The Seven Sins

Is the twenty-first century really a time when we can talk about sin? Is sin necessarily something that reflects a religious world-view, or might it be a fundamental psychological dynamic that has profound meaning in terms of our compulsions, our struggles with our own tendencies toward destructiveness, and our efforts to contribute something creative to life?

The concept of the Seven Cardinal Sins is a very ancient one, and long predates what we now think of in Western cultures as a medieval and grossly outdated list of offences against the dictates of religious orthodoxy. If we are to understand within a psychological framework what it might mean to sin, and what kind of profoundly complex and potentially transformative themes underpin older and often highly misleading interpretations, we will need to look more deeply at each of the Cardinal Sins and its expressions in individual character and life.

The challenges of the Seven Sins don’t disappear with age, nor lessen with experience. What can change at any time in life, with effort and inner exploration, is our consciousness, and our capacity to recognise the subtle ways in which our inner compulsions can impel us to express the very best as well as the very worst within us.

The first Cardinal Sin is Envy. In Latin they called it 'Invidia'. Envy is not as simple as just wishing you had something someone else has, or wishing for qualities you see in another person but feel that you yourself lack.

Envy has to do with your capacity to accept certain limitations on the ways in which you build the foundations of your self-confidence; if you can work with those limitations rather than ignoring them, then Envy can provide the bricks and mortar that help you to feel you have firm ground to stand on throughout life.

The Fifth Cardinal Sin is Lust. This sin was called 'Luxuria' in the medieval Christian world, and it was related to sexual desire and what was known as voluptuousness: unbridled sensuality. Times have changed since then, and Lust is hardly viewed as a sin these days in Western cultures.

In older texts, Lust was also called 'Inappropriate Longing', revealing another, subtler, yet extremely important dimension of Lust: desiring that which one has no right to desire. And if we can begin to understand what constitutes 'inappropriate longing' for each individual, Lust might turn out to be an immensely creative force; for what we cannot possess in the outer world, we can nourish in the inner, and discover in the process a profound experience of joy.

Deceit, the Sixth of the Cardinal Sins, was known as 'Avaritia' in Latin. The term Deceit, usually referred to as Avarice in medieval descriptions of the Sins, is based on a much older text that calls it 'the machinations of evil cunning'.

The sin of Deceit is neither simple lying nor simple greed. It is the urge to use trickery, and can accompany a sense of superiority because successful perpetrators of Deceit believe that they are cleverer than other people and therefore entitled to dupe them. Yet the acute intelligence, perspicacity, subtlety, and depth that successful Deceit requires could also, if combined with integrity and compassion, generate something we might call Worldly Wisdom.

The Seven Sins have always been a powerful metaphor for the ways in which humans 'go wrong' in life. The Sins began as a story of the planetary journey of the soul into incarnation, but they were appropriated and given a particular moral slant by religious authorities, and have remained deep in human consciousness as impulses that, even in this apparently liberal twenty-first century, still have the power to make us feel bad about ourselves.

In an era when deeper questions about the meaning and nature of life have been given definitive answers by science, sociology, and politics, it might be important to remember that the word 'sin', albeit abused by so many religious doctrines, means 'injury' or 'transgression': an injury against the unfolding patterns of life itself. Yet the Seven Sins are also very much more. Each of them conceals an immensely creative human impulse. If we are prepared to understand their roots rather than simply indulging in an orgy of guilty self-loathing, they could help us to fulfil the highest potentials of which we are capable.