I’ve created an upcoming course titled “The Theology of Hell,” a theme which has had shockingly high resonance with undergraduate students (wait, there is a waiting list for a theology elective?) So when I was asked to compose a series of short reflections on the seven deadly sins, I gladly accepted to kill two birds with one stone. I hope getting paid twice for the same work isn’t somewhere on the list of offences!
It will behoove us to begin with a short discussion of what exactly “sin” means, before we move into categorizing them down the line. The word sin is a translation of the pre-Christian Greek “hamartia,” which means “to fall short, to miss the mark” as in archery. Although by the time of the New Testament it had taken on the common connotations of transgression and iniquity, or in a familiar formulation, “our trespasses,” its genesis was completely secular.
Though it obviously predates him, there is to my mind something rather Augustinian lurking in this original notion: of the arrow missing the target of its intended end. For traditional Christian theology such an end (telos) can only be God, our True Home. And for Augustine, evil is not a “thing”; rather, it’s an absence, a lack, a privation. It’s the cavity in the good tooth of creation, the hole where love ought to be. So the evil of “sin” is not an actual substance in competition with goodness, but the “no-thing-ness” of the space in which the projectile (we) have, through our deliberate actions, fallen short of the Supreme Dartboard (God).
The Catholic Church teaches sins can be venial (minor) or mortal (deadly). These latter somehow deeply impact, some would say sever, the life of grace in our relationship to God. Three conditions are necessary for a sin to be considered mortal:
— a serious matter is involved,
— full knowledge that what is occurring is wrong, and — full consent of
the will to commit the evil action or to omit the corresponding proper action — the priest and the Levite in the Good Samaritan parable didn’t actively do anything but keep their scheduled appointments downtown, but still sinned.
Sins where a wrong action is committed are called sins of commission; sins where right behavior is omitted, (no surprise here) sins of omission.
Aquinas put much emphasis on the habitual nature of sin or vice, as well as of virtue. As the Catechism puts it, “Sin creates a proclivity to sin.” That first kiss of an extramarital affair likely causes sharp internal misgivings which years of secret rendezvous smooth away over time.
So too with good behavior, the better one is, Aquinas would say, the easier it is to be good. Our actions somehow become incarnated within us and we become what we “have” (habitus). Aquinas here uses Aristotle’s concept of virtue as a via media, or middle way, between defect — having too little; and excess — having too much.
Think of courage on a grid: the virtue lies between the sins of defect where one is afraid to stand up for anything, and excess where one is foolhardy and rushes into battle barbarian-style without thinking. Properly using money lies between being cheap or miserly (“short arms, deep pockets”) and being wasteful or prodigal (“Shots on me all around!”). Virtue is always in between these sins of “more than” and “not enough.”
If nothing else, these thinkers from the past were pretty perceptive about human nature. As Fulton Sheen once aptly put it, “We think many a thing is modern simply because we do not know the ancients.”
The basis for every sin is the immediacy of the rivalry between an illegitimate and disordered focus on the self and the intrinsically natural one on the transcendent as the gravitational center of our daily universe. Which we choose to orbit determines everything.
Think of the sinners in Dante’s Inferno: locked staring into the icy mirror of selfhood in the very deepest circles of hell. Their eyes are literally frozen, forever gazing back only at the infinitesimally tiny horizons of their own interests, regrets and desires. They are narcissism recast and personified, and anyone who knows the original Greek myth sees the allusion.
While sins of passion may in the first instance feel fiery with the heat of attraction, it’s really the deadening permafrost of choosing the self to the exclusion of others and the Other in which the real danger of sinfulness lies.
Michael M. Canaris is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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