seven deadly sins

According to Roman Catholic theology, the seven deadly sins are the seven behaviours or feelings that inspire further sin. They are typically ordered as: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth. 

The Christian ascetic Evagrius Ponticus outlined eight—not seven—cardinal sins in the 4th century CE. Evagrius’s influential pupil John Cassian expounded on his list in the 5th century. Borrowing from this tradition, Pope Gregory I analyzed the cardinal sins in his authoritative 6th-century text Moralia and trimmed their number to seven.

The seven deadly sins were first enumerated—then eight in total—by the Christian ascetic Evagrius Ponticus in the 4th century CE. His work articulated a monastic consensus rooted in Hellenistic cosmology, which identified seven or eight planets that were guarded by corresponding aerial spirits. By Evagrius’s time these unorthodox influences had largely been eliminated. 

The earliest Christians did not understand the seven cardinal sins to be deadly. The first Church Fathers and their rabbinical counterparts thought that certain sins, unrelated to the cardinal sins and drawn from the Ten Commandments, condemned the soul to eternal damnation. The deadly and the cardinal became conflated during the early Middle Ages through the sacrament of penance.

St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy are perhaps the best-known examples of medieval Italian thought on the seven deadly sins. In medieval England, Geoffrey Chaucer ended The Canterbury Tales with a discussion of the sins. Since the Middle Ages the concept has inspired countless works of literature, art, music, and film.