Holiness in the Virtue & Vice Tradition
An Introduction to the Seven Deadly Sins
by Jeff Reimer
Feast of St John the Hut DwellerAnno Domini 2020, January 15
The list of seven capital vices (as I shall elect to call them) has, moreover, undergone several permutations throughout the centuries. They originate from the fourth-century desert father Evagrius of Pontus. An aristocratic, philosophically minded theologian living among largely (though by no means exclusively) illiterate peasant monks in the desert, Evagrius gave theoretical and systematic articulation to ascetic life in the Egyptian wilderness, categorizing the various forms of temptation and distilling what he called “the eight thoughts,” the often-unrecognized precurser to and fountainhead of one of Christianity’s most enduring moral legacies.
Evagrius’s list included gluttony, lust, avarice, wrath, sadness, acedia, vainglory, and pride. This list passed into the West via John Cassian, a Latin-speaking—and, crucially, Latin-writing—Christian who spent time in the desert with the first monks. In two works, the Institutes
and the Conferences, he summarized and elaborated on the desert tradition. These books were deeply influential in the Latin West, particularly because in his Rule
Benedict identified them by name as essential reading for all monks. Cassian called Evagrius’s eight thoughts the capital vices.
In the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great, writing for a non-monastic audience, did a little pruning and rearranging of the list, dropping pride (which he viewed as the taproot of all sin), adding envy, and incorporating acedia into sadness. His list has remained basically standard in the West ever since. In the twelfth century, however, Hugh of St. Victor made one seemingly small change: he re-substituted acedia for sadness—a happy occurrence, for to have subsumed acedia, the “complex thought,” as Evagrius called it, completely into sadness would have tragically vitiated our understanding of one of the most mercurial and vexing of the classic vices. He also called the list, for the first time, the seven capital sins. This is the fixed and definite form the list and its title took in the West, for it is this list and this title that was sitting in front of Thomas Aquinas (who thought it was Gregory’s) as he brought to bear upon it the force of his genius.
The capital vices are identified as such not because they are the most frequent or worst possible sins but because they are the source of all other sins. There is also a structure to them (I’m using Aquinas’s list): gluttony, lust, and avarice are sins of a carnal, animal, or material nature; while envy, vainglory, and wrath are of an immaterial, rational, or spiritual nature. Acedia lies at the juncture of our animal and rational natures, as Evagrius calls them, and thus acedia incorporates aspects of both forms of sin (which is why Evagrius called it the complex thought).
In the modern West when mention is made of the seven deadly sins it is largely to misunderstand them, thus inadvertently but inevitably promoting further moral confusion. The Christian condemnation of lust, for example, is assumed to entail a rejection of all sex, and the embrace of sexual desire in all its forms is taken to be a liberation of the body rather than its willing enslavement to a sinful passion. Envy and avarice foster economic growth, and we thereby celebrate greed. Sloth becomes leisure. Gluttons are gourmands. The purportedly high stakes of social (media) discourse justify vainglory and wrath.
If we do
recognize vice we psychologize it, both immanentizing sin and trivializing it in one deft motion. Thus gluttony is reduced to obesity and treated as a disease. Wrath is quieted by anger management; pride, amended by a proper sense of self-esteem.
If I seem a little dyspeptic it might be because I’m indulging in schadenfreude—a subspecies of envy—at observing the moral chaos of our culture. So let me turn the coin over and look at the other side: virtue.
*The rest of this essay will be printed in The Moot 2.1, available to all Eighth Day Patrons and Pillars, and released at the 10th annual Eighth Day Symposium on January 23-25. If you are not yet a member, we are offering 50% off Patron and Pillar memberships through the end of January. Sign up before the Symposium and attend free!
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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