Seven were the sins—pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth —that the early Christian theologians labeled capital, or deadly, on the ground that they led to the commission of other offenses against God.* For most 20th century men, the list seems a trifle quaint. In a world where millions are hungry because there is too little food, and millions more because they are dieting, gluttony, for example, takes on certain ironies.
To investigate the current state of these fine old sins, London's Sunday Times recently commissioned essays on them from a septet of England's wiliest, wittiest penmen. Nontheologians all, the Sunday Times sin samplers range from longtime agnostic and Critic Cyril Connolly, whose report on covetousness is a jaunty little tale of how a greedy antique collector comes to a Bad End, to Roman Catholic Poetess Dame Edith Sitwell, who rather admired the sin assigned to her. "Pride may be my own besetting sin," she wrote, "but it is also my besetting virtue. Certainly my life has been spent in saying 'Ha ha among the trumpets.' " Among the other contributions, published in the U.S. this week as The Seven Deadly Sins (Morrow; $3.50):
∙ ENVY, writes Novelist Angus (Anglo-Saxon Attitudes) Wilson, is perhaps the dourest of sins, since "it knows no gratification save endless self-torment." Wilson finds the Green Evil everywhere, and suggests it is becoming more prevalent as examinations, from college boards to corporate psychological tests, determine who is up and who is down in life. Writers and actors are notoriously liable to envy and "ambitious clergymen, service officers and shop stewards appear to suffer most." But perhaps the most obnoxious form of the sin today is Western Europe's pervasive anti-Americanism. "There are grievances against America which deserve consideration from everyone," says Wilson. "But anti-Americanism is quite another thing; it is an impotent envy which does nothing but disgrace the speaker. Hear a group of rich, beleaguered French or Italian or Spanish describing the necessity for a civilized Europe where American barbarism cannot interfere. There are few more nauseating sounds in the modern world.''
∙ SLOTH, which St. Thomas defined as "sadness in the face of spiritual good/' is very much present in modern novels and plays, writes Evelyn Waugh. It is personified by the man who lost his faith "as though faith were an extraneous possession like an umbrella, which can be inadvertently left behind in a railway-carriage." Waugh also argues that a sin closely allied to sloth, pigritia (slackness), is gaining: people have "'no time' to read or cook or even to dress decorously, while in their offices and workshops they do less and less, in quality and quantity. for ever larger wages with which to pay larger taxes for services that diminish in quantity and quality."