The Eight Evils: An Introduction Chris Selmys Originally published in Issue XII of Vulgata, February, 2004.

Over the next eight issues, we will be running a special column examining the inns and outs of evil, and particularly the vices to which human beings, being subject to the unfortunate effects of concupiscence, regularly fall prey. Each issue, we will be dealing with a particular evil, or broad category of vice, into which an entire diabolical panoply of actual vices may (roughly) be sorted. I have decided on eight of these categories and I believe that amongst them they account for all of the different variations on turning away from God in the most clear and complete way. Here then are the names I wish to use and the meanings that I intend by them. Pride, the sin that is in every sin and spawned them all, in this discussion will refer primarily to abstract interior vices that mostly amount to an improper disposition toward the self. The most similar in kind to these are the vices of Despair, covered in darkness and difficult to control, they are a little more tangible and usually include an improper disposition towards God as a critical ingredient. The vices of Greed are nothing more than different kinds of worldliness and Sloth covers many of the sins of omission and also some of neglect and irresponsibility. Envy, probably the least well understood by most people, comes in 6 extremely distinct varieties, all of which are quite nasty. Gluttony, far from being confined to overeating contains no fewer than 7 other dependent vices which I intend to discuss and Lust is a special kind of gluttony which is distinct and rampant enough to be its own category – it includes every kind of disordered sexuality. That leaves only Wrath which contains not only the sins against Meekness and Patience but also those against virtues such as Justice. The Eight Evils may also be grouped into 4 pairs according to the way in which theyattack the soul. Wrath and Lust will try to burn it with fire. Greed and Gluttony will endeavour to make it soft, pulpy and weak so that, buttressed with trinkets and crumpets it will have no strength of its own. Sloth and Despair will pile up heavy burdens on it so that it will lie in a sickly torpor while the needs of neighbour, the will of God, the call of Obedience and the rebuke of conscience pass it by. Finally, Envy and Pride urge it to float up to heights that are not its own, usurp the privileges and attributes of the Almighty, and when it is cozy in the delusion that it sits on His throne, to gaze down at the ants it once called its neighbours with derision and scorn.

Medicinal Gore

The purpose of this exercise is to foster a greater understanding of the nature and appeal of evil. A problem of some significance is that most people find the sins that they do not personally commit to be the most odious. We tend, furthermore, to find those that we have not even been tempted with to be unfathomable atrocities. On the other hand the ones that we do have problems with are the ones that we are most likely to think are not all that bad, and sometimes we will believe them not to be sins at all. It should be obvious that this attitude not only lacks humility and objectivity, but charity as well. In examining the variety of vices, the reasons why they are appealing in the first place, and the real harm that they cause, I hope to counteract these problems: to derive some measure of sympathy and charity for people whose sins are very different from our own, and to gain a greater self-knowledge, and a greater incentive to combat the vices to which we are personally subject.

 Even those who do a regular examination of conscience may have a tendency to pay excessive attention to sins that may not be amongst their most deeply ingrained habits, but which they personally find the most repugnant. In many cases this is serious problem – it is a well recognized fact that venial sin leads to mortal sin, especially when it becomes habitual, and there are numerous associations to be forged between the “invisible” vices that consistently slide past our spiritual radar, and the more serious sins that tend to drive us onto our knees in front of a priest.

Of course it can help to meditate on the Seven Deadly Sins as part of our examination of conscience, but even this can be seriously hampered when we have a limited knowledge of the smaller categories of vice that arise within each of these broad categories. Many of us think, for example, that we are not angry, or that we never get tempted with envy, because we think of them only in terms of their most stereotypical manifestations: we don't scream and yell and get violent, so we completely overlook our ability to hold a grudge; we don't feel ourselves turning green on account of our neighbours ass, yet fail to see that our love of gossip is founded in envy. These articles are designed, therefore, to help us discover our hidden sins, and to help destroy any false (and pride-inspiring) notions of our own mastery over the deadly seven. It will be gruesome at times. We will stare into the abyss, it may stare back at us, but it is all for a good cause.

