Seven Deadly Sins

The desert monks did not fear demons in the sand. They feared the thoughts that arrived at noon.

The list began as eight. In the fourth century, Evagrius Ponticus — a brilliant, disgraced theologian who fled to the Egyptian desert — catalogued the eight logismoi, the recurring tempting-thoughts that assault a solitary mind: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride. His student John Cassian carried the scheme west. Around 590, Gregory the Great reworked it in the Moralia in Job: he folded vainglory into pride and set pride apart as the root of all the rest, merged acedia and sadness into one, added envy, and arrived at the seven that the Middle Ages memorized and Dante built a mountain out of.

The crucial insight, easy to lose under centuries of moralizing, is that these are not primarily acts. They are disordered desires — good appetites bent toward the wrong object, the wrong amount, the wrong way. Dante's Purgatorio makes this explicit: the whole mountain is organized as a taxonomy of love. The lower terraces purge love perverted into harm of the neighbor (Pride, Envy, Wrath); the middle terrace purges love deficient (Sloth); the upper terraces purge love excessive, aimed at genuinely good things held too tightly (Greed, Gluttony, Lust).

Each sin has a remedial virtue — the counter-practice the tradition prescribed — and each has survived into the present under a new name: the Enneagram's nine passions are these seven plus fear (Type 6) and deceit (Type 3). The desert's diagnostic manual is still in print; it just changed publishers.

The Seven

Related

• Virtues & Vices — the domain index
• Virtues — the remedies
• The Shadow — the sins as disowned material
• Enneagram — the passions, seven of nine
• Christianity — the carrying tradition

Seven names for the ways love goes wrong.