use words such as pride or envy in perfectly good senses. Irish (or Polish or black) pride may refer only to a harmless affirmation of one’s heritage. Similarly, we may speak of somebody’s garden as the “envy of the neighborhood” with no malign intention.
We tend to psychologize sin in our highly therapeutic culture. We talk about anger management or argue, as some have done when it comes to making money, that greed is good. We may insist that low self-esteem can be cured by the cultivation of self-pride, or that gluttony calls only for a good 12-step program. In each of these cases there are good intentions and helpful roads to betterment, but they do not quite touch on the deep meaning of sin, as we Catholics understand it.
Sin’s Poisonous Power
Anger makes a good case study. The Bible clearly describes God’s anger in places. We also know that Jesus became angry enough to make a whip of cords to drive money lenders from the Temple. Furthermore, there are times when anger seems not only appropriate, but demanded. Who has not felt anger in the face of rank injustice? And who has not felt anger erupting from deep inside, even for seemingly trivial reasons?
Of course, there is a very clear distinction between feeling angry and being an angry person. Anger is an all-too-human emotion, but being an angry person persistently is a form of pathology. That persistent anger is the spiritual condition to be avoided.
The early monastic writers considered anger to be one of the worst of the deadly sins. “You are not to act in anger nor hold a grudge,” warns St. Benedict in his Rule. These writers understood that an angry person was a kind of poison in a community. They also knew that if anger is held in, it acts like a cancer in a person’s soul.
Everyone knows that such anger is extremely destructive. Who does not know of families where Uncle X refuses to speak to Aunt Y, or of families driven apart from long-standing pain caused by long-ago acts or omissions? The media provide us with almost daily examples of such venomous anger erupting into violence and mayhem.
Each of these sins, in its own way, exalts the self at the expense of others. There is an old Latin tag about sin that describes sin as incurvatus in se, “turning in on the self.” It is a shorthand way of saying, that, for example, the sin of pride is an exaltation of the self without recognition of the other. In a different way, greed or gluttony rewards the self and ignores the other.
Being turned toward the self in this way is a failure of love. Jesus famously tells us that the supreme commandment is to love God with our whole heart and soul, and our neighbor as ourselves (he’s drawing, of course, on Hebrew Scripture). That commandment contains a triangular command: to love God above all, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
If we think about that dynamic for a moment, it becomes clear that the seven deadly sins are not merely social mores. Gluttony ought not to be linked with obesity, but, rather, with personal selfishness. Envy is not the same as aspiring to the wealth, looks, or social status of another; but, rather, with a seething anger at the other person (yes, these sins feed on each other). Sinful pride is the sheer resistance to the value of the other.
Love, by contrast, is that enlarging force by which we extend beyond ourselves to be grateful to God and generous to one another. To be a racist, to be a despoiler of the earth, to acquire at the expense of the other, to turn away from the needs of the other—all of these are celebration of the self independently of others. They are a turning away from God and neighbor.
Missing the Mark
Perhaps the reason that sin today may not be taken so seriously is because we’ve reduced
sin to psychological deviancy. The problem is exacerbated because our seven deadly sins are thought to be outdated, a carryover from the medieval world. Then, the very word sin seems to be too weak to bear enough moral freight, when we consider what awful things are done today. However, to say in the Bible that someone has sinned is to say that someone has “missed the mark” (the root meaning of sin), and the mark is to be fully human. Sin, in that sense, is a condition in which we fail to flourish in a fully human way.
We are made in the image and likeness of God. Our choices that turn us away from our fullest humanity make us restlessly unsatisfied. Thomas Merton once wrote that there is nothing interesting about sin: “Sin as such is essentially boring because it is the lack of something . . . ” (New Seeds of Contemplation).
Behind Merton’s paradox is the insight of St. Augustine, who opens his Confessions with his great line that God has made us for himself and “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” What the old monastic writers knew in a deep way is that all of the following are false paths: our attempts to satisfy ourselves inordinately, to alienate ourselves from others by anger or envy, to isolate ourselves totally in our smug superiority. They knew instinctively what we learn only in mature reflection, namely, that to turn away from the isolation of the self and to turn toward the other is to love.
That love gives us the way of loving God. St. John of the Cross said it perfectly, so I will give him the last word: “In the evening of our lives, we will be examined in love.”
