Seven deadly sins

From the Times Newspaper:

Sin is not a subject, with the possible exception of certain behaviour at the office party, that is especially associated with the Christmas season. It is, though, a rather important Christian notion……

According to one authoritative source, a schedule of eight great offences was first drawn up by Evagrius of Pontus, a Greek monastic theologian, who considered gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia (spiritual sloth), vainglory and pride as mankind’s principal failings.

Pope Gregory the Great refined this approach, merging vainglory into pride and acedia with sadness, then adding envy, to leave seven as the final number. His scheme has remained, although disputes exist as to whether greed is a better word than avarice and if wrath might substitute for anger.

Whether some sins should be deemed to be more damning than others has been controversial. Gregory the Great thought that pride was the most capital of sins and that lust was the least disturbing (or, perhaps, the most understandable). Others, notably St Thomas Aquinas, strongly disapproved of any attempt to put them in order. Dante, by contrast, threw himself into the exercise with enthusiasm. He produced a carefully constructed league table indicating which might be closest to Heaven and which flirted with Hell. On the whole, the Aquinas case has much to commend it. It would be unwise to indulge heavily in a little sin……

It is appropriate during the modern Christmas to reflect again upon the dangers of envy, gluttony and sloth. Anger, sadly, often erupts at this moment as well. Lust is not confined to the most prominent actors in popular television soap operas.

Theologians had by the 16th century devised an imaginative programme of precise punishments for those considered guilty of the seven misdemeanours. The approved response to pride was to be broken on the wheel, the sanction for lust was smothering in fire and brimstone, the sentence for those believed to have engaged in gluttony was to be forced to consume rats, toads and snakes. In contemporary Britain, the consequences of sin are not so dramatic but there is a subtle human price that has to be paid. This is a moment to remember that a community, a country and an economic system are held together at least as much by shared values as institutional arrangements. Vice and virtue still do matter. Or, as Simone Weil correctly put it: All sins are attempts to fill voids.