The Eight Principal Vices (Books 5–12)

Books 5 through 12 of St. John Cassian’s Institutes form a systematic spiritual therapeutics: each book diagnoses one of the eight principal vices (octo principalia vitia) — gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, dejection, acedia, vainglory, and pride — and prescribes its cure. Cassian transmits to the Latin West the scheme of the eight logismoi developed in the Greek desert by Evagrius Ponticus, supplying the bridge by which this Eastern psychology of temptation entered Western spirituality. Two centuries later Pope Gregory the Great reworked the eight into the seven capital sins of the medieval West; this file traces the ordering, the Egyptian-Evagrian source, and that later transformation.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; transmitter of Egyptian monasticism to the West)

The Plan: A Physician of the Soul

Having regulated the outward life of the monk in Books 1–4 (see The Coenobitic Rule), Cassian devotes the second and larger part of the Institutes to the inner warfare. Books 5–12 each take up one of the eight principal vices in turn, describing its nature, the temptations through which it works, its offspring or attendant sins, and its remedy. Cassian approaches the vices as a physician approaches diseases: he insists that one must understand the particular character of each passion, its causes and its symptoms, before the right medicine can be applied, and that the vices are linked in a chain, each generating the next, so that the cure of one depends on the cure of those before it (Cassian, Institutes 5.1, 5.10–11; trans. Ramsey, ACW 58). The whole forms a coherent treatise on what the desert tradition called the logismoi — the eight kinds of tempting thought that assail the monk and from which all sins arise.

The proximate aim of this warfare is puritas cordis, purity of heart (Matthew 5:8), which Cassian, following his desert teachers, names as the goal toward which all ascetic effort is directed, with the Kingdom of Heaven as its final end (Cassian, Conferences 1.4–7; see Prayer and Purity of Heart). The eight books on the vices are thus the negative side of a single project whose positive side is the purification of the heart for the vision of God.

The Eight Vices in Order

Cassian states the list and its order plainly at the head of Book 5: “There are eight principal vices that attack the human race,” and he enumerates them (Cassian, Institutes 5.1; trans. Ramsey). The twelve books assign one vice to each of Books 5 through 12, in this fixed sequence:

Book 5 — Gluttony (De spiritu gastrimargiae; Greek gastrimargia): the disordered appetite for food, treated first because the monk’s combat begins with the belly; Cassian gives extended practical teaching on fasting, the discernment of true bodily need, and the danger of both excess and ostentatious abstinence (Cassian, Institutes 5.1–23).
Book 6 — Fornication (De spiritu fornicationis): unchastity in act and in thought, which Cassian treats as bound up with gluttony, since the unrestrained belly inflames lust; he stresses that this vice is conquered not by bodily effort alone but by the grace of God together with humility of heart (Cassian, Institutes 6.1–23).
Book 7 — Avarice / love of money (De spiritu filargyriae; Greek philargyria): the love of money, which Cassian, following Scripture, calls “the root of all evils” (1 Timothy 6:10) and which he treats as an unnatural passion, not arising from any need implanted in human nature but invading the soul from without (Cassian, Institutes 7.1–3, 7.7).
Book 8 — Anger (De spiritu irae; ira): wrath, which Cassian says must be uprooted utterly, for the angry monk cannot see clearly nor pray, and the light of discernment is darkened in him (Cassian, Institutes 8.1, 8.6–7; cf. Matthew 5:22).
Book 9 — Dejection / sadness (De spiritu tristitiae; tristitia): destructive sorrow or gloom, which eats away at the soul and must be distinguished from the godly sorrow that works repentance (Cassian, Institutes 9.1–13; cf. 2 Corinthians 7:10).
Book 10 — Acedia (De spiritu acediae; Greek akēdia): listlessness, weariness, or dejection of the heart — the subtlest and most dangerous of the monk’s afflictions, treated at length below (Cassian, Institutes 10.1–25).
Book 11 — Vainglory (De spiritu cenodoxiae; Greek kenodoxia, Latin vana gloria): empty self-display, which Cassian calls the most subtle of the vices because it attacks the monk precisely through his virtues, and because, when beaten back, it returns disguised as humility (Cassian, Institutes 11.1–4).
Book 12 — Pride (De spiritu superbiae; superbia): self-exaltation, the last and gravest, “the most savage of all the vices,” which Cassian places at the summit because it overthrew even an angel and because it is the contrary of the humility that is the foundation of every virtue (Cassian, Institutes 12.1–8; cf. Isaiah 14:12–14; James 4:6).

