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Concept
Seven deadly sins
Summary
The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings. According to the standard list, they are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth, which are contrary to the seven capital virtues. These sins are often thought to be abuses or excessive versions of one's natural faculties or passions (for example, gluttony abuses one's desire to eat).
This classification originated with the Desert Fathers, especially Evagrius Ponticus. Evagrius' pupil John Cassian with his book The Institutes brought the classification to Europe, where it became fundamental to Catholic confessional practices.
The seven deadly sins are discussed in treatises and depicted in paintings and sculpture decorations on Catholic churches as well as older textbooks. The seven deadly sins, along with the sins against the Holy Ghost and the sins that cry to Heaven for vengeance, are taught especially in Western Christian traditions as things to be deplored.
Roman writers such as Horace extolled virtues, and they listed and warned against vices. His first epistles say that "to flee vice is the beginning of virtue and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom."
These "evil thoughts" can be categorized as follows:
physical (thoughts produced by the nutritive, sexual, and acquisitive appetites)
emotional (thoughts produced by depressive, irascible, or dismissive moods)
mental (thoughts produced by jealous/envious, boastful, or hubristic states of mind)
The fourth-century monk Evagrius Ponticus reduced the nine logismoi to eight, as follows:
Γαστριμαργία (gastrimargia) gluttony
Πορνεία (porneia) prostitution, fornication
Φιλαργυρία (philargyria) avarice (greed)
Λύπη (lypē) sadness, rendered in the Philokalia as envy, sadness at another's good fortune
Ὀργή (orgē) wrath
Ἀκηδία (akēdia) acedia, rendered in the Philokalia as dejection
Κενοδοξία (kenodoxia) boasting
Ὑπερηφανία (hyperēphania) pride, sometimes rendered as self-overestimation, arrogance, or grandiosity
Evagrius's list was translated into the Latin of Western Christianity in many writings of John Cassian, thus becoming part of the Western tradition's spiritual pietas or Catholic devotions as follows:
Gula (gluttony)
Luxuria/Fornicatio (lust, fornication)
Avaritia (avarice/greed)
Tristitia (sorrow/despair/despondency)
Ira (wrath)
Acedia (sloth)
Vanagloria (vain, glory)
Superbia (pride, hubris)
In AD 590, Pope Gregory I revised the list to form a more common list.
Official source
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