The Seven Deadly Sins
The Seven Deadly Sins also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices. Behaviors or habits are classified under this category if they directly engender other immoralities. According to the standard list, they are hubristic pride, greed, lust, malicious envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, which are also contrary to the seven virtues.
This classification originated with the desert fathers, especially Evagrius Ponticus, who identified seven or eight evil thoughts or spirits that one needed to overcome. Evagrius' pupil John Cassian, with his book The Institutes, brought the classification to Europe, where it became fundamental to Catholic confessional practices as evident in penitential manuals, sermons like "The Parson's Tale" from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and artworks like Dante's Purgatory (where the penitents of Mount Purgatory are depicted as being grouped and penanced according to the worst capital sin they committed). The Church used the doctrine of the deadly sins to help people stop their inclination towards evil before dire consequences and misdeeds occur; the leader-teachers especially focused on pride, from which all sin comes, and greed, which is also a universal source of vice. To inspire people to focus on the seven deadly sins, the vices are discussed in treatises and depicted in paintings and sculpture decorations on churches. Peter Brueghel the Elder's prints of the Seven Deadly Sins and extremely numerous other works, both religious and non-religious, show the continuity of this practice in the culture and everyday life of the modern era.
- More information is available at [ Wikipedia:The_Seven_Deadly_Sins ]
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