Cassian groups the eight into the carnal and the spiritual: the first vices (gluttony, fornication, and in part avarice) work chiefly through the body and its needs, while the latter (anger, dejection, acedia, vainglory, pride) are properly of the soul; and he describes a generative chain among them, in which gluttony feeds fornication, the two open the door to avarice, and so on up to pride (Cassian, Institutes 5.1, 5.10; Conferences 5.10; Stewart 1998, 62–65). The ordering is not arbitrary: it runs from the grossest and most external passion to the most interior and spiritual, ending with pride, which is at once the root and the crown of all the rest.

Acedia: The Noonday Demon

Book 10, on acedia, is Cassian’s most original and influential single treatment, and the one for which this part of the Institutes is best remembered. Acedia — a Greek loanword (akēdia, literally “lack of care”) that Latin had to borrow because it had no equivalent — names a complex of weariness, boredom, restlessness, and despondency that besets the monk especially in the solitude of his cell. Cassian describes its symptoms with a psychological precision that has been admired ever since: a horror of the place and a disgust with the cell, a contempt for the brethren, a restless urge to be elsewhere, a heaviness that makes the monk drowsy and listless, and a thousand pretexts for leaving his work and his prayer (Cassian, Institutes 10.2–4; trans. Ramsey).

Cassian fixes the vice to a particular hour and, through a particular verse, to a name. He identifies acedia with the “noonday demon” of the Psalter — daemonium meridianum, “the destruction that wastes at noonday” — for it assails the monk most fiercely in the middle of the day, when hunger, heat, and the long hours stretching ahead conspire to crush his resolve (Cassian, Institutes 10.1; citing Psalm 90:6 LXX [= Psalm 91:6 in the Hebrew numbering]). The remedy he prescribes is, characteristically, not flight but stability and manual labor: the monk must not leave his cell but remain in it, working with his hands, for Cassian quotes the Apostle’s rule that “if anyone will not work, neither shall he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) and recounts at length the Egyptian conviction that steady labor anchors the soul against the wandering and despondency that acedia breeds (Cassian, Institutes 10.7–24; cf. 2 Thessalonians 3:6–12). The treatment of acedia is thus the meeting-point of Cassian’s outward and inward teaching: the bodily discipline of work in the cell is the medicine for the deepest disease of the monastic soul.

The Evagrian Source

The scheme of eight principal vices was not Cassian’s invention. It descends from the eight logismoi — the eight kinds of evil thought — set out by Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399), the learned monk of the Egyptian desert of Kellia whose writings systematized the spiritual psychology of the Origenist circles of Lower Egypt. Evagrius’s list (in his Praktikos and On the Eight Thoughts) runs: gluttony, fornication, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and pride — the same eight Cassian transmits, with only a difference in the order of sadness, anger, and acedia (Evagrius, Praktikos 6; Stewart 1998, 62; Chadwick 1968, 94–95). Cassian had lived in the same Egyptian milieu, at Scetis and Kellia, in the years before the Origenist controversy scattered its monks, and he carried its teaching west (see Among the Desert Fathers of Egypt).

Yet Cassian never once names Evagrius. The reason is generally understood to be the cloud that fell over Evagrius’s reputation: as a leading exponent of the Origenist speculation condemned in the controversies of 399–400 and, definitively, at the Fifth Ecumenical Council (Constantinople II, 553), Evagrius became a dangerous name to invoke, and Cassian — who transmits the desert’s ascetic psychology while quietly dropping its controversial metaphysics — preserves the framework of the eight thoughts and the goal of purity of heart without its compromised author (Stewart 1998, 11, 36–39; Chadwick 1968, 94–96). [Disputed: the degree of Cassian's direct, textual dependence on Evagrius (as against a shared Lower-Egyptian desert tradition that both men drew on independently) is debated; Stewart (1998, 36–39, 62–65) and Chadwick (1968, 82–96) both affirm a real Evagrian background to the eight vices and to purity of heart, while differing on how much Cassian read Evagrius directly versus absorbing the scheme orally from common teachers such as the monks of Scetis, and on how much Cassian reshaped the list for a Latin and coenobitic audience.] Cassian’s own contribution lies less in the bare list than in its pastoral and practical elaboration for Western, communal monasticism, and in welding the diagnosis of the vices to the regulated coenobitic discipline of Books 1–4.

From Eight to Seven: Gregory the Great

The most consequential afterlife of Cassian’s scheme was its transformation, roughly two centuries later, into the list of capital sins that the medieval and modern West would know. Pope Gregory the Great (Gregory I, d. 604), in his vast Moralia in Job (composed in the 580s–590s), reworked the eightfold scheme he had inherited — Cassian being its principal Latin channel — into a list of seven principal vices flowing from a single root (Gregory, Moralia in Job 31.45; Bloomfield 1952, 72–75; Stewart 1998, 62, with notes).

