The Seven Deadly Sins

Lust (Latin, Cupidita), or lechery, is usually thought of as excessive thoughts or desires of a sexual nature. Dante’s criterion was excessive love of others, which therefore rendered love and devotion to God as secondary.

Derived from the Latin gluttire, meaning to gulp down or swallow, gluttony (Latin, gula) is the over-indulgence and over-consumption of anything to the point of waste. In the Christian religions, it is considered a sin because of the excessive desire for food, or its withholding from the needy.

Greed (Latin, avaritia), also known as avarice or covetousness, is, like lust and gluttony, a sin of excess. However, greed (as seen by the church) is applied to the acquisition of wealth in particular. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that greed was “a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things.”

Sloth is defined as spiritual and/or actual apathy, putting off what God asks you to do, or not doing it or anything at all. Acedia is a Latin word, from Greek akedia, literally meaning “absence of caring”. Acedia is also deemed to lead to God’s wrath. Sloth can also concern wasting due to lack of use or allowing entropy, expanding into almost any person, place, thing, skills, or intangible ideal that would require maintenance, refinement and/or support to continue to exist.

In many religions vanity, in its modern sense, is considered a form of self-idolatry, in which one rejects God for the sake of one’s own image, and thereby becomes divorced from the graces of God. The stories of Lucifer, Narcissus and others attend to a pernicious aspect of vanity. 

Like greed, Envy (Latin, invidia) may be characterized by an insatiable desire; they differ, however, for two main reasons. Those who commit the sin of envy resent that another person has something they perceive themselves as lacking, and wish the other person to be deprived of it. Dante defined this as “love of one’s own good perverted to a desire to deprive other men of theirs.”