We Learn How to Live by Dying to our Greed, Envy, Sloth, Lust, Pride, Anger, & Gluttony.

It is by dying to our greed, envy, sloth, lust, pride, anger, & gluttony that we learn to live.  

The seven deadly sins are referred to as "capital sins." This means they are considered the most dangerous vices that can lead to other sins. The seven deadly sins are pride, greed (avarice), lust, envy, gluttony, wrath (anger), and sloth (laziness), which we have all experirenced in our lives. Each of these can be countered by a corresponding virtue like humility, generosity, chastity, gratitude, temperance, patience, and diligence respectively. 

The Latin term for pride is telling: superbia. The proud person thinks he or she is above (super-) the normal workings and demands of human living (bios). The Greek word is hubris, a word connoting a sense of futility because the hubristic person desires to be perceived impervious to the human condition by denying anything higher.

According to St. Thomas Aquinas, pride can take on four possible forms:

1. Attributing to ourselves perfections we do not really possess.
2. Actually possessing such a perfection but thinking we have it because we worked very hard and earned it
3. Possessing the perfection and knowing God gave it to us but thinking he did so because we somehow deserved it
4. Possessing the perfection and knowing God gave it to us undeservedly but being unwilling to share it with anyone else

St. Thomas Aquinas embodied the Holy Virtue of humility that helps to overcome pride. In his Summa Contra Gentiles, St. Thomas Aquinas describes humility thus: “Truly, the virtue of humility consists in this, that one keep himself within his own limits; he does not stretch himself to what is above him, but he subjects himself to his superior.” St. Thomas was willing to submit his intellect to God and give all the glory back to Him whom he received his intellect from.

Avarice is a fancy word for greed, the disordered use of material goods. Living in the world of cars and coats, the world of houses and hats, it is understandable that we might misuse such goods from time to time. Here the simple needs of life take on an allure that is not proper to them, consumerism based on this misjudgment of the true nature of things. 

St. Maximillian Kolbe embodied the Holy  Virtue of charity that helps to overcome greed. He believed that the essence of God's love is in the will, not in affections or sweet words. He believed that if someone perseveres in their will to love God and be holy, they are moving forward and upward, even if they don't feel it. This belief of love allowed him to sacrifice his  life in place of  another rather than greedily hold onto his life.

Lust is the English term for luxuria, the sin of luxuriating in bodily activities that lead to neither true unity nor the natural openness to human life. Yet since we have been made for intimacy and interpersonal relationship, lust is the most understandable of all the deadly sins. It is here we must learn to have our basest instincts tempered. Self-mastery is the most basic of all the virtues because lust is the least deadly of all our sins.

St. Kateri Tekakwitha embodied the Holy Virtue of purity that helps to overcome lust. She would visit the Blessed Sacrament several times a day and attend Mass twice a day. The fruit of her devotion to the Blessed Sacrament led St. Kateri to have a great purity of heart. She preserved such extraordinary purity through constant mortification of the senses and through devotion to the Blessed Virgin. 

Envy comes from a telling Latin term, invidere, meaning to look (vid-) only into (in-) oneself. It is a doleful and deplorable state in that one is basically telling God he did a poor job arranging the gifts and the goods of this creation. With such divine rejection comes the inability to rejoice over the flourishing of others, and the envious person has only himself to look at, everyone else being a threat.

St. Therese of Lisieux totally encompassed the Holy Virtue of kindness that helps to overcome envy. She embraced humility and kindness by doing small things with great love.

Gluttony is something most of us have encountered in one way or another. In the great Catholic intellectual tradition, gluttony is not simply eating too much, it is also eating at an improper time, eating too eagerly, eating too expensively, and even eating too daintily, as the sylphlike supermodel is just as consumed by disordered concerns about calories as the corpulent gourmand.

St. Augustine embodied the Holy Virtue of temperance that helps to overcome gluttony. St. Augustine fought fierce battles with a temptation to intemperance, describing himself at one point as a “slave to lust.” He is a role model for temperance because it is the virtue that helps us overcome weaknesses of the flesh. St. Augustine stated, “Temperance is a disposition that restrains our desires for things which it is base to desire.”

The Latin term ire is what our acronym calls wrath. It is a lesser deadly sin because the truth is that there is a peculiar sort of intimacy in wrath. “You know, when you said this or did that, you hurt my feelings . . .”

St. Monica embodied the Holy Virtue of patience that helps to overcome anger. She is known for her patience and perseverance because she prayed for her son St. Augustine’s conversion for 17 years and for her husband for many more. She teaches us to trust in Good and have faith that He will answer our prayers according to His perfect timing. 

Sloth is perhaps the least understood of the seven deadlies. Here, turning to the Greek will help us understand why the ancients denounced this sin as the noonday devil from Psalm 91:6. In Greek, the term for sloth is acedia, a compound word meaning without (a-) care (cedia). 

It wasn’t until the Protestant Reformers that sloth was viewed as physical laziness. For the Fathers as well as the medieval Doctors, sloth was being so busy that one didn’t make time for what was truly important. What is easier: to make a silent holy hour or to answer emails while talking on one’s cellphone?

This is why Thomas Aquinas defined sloth as an aimless “tendency to wander.” It is the inability to care about the everyday routines of life and the demands of basic human existence.

St. John Vianney embodied the Holy Virtue of diligence that helps to overcome sloth. He was a saint who worked hard to the point of exhaustion to help those in need. He once said, “Virtue demands courage, constant effort and above all, help from on high.”  He recognized that virtue was not easy and that it required hard work and diligence to stay on course.  He was a saint and it required effort on his part to be a good person.

1. Meconi, David. “The Seven Deadly Sins.” Catholic Answers, Catholic Answers, 9 Mar. 2021, www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-seven-deadly-sins.