From movies like David Fincher’s “Se7en” to the green color of the “enviable” female M&M’s candy, the “seven deadly sins” remain in the heart of our culture despite their historic roots.
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Richard Spence, University of Idaho history department chair, said the modern conception of the “seven sins” — pride, avarice, lust, anger, gluttony, envy and sloth — started in the sixth century and was popularized in the 13th.
Other cultures have forbidden particular items, and these can have similarities with the “seven sins.” Ancient Israel had the “10 Commandments,” and the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament discusses “six things which the LORD hates,” including “haughty eyes” and “feet that run rapidly to evil.”
Spence said a tenant of Buddhism is that desire and craving lead people astray and the “seven sins” can be understood in terms of similar desire.
Spence said our culture often encourages escape from taboos and limitations.
“The general argument is (that is) positive because (it’s) all about a kind of grand procession of human liberation,” he said. “The more things we free ourselves from, the more enlightened we become.”
He said this idea runs against another notion we’ve had since at least the French Revolution, that a certain amount of restriction protects us from the corrupting elements of human nature. Homicide can often be traced to greed, pride or anger.
History professor Ellen Kittell teaches courses on the medieval church and the Reformation. She said medieval Europe was an environment of great faith with various opinions that were difficult to pin down. The “seven sins” were likely codified in Council of Trent in the 13th century, and more clearly understood after the 16th century Reformation.
“That’s one thing that’s really pretty interesting about them, is that they are amorphous cultural aspects that don’t get nailed down until later,” Kittell said.
Such codification shouldn’t be confused with invention, she said, as people were merely labeling things that were already understood in some sense.
She said perspectives of the “seven sins” have varied between their absolute nature and the nature people ascribe to them through personal experiences. Avarice can be something that a person’s traits reflect to a small or large degree, or one’s personal definition can assign it qualities mostly characteristic of corporate executives. She said most people reference their own experience to define the “seven sins,” whether influenced by media or other people.
She said the codification of the “seven sins” points to the stability of medieval society that allowed people time to ask such moral questions. As the 14th century brought conflict, plague and famine, the definitions broadened and took on more colorful characteristics as people tried to make sense of the chaos.
She said the “seven sins” are useful for categorization, and our penchant for organizing and personalizing information is no different now than in the past.
“In many ways we (assign personal traits to) these impulses, these appetites,” she said. “We are no different than the people in the 12th century or in (probably) the 36th century … where we want to be able to handle this information in an image or fashion or word, because it’s organizing information.”
Spence said our culture’s fixation with “depression” might be a similar process of categorization. In an effort to make sense of the perceived letdown of the supposed “sexual liberation” that began in the 1960s and ‘70s, people have prescribed the name “depression” to the problem and numerous medications to fix it.
Spence said concepts like the “seven sins” can help societies restrain what they see as wrong to enable a pursuit of happiness. But he doesn’t think people now are more “depressed” than they’ve been historically, and he hasn’t seen any civilizations become “happier” than others.
Spence said human nature hasn’t changed through the centuries, despite our inventions and adaptations.
“As old school, fire-and-brimstone potpourri as (the sins) sound, (they) still have a certain amount of resonance (because) we can’t say that anger, greed and sloth have gone away,” he said. “Whether they’re deadly or not, all of those things are … a part of us collectively (and) individually, and we are no better at figuring out exactly how we will deal with them than we were at the beginning. And they won’t go away.”
Matt Maw can be reached at [email protected]