This is the free study guide for our free booklet, Our Sins and Ourselves.
There is a great dilemma in the Christian life: we know what we should do, but we don’t really want to do it…or, just as often, we know what we shouldn’t do, but we really want to do that! This is the apostle Paul’s problem in Romans 9, where he laments, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (7:19, NRSVUE).
Lists of sins, vices and transgressions are limited in the Bible. Aside from the “thou shalt nots” (as well as the “thou shalts”) of the Ten Commandments, one of the most extensive lists is the works of the flesh in Galatians 5, with its list of selfish and divisive acts ending with “and things like these” (5:21; cf. Rm 1:29–31). In the fourth century, a monk named Evagrius created a list of eight “evil thoughts” that could distract and corrupt monks; this list formed the basis for the “eight principal faults” of the Desert Father John Cassian. These faults were further systematized in the sixth century by Gregory the Great into seven principal sins—vain glory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony and lust—all stemming from the “queen of sins,” pride. Notice how the “chain” of sin works: we become increasingly self-centered and self-absorbed, and we then close ourselves off from the love of God and others. The process becomes circular, because turning our attention inward harms our relations with others, which drives us further inward, and on and on it goes in a cascade of degradation. This is why we can see these sins as “deadly sins,” with their corrosive effect on our soul as we move further and further away from true love.
This corrosive effect can easily be seen in greed where, as Clement of Alexandria says, possessing all the wealth in the universe would still leave the greedy person feeling poor. This life, “which crawls on its belly is destitute of dignity, is scandalous, hateful, ridiculous.”
The Shepherd of Hermas and Cyprian of Carthage expand our focus by seeing precisely how certain sins corrode our relationships with God and others. James tells us, “Human anger does not produce God’s righteousness” (1:20, NRSVUE); The Shepherd agrees, saying “anger is foolish, and fickle, and senseless.” Still more, anger causes us to be “emptied of the righteous Spirit”—it can deeply harm our relationship with God, leaving a person with “a complete darkness in his mind as to everything good.” Jealousy—itself an unholy combination of greed and anger—likewise destroys our relationships with others. Cyprian therefore hammers home, “When jealousy darkens our perceptions, and reduces the secret agencies of the mind under its command, the fear of God is despised, the teaching of Christ is neglected…By this the bond of the Lord’s peace is broken; by this is violated brotherly charity; by this truth is adulterated, unity is divided.”
The booklet concludes with a piece about pride, the “queen of sins.” Piers Plowman, a 14th-century allegorical poem about the true Christian life, and how it is affected by virtue and vice. The section on pride emphasizes the self-centeredness of the sin, with every line focusing on “I,” “me” and “my.”
