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The seven deadlysins, also known as the capitalvicesor cardinal sins, function as a grouping and classification of major vices within the teachings of Christianity.[1] According to the standard list, the seven deadly sins in Christianity are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttonyand sloth. In Christianity, the classification of deadly sins ...
Sep 29, 2014 · Pope Gregory I reduced the list to seven in the sixth century, providing us with what we now commonly refer to as the seven deadly sins: sloth, anger, envy, pride, lust, gluttony, and avarice/greed (Michael Mangis, Signature Sins). This is the sixth post in our series on these seven sins, explaining what they are, how they affect our ...
- Lust. Lust refers to an intense desire, usually to engage in illegal or immoral sexual pleasure. Lust can lead to sexual immorality between two unmarried individuals (fornication) or between two people who’re not legally married to one another (adultery).
- Gluttony. Gluttony refers to the overconsumption of food or anything to the point of waste. In the Christian context, gluttony is considered as the overindulgence in food when you should spare some for the needy.
- Greed. Also known as avarice, covetousness, or cupidity, Greed is an intense desire and passionate love for material wealth. Much like lust and gluttony, greed results from an irrational longing for what you don’t need.
- Sloth. Sloth, or acedia, is laziness as is manifested by the willful avoidance of work. Unlike the deadly sins we’ve highlighted so far, laziness isn’t inspired by immorality.
- Overview
- Thomas Aquinas Revisits the List
- 1. Vainglory / Pride
- 2. Avarice
- 3. Envy
- 4. Wrath
- 5. Lust
- 6. Gluttony
- 7. Sloth
- HISTORY Vault: Religion
The idea of listing the vices began in the fourth century.
In the fourth century, a Christian monk named Evagrius Ponticus wrote down what’s known as the “eight evil thoughts”: gluttony, lust, avarice, anger, sloth, sadness, vainglory and pride.
Evagrius wasn’t writing for a general audience. As an ascetic monk in the Eastern Christian church, he was writing to other monks about how these eight thoughts could interfere with their spiritual practice. Evagrius’ student, John Cassian, brought these ideas to the Western church, where they were translated from Greek to Latin. In the sixth century, St. Gregory the Great—who would become Pope Gregory I—rearranged them in his commentary on the Book of Job, removing “sloth” and adding “envy.” Instead of giving “pride” its own place on the list, he described it as the ruler of the other seven vices, which became known as the seven deadly sins.
Religions on the End of the World
Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
Fast forward to the 13th century, when theologian Thomas Aquinas again revisited the list in Summa Theologica (“Summary of Theology”). In his list, he brought back “sloth” and eliminated “sadness.” Like Gregory, Aquinas described “pride” as the overarching ruler of the seven sins. The Catechism of the Catholic Church’s current capital sins are basically the same as Aquinas’, except that “pride” replaces “vainglory.”
Engraving of the Seven deadly sins.
Lists of the seven sins often use vainglory and pride interchangeably. But technically, they’re not the same thing, says Kevin M. Clarke, a professor of scripture and patristics at St. Patrick's Seminary and University who has edited a book of historical writings on the seven deadly sins.
“Gregory the Great wrote that avarice is not just a desire for wealth but for honors [and] high positions,” Newhauser says. “So he was aware that things that we would consider as immaterial could also be the object of avarice.” While some of the sins may vary between lists, avarice or greed shows up on all of them.
“Evagrius doesn’t have envy in his list,” Clarke says, but Evagrius did include sadness. “Sadness is closely related to envy because envy concerns really two things: One is joy at another’s misfortune and [the other is] sorrow at the fortune of someone else.”
Gregory articulated this when he added envy to his list of vices, writing that envy engendered “exultation at the misfortunes of a neighbour, and affliction at his prosperity.”
Anger can be a normal reaction to injustice, but wrath is something more. The Catechism says that “If anger reaches the point of a deliberate desire to kill or seriously wound a neighbor, it is gravely against charity; it is a mortal sin.” Medieval artists depicted wrath with scenes of people fighting as well as scenes of suicide.
Lust is so broad that it encompasses sex outside of heterosexual marriage as well as sex inside of heterosexual marriage. The Catechism defines lust as a “disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.”
Of all the sins, this is probably the one on which public opinion has changed the most. Although the Catholic church officially opposes birth control and same-sex marriage, polls by Gallup and the Pew Research Center show that the majority of Catholics in the United States believe the church should permit birth control and that same-sex marriage should remain legal.
Early Christian theologians understood gluttony to include drinking too much alcohol and desiring too much fine food, in addition to overeating.
“If I just simply have to have the most delicate food, the most expensive food, that can be a form of gluttony,” Clarke says.
Sloth has come to mean “laziness” today, but for early Christian theologians, it meant “a lack of care for performing spiritual duties,” Newhauser says. Although Gregory didn’t include sloth in his list of seven sins, he did mention it when talking about the sin of sadness or melancholy, writing that melancholy causes “slothfulness in fulfilling the commands.”
When Aquinas replaced sadness with sloth in his list of capital sins, he maintained a connecting between the two. “Sloth is a kind of sadness,” he wrote, “whereby a man becomes sluggish in spiritual exercises because they weary the body.”
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- Becky Little
- Pride: an excessive love of self or the desire to be better or more important than others. “Respect for the human person proceeds by way of respect for the principle that ‘everyone should look upon his neighbor (without exception) as “another self,” above all bearing in mind his life and the means necessary for living it with dignity’” (No.
- Lust: an intense desire, usually for sexual pleasure, but also for money, power or fame. “The God of promises always warned man against seduction by what from the beginning has seemed ‘good for food … a delight to the eyes … to be desired to make one wise’” (No.
- Gluttony: overconsumption, usually of food or drink. “The virtue of temperance disposes us to avoid every kind of excess: the abuse of food, alcohol, tobacco or medicine” (No.
- Greed: the desire for and love of possessions. “Sin … is a failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods” (No.
Dec 11, 2018 · Avarice: The Secret Sin that Owns Us. Pope Benedict XVI said that the saints are the best apologetics. Their lives are a clear and manifest proof of God’s love and action in the human heart, and we know this is so because, though our heart is too little examined, we know the human condition well enough to know its corruption.
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In so far as avarice is an incentive to injustice in the acquiring and retaining of wealth, it is frequently a grievous sin. In itself, however, and in so far as it implies simply an excessive desire of, or pleasure in, riches, it is commonly not a mortal sin.
