Moralists and theologians enjoy attaching numbers to quite abstract entities, such as the Four Cardinal Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins.
The enthusiasm for enumerations can be seen already in Plato. He set out three parts of the soul: reason, temper and appetite. Each part had its characteristic virtue: prudence for reason, fortitude for temper and temperance for appetite.
Harmony between the three parts was brought about by justice which thus appears as the fourth cardinal virtue. These four virtues are cardinal (from the Latin cardo, hinge): they are the hinges that provide the framework for the exercise of particular virtues. Christianity added to the four “natural” virtues the three “theological” virtues of faith, hope and charity, thereby completing a set of seven – known sometimes as the Seven Heavenly Virtues.
To match this set theologians drew up a contrasting set of seven deadly sins: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Wrath and Sloth. In some lists the second sin is named “greed”, but this lacks the scriptural authority of “covetousness” and fails to bring out that what is sinful here is not just the pursuit of excessive good for oneself but the desire to transfer that good from somebody else.
Two things are notable about this list. One is that whereas sins are actions or omissions, such as adultery or missing Sunday Mass, the items on the list are not sins but rather emotions or passions that may lead to sins. Second, the sins are not cardinal in the way that the virtues are. They do not provide a general framework for other sins, even though in a particular case a rape, for example, may be seen as an expression of the craving for power rather than the lust for pleasure.
Certainly no one has succeeded in showing that one single deadly sin is the fundamental basis of the others. The Seven Deadly Sins are in fact a set chosen arbitrarily to match and contrast with the Seven Heavenly Virtues. Some went further and tried to pair off each sin with a particular virtue. This was not easy to do: surely the sin of pride is paired with the virtue of humility, rather than with any of the heavenly virtues.
In addition to listing deadly sins, theologians made a distinction between mortal and venial sins. Mortal sins were deadly in that if you died with an unrepented mortal sin on your conscience you would go to the everlasting death of hell. Venial sins might be forgiven, whether in the confessional or as the upshot of countervailing good works.
Most of the seven deadly sins could occur in mortal or venial form. However, for no clear reason, many theologians taught that all sins of lust, even if only in thought, were mortal and not venial. This provided material for self-torture to many a scrupulous conscience.
I am told that the distinction between mortal and venial sins is nowadays unfamiliar to most Catholics. Fifty years ago that was the most important distinction in all of moral theology. No doubt the change is connected with the decrease among Catholics of recourse to the confessional.
If that is so, it exhibits the extent to which Catholic theology has evolved during the last century.
The Angelic Doctor described the Seven Deadly Sins as “capital sins” to explain how they lead to others.
“The word capital is derived from ‘caput’ [a head]. Now the head, properly speaking, is that part of an animal’s body, which is the principle and director of the whole animal. Hence, metaphorically speaking, every principle is called a head, and even men who direct and govern others are called heads. Accordingly a capital vice is … derived from the head, taken metaphorically for a principle or director of others. In this way a capital vice is one from which other vices arise, chiefly by being their final cause. Wherefore a capital vice is not only the principle of others, but is also their director and, in a way, their leader: because the art or habit, to which the end belongs, is always the principle and the commander in matters concerning the means.”
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