From “Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human” by Guy Leschziner
It was Pope Gregory I in 590 CE who revised the deadly sins into the more familiar Seven Deadly Sins format – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, warth, envy, and pride. Saint Thomas Aquinas described them as ‘capital sins’, the foundations of all other sins. These immoral thoughts and actions were the basis of all our contraventions of the laws of God and man.
It is not just the Judeo-Christian world that has been preoccupied with sin, and its classification and categorisation, however. So too have all the other world religions, and indeed theologies now extinct, such as Greek and Roman mythologies. These human failings also fascinated the ancient philosophers, from Plato and his tripartite view of the soul – reason, desire and emotion, all competing to influence our behavior – to the Stoics, who proposed the abandonment of worldly pursuits in the search for freedom and happiness.
That this theological and philosophical concern with sin is so universal, transcending time, geography and culture, simply reflects that these thoughts and acts are ubiquitous too. These sins are hard-wired within us, deeply embedded in the recesses of our brains or the essence of our souls. And that they have had such profound influence over human history, and indeed the organisational structures of our societies today, hints at their dualistic nature – that these ‘sins’ may have benefits as well. For it these behaviours were solely agents of harm, why should they be the weft of the tapestry of who we are? What possible reason would there be for such destructive traits to be passed down through the generations, to persist throughout the evolution of life as we know it?