Loss of Transcendence - Lesson 17

Dr. James Houston
Loss of Transcendence
th730-17
Contemporary Significance of the Seven Cardinal Sins
Lesson Transcript

In conclusion then, it’s helpful for us today to see the contemporary significance of the seven cardinal sins that the Early Fathers depicted and mapped out so effectively because that context is still very appropriate for us in our life today.

The cardinal sins that the Early Fathers were reacting against were in response to the seven virtues of the Stoics. And the Stoics themselves had thought that the virtues were affected by the planets so that human emotions were influenced by the motion of the planets. This kind of thinking, which seems to us so wacky today, was actually still the belief of even people in the Tudor period and even the Narnia tales one scholar has suggested that Lewis is quite deliberately using the same mythology as a kind of background to what he’s writing about on the seven books of the Narnia tales. But that’s another story that we won’t explore.

As far as we’re concerned, the significance of the seven virtues or vices in counterpoise one to the other is that every culture has interpreted it differently and even The Daily Telegraph some years ago was, in a sense, suggesting that in our culture today what we would as Christians call vices the world is calling virtues. So they contradict totally the one with the other. So this upsidedness, this contradiction, this paradox, of vices and virtues suggests there is an amazing fluidity through changing cultures. And there’s a whole study also about how the virtues and the vices were interpreted and reinterpreted throughout the different stages of Western humanism and its long history.

But for us today, it’s appropriate to start with the first vice. And that vice is not pride. That vice is envy. It’s significant that Rene Girard in his understanding of this indicates that the primal vice is envy. It was the envy of Adam and Eve, envious of God and the temptation to be like God, to be a rival of God, that was the first Fall of Man. But then like parents, like children. And so what we find with the two brothers was that Cain was envious of his brother and of his sacrifice and so the result of that was fratricide. And so this is the primary vice, says Ricoeur, and yet, ironically, it’s that primal vice that has created the city of man. In other words, what he sees is that the whole structure of human culture is being envious of the other in rivalry and that builds up all our activities that we have in the formation of what is the city of man.

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Pride is clearly also very close to envy, but what pride is is the isolation of the self perhaps in frustration because we’re not getting what we want. [But the result of pride, [or the vice of envy 00:04:42], is that pride is self-enclosure. And already we’ve mentioned, I think, before how Dante saw that the great Satan was not in a fiery furnace of Hell, but he was in a frozen lake. He was totally frozen within himself to be himself by himself. That’s Hell. That’s satanic. And so perhaps we should realise with great solemnity how serious is the narcissism that is connected with being enclosed within oneself in pride.

Then with pride, there’s also anger. And anger, of course, was certainly one of the elements in the dynamic of envy that, in frustration, we find that in his pride Cain kills his brother. And the killing has never ceased since, whether it’s a metaphorical killing of other companies in the high competition that we have today of the business world, or whether it’s the rivalry we have with school marks, of hating our school friend for being smarter than I am, all of this different disturbances that so profoundly affect the whole of the human race lies behind these three vices. The other vices are vices that are much more in terms of our own greed, of our own avarice, of our own jealously. All of these are interconnected. And we can also see how the vices that affect others around us socially are the vices that we associate with these other in what we would then call the ecosystem of morality.

What the Early Fathers may surprise us with is the vice of sloth. And we think that being lazy is no big deal, but it’s much more than laziness. It’s simply giving up in despair. It’s giving up desire. It’s giving up hope. It’s really living with what the Desert Fathers call the noonday devil. That is to say, I’m weary of well-doing, or I’m weary of my efforts to be good, or I’m weary of my efforts to live. And so there’s a very close connection between sloth and despair. And then, of course, with despair we can do dreadful things. The whole climate of anxiety is the climate of sloth, of acedia, in the use of this word. And then, of course, beyond that we have the more sensual vices such as fornication and sexual immorality and of the addictions that they so readily bind us in imprisonment in our lives, these [two 00:08:38]. And of course, greed itself is one of these vices because there’s no appetite that is satisfied by greed. Greed is an insatiable desire that never stops and it leads on the slippery path to even worse vices than all.

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So I think the significance of us today as Christians being able to take serious study and perhaps even have a weekend retreat on the seven virtues and the seven vices is very helpful for us in order to know how to live morally as Christians before God.