Seven deadly sins
[1] According to the standard list, the seven deadly sins in Roman Catholic Church are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth.
Knowledge of the seven deadly sin concept is known through discussions in various treatises and also depictions in paintings and sculpture, for example architectural decorations on certain churches of certain Catholic parishes and also from certain older textbooks.
[10][11] (It is interesting to note that Pope Gregory's list corresponds exactly to the traits described in Pirkei Avot as "removing one from the world."
[19] Listed in order of increasing severity as per Pope Gregory I, 6th-century A.D., the seven deadly sins are as follows: Lust or lechery is intense longing.
[25] Medieval church leaders such as Thomas Aquinas took a more expansive view of gluttony,[25] arguing that it could also include an obsessive anticipation of meals and overindulgence in delicacies and costly foods.
[18] As defined outside Christian writings, greed is an inordinate desire to acquire or possess more than one needs, especially with respect to material wealth.
[28] Sloth refers to many related ideas, dating from antiquity and including mental, spiritual, pathological, and physical states.
Mentally, acedia has a number of distinctive components; the most important of these is affectlessness, a lack of any feeling about self or other, a mind-state that gives rise to boredom, rancor, apathy, and a passive inert or sluggish mentation.
Physically, acedia is fundamentally associated with a cessation of motion and an indifference to work; it finds expression in laziness, idleness, and indolence.
[29] Sloth includes ceasing to utilize the seven gifts of grace given by the Holy Spirit (Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Knowledge, Piety, Fortitude, and Fear of the Lord); such disregard may lead to the slowing of spiritual progress towards eternal life, the neglect of manifold duties of charity towards the neighbor, and animosity towards those who love God.
The most profound versions of this condition are found in a withdrawal from all forms of participation in or care for others or oneself, but a lesser yet more noisome element was also noted by theologians.
Chaucer also dealt with this attribute of acedia, counting the characteristics of the sin to include despair, somnolence, idleness, tardiness, negligence, laziness, and wrawnesse, the last variously translated as "anger" or better as "peevishness".
[31] Sloth subverts the livelihood of the body, taking no care for its day-to-day provisions, and slows down the mind, halting its attention to matters of great importance.
[32] According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the neutral act of anger becomes the sin of wrath when it is directed against an innocent person, when it is unduly strong or long-lasting, or when it desires excessive punishment.
"If anger reaches the point of a deliberate desire to kill or seriously wound a neighbor, it is gravely against charity; it is a mortal sin".
[37] Pride, also known as hubris (from Ancient Greek ὕβρις) or futility, is considered the original and worst of the seven deadly sins on almost every list, the most demonic.
"[42] Jonathan Edwards said: "remember that pride is the worst viper that is in the heart, the greatest disturber of the soul's peace and sweet communion with Christ; it was the first sin that ever was and lies lowest in the foundation of Lucifer's whole building and is the most difficultly rooted out and is the most hidden, secret and deceitful of all lusts and often creeps in, insensibly, into the midst of religion and sometimes under the disguise of humility.
[44] In political analysis, "hubris" is often used to describe how leaders with great power over many years become more and more irrationally self-confident and contemptuous of advice, leading them to act impulsively.
