Religion: Those Fine Old Deadly Sins

Seven were the sins—pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth —that the early Christian theologians labeled capital, or deadly, on the ground that they led to the commission of other offenses against God.* For most 20th century men, the list seems a trifle quaint. In a world where millions are hungry because there is too little food, and millions more because they are dieting, gluttony, for example, takes on certain ironies.

To investigate the current state of these fine old sins, London’s Sunday Times recently commissioned essays on them from a septet of England’s wiliest, wittiest penmen. Nontheologians all, the Sunday Times sin samplers range from longtime agnostic and Critic Cyril Connolly, whose report on covetousness is a jaunty little tale of how a greedy antique collector comes to a Bad End, to Roman Catholic Poetess Dame Edith Sitwell, who rather admired the sin assigned to her. “Pride may be my own besetting sin,” she wrote, “but it is also my besetting virtue. Certainly my life has been spent in saying ‘Ha ha among the trumpets.’ ” Among the other contributions, published in the U.S. this week as The Seven Deadly Sins (Morrow; $3.50):

∙ ENVY, writes Novelist Angus (Anglo-Saxon Attitudes) Wilson, is perhaps the dourest of sins, since “it knows no gratification save endless self-torment.” Wilson finds the Green Evil everywhere, and suggests it is becoming more prevalent as examinations, from college boards to corporate psychological tests, determine who is up and who is down in life. Writers and actors are notoriously liable to envy and “ambitious clergymen, service officers and shop stewards appear to suffer most.” But perhaps the most obnoxious form of the sin today is Western Europe’s pervasive anti-Americanism. “There are grievances against America which deserve consideration from everyone,” says Wilson. “But anti-Americanism is quite another thing; it is an impotent envy which does nothing but disgrace the speaker. Hear a group of rich, beleaguered French or Italian or Spanish describing the necessity for a civilized Europe where American barbarism cannot interfere. There are few more nauseating sounds in the modern world.”

∙ SLOTH, which St. Thomas defined as “sadness in the face of spiritual good/’ is very much present in modern novels and plays, writes Evelyn Waugh. It is personified by the man who lost his faith “as though faith were an extraneous possession like an umbrella, which can be inadvertently left behind in a railway-carriage.” Waugh also argues that a sin closely allied to sloth, pigritia (slackness), is gaining: people have “‘no time’ to read or cook or even to dress decorously, while in their offices and workshops they do less and less, in quality and quantity. for ever larger wages with which to pay larger taxes for services that diminish in quantity and quality.”

∙ ANGER, says Poet W. H. Auden, is a perversion “of something in our nature which in itself is innocent, necessary to our existence and good.” The kinds of anger Auden finds most sinful are verbal wickedness substituted for physical violence, and the righteous anger often affected by police officials and governments. “Righteous anger can effectively resist and destroy evil, but the more one relies upon it as a source of energy, the less energy and attention one can give to the good which is to replace the evil once it has been removed. That is why, though there may have been some just wars, there has been no just peace.”

∙ LUST is a sin that virtually every man knows about, writes Biographer Christopher Sykes, and the very universality of the vice raises the question: Is it so bad after all? On the one hand, Sykes notes, God created the sexual urge, and denial of it often turns Christians into cold-hearted prudes; on the other hand, a number of well-adjusted people do abstain from sex with no psychological harm, and full sexual freedom— judging from Sweden or Japan — does not necessarily lead “to an earthly paradise whose inhabitants lose all cruel impulse and dwell together in peace and bliss.” Sykes suggests that churchmen tend to be too harsh in condemning lust, but joins them in condemning the Don Juan: “He seems to me merely the inverse of the flinty-hearted Pharisee: all the mental and moral energy used up in the strenuous play of seduction.”

* The church fathers were very keen on distinguishing varieties of sin. Their basic distinction, still followed by most Chiristian moralists, is between mortal and venial. A mortal sin is a freely willed, deliberate offense against God on a serious matter, deserving of eternal punishment.

A venial sin is a spiritual misdemeanor, involving a less serious matter, or a grave trangression that the sinner did not know was serious, or did not really want to commit.

Deadly sins are evil states of mind that can include or lead to mortal and venial sins.