Vices

35 entries. Click any to see everything it connects to.

The vices are the faults the moral traditions name and warn against. This category holds the seven deadly sins of Christian teaching (pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth), each recorded with its Latin name, its traditional demon, and the virtue it is set against. The list has changed over time: it descends from Evagrius Ponticus's eight thoughts by way of Gregory the Great's revision. Each entry gives the sin as the tradition names it and the reason it is held to be harmful.

Facts

Overview

Entries in the Atlas: 35
What Defines This Grouping: Faults a tradition names and warns against, given in its own list with the reason it holds them harmful. The lists are not equivalents: the Latin capital vices are a catalogue of sins ordered by gravity, while the Buddhist and yogic kleshas are an analysis of what obstructs the mind, and neither is a translation of the other. 1
Size of the Traditional Set: Seven capital vices in the Latin Christian list fixed by Gregory the Great 2

Origins

Whose Classification This Is: The familiar seven are Latin Christian. Evagrius Ponticus listed eight evil thoughts in the late fourth century, John Cassian carried them west, and Gregory the Great reduced and reordered them to seven around 590. The list went on moving through the Middle Ages before settling into its modern form. It is not a universal scheme. 3

Sources

Encyclopedia of Religion Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), 2005
Moralia in Job Gregory the Great, bk. XXXI
The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature Morton W. Bloomfield, 1952

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The Faults the Traditions Warn Against

This category holds the vices, the faults that moral and spiritual traditions name and warn against. It gathers the seven deadly sins of Christian teaching: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth, each with its Latin name and the demon later tradition attached to it.

Each entry gives a vice in the terms the tradition names it, the reason it is held to be harmful, and, where the tradition draws the pairing, the virtue set against it.

How traditions count them

The seven deadly sins themselves went through several forms before settling into the familiar list: the Western scheme descends from the eight thoughts of Evagrius Ponticus, revised by Gregory the Great into the seven, and the ordering by seriousness varied from one authority to another. The entries note these shifts rather than presenting the list as fixed.

The vices connect to the virtues, with which the tradition pairs them, and to the demons that later writers assigned to each. The virtues set against them are treated in their own category.