THINKING ABOUT SIN

In the lurid film Seven, starring Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt, a maniacal killer roams the streets killing a string of victims in a series of gruesome murders. The detectives are stumped until they realize that the perpetrator is killing his victims as a sort of sick punishment for their having committed one of the Seven Deadly Sins. The murders are terrible, the crime scenes are horrible. The whole movie is dark, somber, and sinister.

In other words, the movie is quite unlike the historical depictions of the Seven. If only it were true that these sins were the peculiar provenance of the maniac and the madman, a Hitler or a Mao. But the thing that first impresses us about the Seven is how utterly ordinary and unspectacular they are. These are the mundane, all-too-human foibles of the human race in general, not of the few utterly depraved. Perhaps there is something in us that wants to believe that "sin" must apply to someone other than ourselves. Thus we make a movie that depicts the Seven as lurid, bloody, and spectacularly bad. They are not. This is where we live, this is who we are.

I wrote this book just after having undergone my church's rather laborious process of episcopal election. My experience of that process by which my church chooses its leaders gave me so many opportunities to observe sin in action—the sins of others and my own—that I became interested in this subject afresh. A process of election that leads to clerical exaltation, a process in which nominees are asked positively to present themselves before others while at the same time acting humble and self-effacing about the whole thing, and a process in which electors must make decisions about the suitability and spirituality of the nominees, is a process that is replete with opportunities for sin. Self-delusion is virtually unavoidable in such a situation. At least it was so for me. Shortly thereafter I watched the shenanigans of the candidates in both political parties during a presidential election—their false promises, self-deceit, and misrepresentation—and thought to myself, mea culpa, mea culpa.

As a pastor and a Southerner, I've long been fascinated with sin, my own and that of my parishioners. When one sets out to do good things among good people in a good organization, sin is never far away. In my last parish, some years ago, I wrote a book about sin and evil. But that book depicted sin in a rather large, cosmic, systemic manner. I am now, after the election of bishops, more impressed with the rather mundane, ordinary, petty nature of our sin, just the sort of sin that is named in the Seven.

One of the first curiosities about the Seven Deadly Sins is that there are so few sins on the list. Just as God graciously gave us only Ten Commandments, considering all that God might have commanded us, so the church Fathers stopped at a holy, complete number, Seven. They are pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lechery, or by their more elegant Latin names: superbia, invidia, ira, acedia, avaritia, gula, luxuria. For fifteen hundred years the Heptalog has been a Christian way of naming the nature of sin.

The earliest Christian formulation of the Seven is from a contemporary of Augustine, the desert father Evagrius of Pontus in his Praktikos. Evagrius was a follower of Origen, who was condemned at the Fifth Ecumenical Council in A.D. 553. In Egypt, Evagrius established a group of monks who went out in the desert to live in order to separate themselves from the wiles of the world and to be closer to God. There is some irony that, out in the desert, in this communal, pure, ascetic community that was designed to promote a better vision of God, Evagrius and his fellow monks discovered their own sin. When Jesus went out into the desert at the beginning of his ministry, there he met Satan, there he was tempted. In the wilderness, alone, sin crouches by the door. Evagrius's Praktikos influenced the more famous monastic rule of St. Benedict, which became the means of ordering monastic life in the Western church.

Evagrius's ideas about sin are curious. For instance, he said that women and bishops constituted the greatest temptations to monks, and that both should be avoided as much as possible. He got at least one of those warnings right. His Praktikos is a collection of short reflections upon the various aspects of the ascetic life, practical guidelines that make communal life in such close proximity possible. He lists "eight demons" that make life in community, particularly community that is dedicated to God, so difficult.

From time to time we have an earnest little group of seminarians who move out of the dormitory, rent an old rambling house near campus, and set up a "Christian community." Most of these attempts at communal living in Christ do not endure long, as history has shown. Jesus calls us to live with our sisters and brothers in Christ-like family. In these communal attempts, most Christians act exactly like a family—fighting among themselves, full of resentment and envy, and all the rest. So the Seven are the only truthful account that I know of what "family values" really look like. They are the sins that arise most vigorously precisely among those who obey Jesus' command to "love our neighbor" by moving in with our neighbor. I expect the poet Auden was thinking about the difficulty of life in proximity when he quipped that everybody knows we are created to serve our neighbor, but God only knows why the neighbor was created.

The most extensive dissertation on the subject of the Seven was by St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas differentiated between the "spiritual sins," like pride, anger, envy, covetousness, and sloth, and the two "carnal sins" of lust and gluttony. I doubt that these sins can be so easily separated. Our body and soul, spiritual and physical, psyche and soma are intertwined. Yet it is probably worth saying that these early Fathers—despite popular misconceptions about Christian sexual prudery, and indeed despite the church's current heated debate over sexual sins—agreed that when it comes to evaluating sin, spiritual sins were decidedly more detrimental and deadly than the carnal.

The first thing that strikes one about the Seven is that they don't seem so "deadly." Why worry about gluttony when murder is so prevalent among us? Surely there are more serious sins than Sloth, Greed, Gluttony, Anger, Lust, Envy, and Pride. The Seven are the stock and trade of daytime soap opera TV, but they are hardly the most terrible things of which human beings are capable. The more spectacular sins—political tyranny, ethnic hatred, religious persecution, and racial violence—fail to make the list. On our campus we are currently terribly concerned with academic dishonesty—cheating—but you won't find it among the Seven. In the churches that I have served, adultery, not to mention drunkenness, is certainly a source of great misery and cruelty. Why not go with adultery, a sin that is so directly, specifically condemned by Jesus, rather than lust? Smoking is one of...