Other Attempts to Impose Order on Chaos

The examination and categorization of evil has a long and illustrious history. A fourth century ascetical writer, Evagrius, put forth 8 “evil thoughts,” similar in many ways to the seven deadly sins that we are familiar with, except that he omits envy, splits sloth into despondency and dejection, and adds vainglory. In the sixth century, St. Gregory the Great provided the original list of seven deadly sins, folding dejection and despondency into “sadness” and grouping vainglory with pride. He also added envy, giving us the list that we are familiar with – excepting “sloth” which replaced sadness during the seventeenth century. St. John Climacus, writing in the sixth or seventh century, provides a list very similar to that of Evagrius, but omits dejection (presumably, like St. Gregory, he believed it to be part of despondency), but also supplies a further seven “dependent” vices, which he says are linked with the primary seven.

Climacus's system is relevant, because it represents an attempt to break down the traditional vices into their components – to reduce them from abstract terms like “anger” that suggest a very narrow interpretation, into much clearer and more concrete vices such as “slander.” In this series of articles, we will attempt to take that a little further – to break down the Deadly Sins into a catalogue of vices that, ideally, will cover all of the different varieties of evil, without descending into hair-splitting or trying to form an itemized list that actually covers every slight variation, shade and hue of sin in the world today.

Some of these writers attempted to rank their lists according to what were, they felt, the most serious sins. Evagrius thought that the severity of a vice was dependent on the degree to which it reflected a fixation on the self. He also attempted to reflect the normal development of the spiritual life in the composition of his list – thus the grosser material sins, such as lust and gluttony, are placed earlier in the list (and are seen as less serious); inward temptations such as despondency and anger are in the middle; while pride and vainglory are given the last and most grevious place. St. Gregory ranked them according to how severely they offended against Charity, and identified pride as the greatest sin, and the source of all others. Since then, however, most writers – including St. Thomas Aquinas – have agreed that, although pride certainly holds the top place in the list, the remainder cannot be ranked in this way. They are, however, often divided according to the faculties that they corrupt. Thus some writers would group together lust, gluttony and greed, because they appeal to man's appetites; anger and sloth because they effect our emotions; and pride and envy because they infect the intellect. St. Thomas points out that four of the seven – vainglory (pride), covetousness (greed), lust and gluttony – represent a disordered desire for natural goods, while the other three are prompted by an avoidance of some good for fear of an attendant evil. Thus, by sloth we avoid our own good for fear of effort, by envy we deny goods to other people for fear that we will be lessened in comparison, and by anger we try to prevent another's good in order to make retribution for some good we feel they have deprived us of.

Before we begin, it is important that we understand what, precisely a vice is, and how it differs from a sin and from a persistent temptation. For a specific sin to be present in someones life as a vice it must be a habitual pattern of sin – some evil committed or good omitted to which the will is disposed regularly. If it is something that it is only present infrequently than it is only isolated sin or temptation. If the will is not disposed to it then it is only persistent temptation. There are many cases in which people commit sins without them ever becoming vices. If you once stole a single trinket from a convenience store, just to see if you could get away with it, and then felt sufficiently guilt ridden afterward that you never stole anything again then you never had the vice of stealing but you did sin. It is also necessary that we recognize the difference between a vice and a persistent temptation. Often, when someone starts trying to figure out which of the Evils have the strongest hold over their life, they will be inclined to point to the one that they spend the most time battling – but if they are winning the battle then there may not be any vice. Saint Jerome was given such a hard time by the demons of lust that he frequently found it necessary to keep all-night vigils before the crucifix with his head in the dust or to beat his breast into a bloody pulp with stones, but he was by no means a wanton fornicator.

How Evil, Exactly?

While I do not wish to present a scheme for ranking the various categories of sin as they compare to each other, I would suggest that there are three basic levels of severity that each of the vices subject to them can attain. A natural good will become infected, develop imperfection and then start to progress through these 3 stages: Tempting, Common and Beastly. The first is the stage at which they are actually attractive to us – where we don't recognize them as Evils, or at least believe that they aren't sins in any serious way, and where we perceive them as being justified and even good. At this stage, there is nothing overtly ugly about the sin – at least from the perspective of the sinner – but it is at this stage that it is most easily weeded out, because it will not yet have had the chance to solidify into an ingrained pattern of behaviour.