Gregory’s reformulation made several changes that together produced the familiar Western “seven deadly sins”:

He set pride (superbia) apart as the root and queen of all the vices — the source from which the rest spring — rather than counting it as one item in a horizontal list; the seven are then ranged as the offspring of pride (Gregory, Moralia 31.45; Bloomfield 1952, 72–73).
He folded vainglory into pride, collapsing Cassian’s two final and closely related vices (cenodoxia and superbia) into one.
He added envy (invidia), which had not stood as a separate head in Cassian’s eight, giving the new scheme its full number.
He reordered the list, and his sequence (variously given, e.g., vainglory/pride, envy, anger, sadness, avarice, gluttony, lust) reflects a different rationale from Cassian’s carnal-to-spiritual progression.

The result — most often later enumerated as pride, envy, anger, sloth (acedia/tristitia merged), avarice, gluttony, and lust — became the standard catechetical list of the Latin Middle Ages, expounded by Thomas Aquinas and dramatized by Dante, and it is this Gregorian seven, not Cassian’s eight, that the popular phrase “the seven deadly sins” denotes (Bloomfield 1952, 69–104).

It is worth stating plainly what changed and what did not. The Eastern Orthodox ascetic tradition has continued to work with the older fuller scheme of the eight logismoi — the framework Cassian transmitted and which runs through Evagrius, St. John Climacus, St. Maximus the Confessor, and the Philokalia (see St. John Climacus; St. Isaac the Syrian). The Western seven is a later reshaping of that Eastern inheritance. [Disputed: how much of the standard "seven deadly sins" lineage is due to Gregory's deliberate revision as against gradual scholastic systematization is discussed by Bloomfield (1952, esp. 69–104), who traces the long and untidy medieval development of the list and cautions against treating Gregory's chapter as a single decisive legislative act; cf. Stewart (1998, 62) and Chadwick (1968, 94–95) on the Evagrius→Cassian→Gregory chain.]

The Enduring Form

Cassian’s books on the eight vices proved among the most durable parts of his legacy. St. Benedict of Nursia absorbed the diagnostic-therapeutic approach to the passions and the centrality of humility and obedience as their cure (see Influence on Benedict; St. Benedict of Nursia), and through Benedict and Gregory the analysis of the vices became part of the common moral theology of the West (see Cassian as Translator of the Desert; Church Fathers). In the East the same eightfold scheme, with its goal of purity of heart and unceasing prayer, fed directly into the hesychast tradition and the practice of watchfulness over the logismoi (see Purity of Heart and Hesychasm; The Jesus Prayer). In Cassian the two streams meet: he is the single figure through whom the Egyptian desert’s psychology of temptation reached the Latin West intact, and he remains, for Orthodox and Western Christians alike, the great transmitter of the analysis of the eight passions.

References

Cassian, John. The Institutes. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58. New York: Newman Press, 2000. (Translation, introduction, and notes; the list of the eight vices and their chain at 5.1, 5.10–11; gluttony in Book 5; fornication, Book 6; avarice as unnatural passion, Book 7; anger, Book 8; dejection, Book 9; acedia and the noonday demon at 10.1–4 and the remedy of labor at 10.7–24; vainglory, Book 11; pride, Book 12.)
Cassian, John. The Conferences. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. (Conference 1 on purity of heart as skopos; Conference 5, “On the Eight Principal Vices,” the parallel treatment and the generative chain of the passions.)
The Works of John Cassian. Trans. Edgar C. S. Gibson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1894. (Public-domain English translation of the Institutes and Conferences, web-checkable verification anchor.)
Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer. Trans. John Eudes Bamberger. Cistercian Studies 4. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1972. (The eight logismoi; Praktikos 6 and following.)
Stewart, Columba. Cassian the Monk. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (On the eight vices, the Evagrian background, Cassian’s silence on Evagrius, purity of heart, and the Cassian→Gregory development.)
Chadwick, Owen. John Cassian. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. (On the Evagrian sources, the eight vices, and Cassian’s relation to the Origenist desert.)
Bloomfield, Morton W. The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept. East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1952. (On Gregory the Great’s reformulation, the eight-to-seven transition, and the medieval development of the capital-sins scheme.)
Gregory the Great. Moralia in Job 31.45. (The reduction and reordering of the principal vices, with pride as their root and the substitution of envy.)