As we move from the first stage towards the second, the degree to which the sin is actually appealing diminished, but our attachment for it increases. We have actually reached the second stage when the vice is in its most readily recognizable form: it has developed to the point where its ugliness is apparent, but where it takes substantial, concerted effort to actually eliminate it. For a Catholic, this should be what your confessing whenever you show up for the sacrament of penance. If you don't see how this applies to you I then I hope that my column will help clear that up. Failing that, send me your name and I'll notify the Vatican that you should be preemptively beatified. Ironically, whatever once made it appealing – its seeming innocence or even goodness – is almost entirely gone by this point, and we continue to do it almost from a sense of compulsion, or from the habitual assumption that we will get the same effect as we used to when the vice was still appealing. Someone mindlessly consuming their sixteenth piece of cheese-cake is not really deriving any pleasure from it, however, the fact that they are sticking it into their head has much to do with how much they enjoyed the first two. Another person, one who is a coward, will inflict untold psychological violence upon themselves with the splintery stake of anxiety rather than fulfill some trifle of an obligation that they feel uneasy about. A third, in this case one who makes themselves the plaything of the devils of Wrath may, with a forked tongue dripping venom, reduce his enemy to a puddle, but he will not feel vindicated and he will not be at peace. We continue, therefore, not because of the allure of the sin, but rather for fear of the consequences of avoiding it – a compulsive buyer may gain no particular pleasure from owning yet another expensive pair of shoes, but if they try to keep from buying them, the thought that they 'need to' will continue to insinuate itself into their thoughts, persistently, intrusively and unrelentingly until it seems far better to just give in to it just for the hope of a drop of relief.

We are unlikely to ever actually arrive at a full-blown third-stage vice, but with our most serious and deeply ingrained sins, we may start along the path from second degree to third. The third degree is where vice shows its true colours; it is the logical end-point of its development. At this point it is blatantly, repulsively hideous, to the point where it is absolutely inconceivable to anyone but the sinner who is so afflicted. To the person doing it, however, it comes to seem that it is not only excusable, but even necessary – whatever they are doing, it is sufficiently horrible that they can only go on doing it by means of an ironclad delusion that it is a 'good'. At its end point, the sin actually becomes an idol. It must, there is no other way to plunge to those depths but to adopt the same mentality as the infamous fallen angel who was there first and to call white black and black white. Mary Daly, who actually proposes that abortion is a sacrament, seems to have found her way there, also, the underground man in Dostoevsky's book Notes from Underground is a good example of what it is like to think in this way. In this stage of development, furthermore, the vice becomes the central concern of your life, and interferes with all other aspects of your daily existence. Just as the move from the first stage to the second includes, of necessity, increased attachment and the slow decay of the allure which drew us to the vice in the first place, moving from the second to the third involves a kind of surrender. You no longer see the ugliness of your vice and try to banish it from your life, instead you actively embrace it and formulate every possible justification in order to try to prevent yourself from seeing how ugly and destructive your activities really are. Thus the man who has alienated all other human beings by his unsufferable arrogance will claim that this is the price that must be paid for being the best, that those who want to breathe the cool, clean air of the mountain tops must accept that they will find those precipitous summits rather bereft of human company. The man obsessed with suicide will begin to claim that the “right” to self-termination is the ultimate liberation, or that human beings are a sort of cancer on the earth and have a responsibility to self-annihilation. Another person, one who is already very much broken and can only really conceive of goodness in very personal terms and therefore does not expect to rally anyone else to their banner, might see the 'good' in their abominations in purely selfish terms, but they will still project that trait onto whichever monster has their soul in its jaws.

The last important distinction to be made is between the different forms that a given vice may take in the lives of different individuals. Specifically, I believe it is useful for us to think in terms of the Christian and the non-Christian manifestations the vices. When Saint John Climacus writes about the vices they are not abstract fabrications of man that give us the necessary vocabulary to examine our conscience, on the contrary, they are demons that crawl out of Hell to destroy us. If a vice, Slander, for example is not a category or a tool but a malignant entity waging war against goodness, and its individual characteristics do not originate in the traits proper to its definition but in its personality, then it is perfectly natural to think that it would not tempt a Christian in the same way that it would a heathen or an apostate.

In the next issue, we will actually start our analysis of vice. We will attempt to trace each one from its mock-humble beginnings as an innocent little indulgence, through its typical development, and down into the deepest abyss of its ultimate descent. We must, however, make this journey in a spirit of humility – it's purpose is introspection and solidarity with other sinners. If it becomes nothing more than an opportunity to be proud of the sins we do not commit, or to point out with greater poignancy the faults of others, then it will not only have failed in its purpose, but will present a stumbling block to our growth in faith. In the hopes, therefore, of thwarting any such self-congratulation, we will begin our analysis at the beginning and summit of all vice: we will begin with the insidious viper Pride.
 

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