The Eight Thoughts and the Seven Sins

The genealogy of the most famous list in ascetic literature, stated exactly because it is so often garbled. The eight generic thoughts are Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 6. They reached the Latin West through St. John Cassian, in Institutes V–XII and Conferences 5. St. Gregory the Great reorganized them in Moralia in Job XXXI.45 into the seven that became the Western capital vices — and what he actually did is not what the popular account says he did. The East kept the eight and never made them a doctrine of “deadly sins”.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Evagrius: The Eight Generic Thoughts

The list appears in the sixth chapter of the Praktikos:

“There are eight general and basic categories of thoughts in which are included every thought. First is that of gluttony, then impurity, avarice, sadness, anger, acedia, vainglory, and last of all, pride.” (Evagrius, Praktikos 6; trans. John Eudes Bamberger, Cistercian Studies 4, Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972.)

In Greek: γαστριμαργία (gluttony), πορνεία (unchastity), φιλαργυρία (avarice), λύπη (dejection), ὀργή (anger), ἀκηδία (listlessness), κενοδοξία (vainglory), ὑπερηφανία (pride).

Two features of the list are deliberate and are lost when it is quoted as a bare enumeration.

It is a classification of thoughts, not of sins. Evagrius is naming the eight genera under which every tempting suggestion can be filed, so that the monk who is being attacked can identify what is attacking him and apply the right remedy. The eight are diagnostic categories, and the Antirrhetikos supplies a different arsenal of scriptural replies for each (see What a Thought Is and the Stages of Assent).

The order is an argument. It runs from the most bodily to the most spiritual, and Evagrius’ chapters following the list (Praktikos 7–14) treat each in turn. The three appetitive thoughts come first because they are the grossest and are met first; anger, dejection, and listlessness occupy the middle because they attack the monk who has already given up the obvious pleasures; vainglory and pride come last because they attack precisely the man who has succeeded. That the list ends with pride is the point of the sequence: spiritual progress does not remove the danger but changes it, and the final temptation is the temptation of the advanced. Evagrius notes that vainglory and pride follow the defeat of the other thoughts rather than preceding it.

Evagrius gives the eight elsewhere with variations in order and emphasis (On the Eight Thoughts; On Thoughts), and he does not present the number as revealed. It is a working taxonomy, and this collection treats it as such.

Cassian: The Transmission to the West

St. John Cassian (c. 360–435) had lived among the monks of Egypt and knew the Evagrian tradition at first hand. Settled at Marseilles, he wrote in Latin for Gallic monasteries, and in doing so carried the desert’s ascetic analysis into the Western tradition.

The eight appear twice in his corpus. The Institutes devote eight books — V through XII — to them one by one, each with its causes and its remedies, under the title De octo principalibus vitiis: gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, dejection, acedia, vainglory, and pride. And Conference 5, attributed to Abba Serapion, sets out the same eight with an analysis of how they generate one another (Cassian, The Institutes V–XII, trans. Boniface Ramsey, Ancient Christian Writers 58, New York: Newman Press, 2000; The Conferences 5, trans. Ramsey, ACW 57, 1997; see The Desert Fathers: Cassian and the Desert in the West).

Cassian’s version differs from Evagrius’ in two respects worth recording.

He alters the order. Evagrius has dejection (λύπη) fourth and anger (ὀργή) fifth in the Praktikos enumeration; Cassian gives anger fourth and dejection fifth. The difference is not doctrinal but it shows that the sequence was already being handled as a pedagogical rather than a fixed scheme.

He classifies them by mode. Cassian divides the eight according to whether they require the body to be enacted — gluttony and fornication being consummated in bodily act, avarice, anger, dejection, acedia, vainglory, and pride operating without it — and according to whether they arise from within or are provoked from outside. This is the beginning of the “bodily and mental passions” division that St. John Climacus and later Greek writers use (see The Catalogue and the Chief Passions).

Cassian’s influence in the West was secured by St. Benedict, whose Rule directs that Cassian’s Conferences and Institutes be read in the monastery and names him among the authors who lead a monk to perfection (Rule of St. Benedict 42 and 73). Cassian is also received in the East: an abridged Greek version of his teaching on the eight vices and on discernment stands in the Philokalia of 1782, addressed to Bishop Castor, so that the Latin transmitter of the Egyptian tradition returned to Greek readers as a Philokalic author (The Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1979: “St John Cassian: On the Eight Vices” and “On the Holy Fathers of Sketis and on Discrimination”).

Gregory the Great: What He Actually Did

The seven capital vices of the Western tradition derive from St. Gregory the Great’s treatment in the Moralia in Job, Book XXXI, chapter 45. What Gregory did there is regularly misdescribed, and the correction matters because the misdescription is repeated in Orthodox as well as Western writing.

Gregory does not produce a list of seven by merging vainglory into pride. What he does is this:

  • He makes pride (superbia) the root of all evil and the queen of the vices — placed above the list rather than within it. His formula is that pride is the root of all evil, and that from that poisoned root spring seven principal vices, “as its first progeny”.
  • The seven that spring from it are: vainglory (inanis gloria), envy (invidia), anger (ira), dejection (tristitia), avarice (avaritia), gluttony (ventris ingluvies), and lust (luxuria) (Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job XXXI.45; trans. in Morals on the Book of Job, Library of Fathers, Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1844–50).

So vainglory is retained in Gregory’s seven; it is pride that is removed from the list — by promotion, not by merger. Gregory adds envy, which is not among the Evagrian eight, and drops acedia as a separate head, its territory being covered by tristitia.

The familiar modern list — pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust — is therefore not Gregory’s. It is the product of the later Latin tradition, which folded vainglory into pride, brought pride back down into the list of seven, and revived acedia under the name of sloth. St. Thomas Aquinas discusses and defends Gregory’s enumeration while working with the later shape of the question (Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 84, a. 4). Attributing the modern seven directly to Gregory compresses several centuries of Latin development into one author, and this collection does not do it.

Why the East Kept Eight

The Greek and Slavic tradition never adopted the sevenfold scheme and never developed anything corresponding to the Western catechetical category of “deadly” or “mortal” sins. The eight remained standard: they structure St. John Climacus’ Ladder, appear in St. John of Damascus’ On the Virtues and the Vices (in The Philokalia, vol. 2, London: Faber and Faber, 1981), and are the frame within which the Philokalic authors write.

Three differences of temper follow, and they are worth stating because they shape how the whole vocabulary is used.

The eight are thoughts, not offences. The Western capital vices are, in their developed form, an instrument of moral classification, tied to the analysis of sin’s gravity and to penitential practice. The Eastern eight remain what Evagrius made them: a diagnostic scheme for a struggle, oriented to therapy rather than to adjudication. This is why the Orthodox tradition has no equivalent to the mortal-versus-venial distinction and treats the categories of sin pastorally rather than juridically (see Soteriology).

The list is not closed. Later Greek writers add, subdivide, and rename freely — rancour, envy, judgment of others, gluttonous talk, and self-love all appear as heads in one author or another — and no council has ever fixed a number. The Orthodox rule is that these are working categories.

Acedia survives. Because the East never absorbed acedia into dejection, it kept a term for something the West largely lost and has had to reinvent: the specific torpor and restlessness that attacks a person in the middle of a settled discipline. It is the most distinctive of the eight and the least translatable (see The Catalogue and the Chief Passions).

A Note on Provenance

The scheme is Evagrian, and Evagrius stands under the condemnation set out at The Sources and Their Limits. It is worth noticing what the tradition’s handling of the eight thoughts shows about how that condemnation works in practice. The Church anathematized a cosmology; she retained, transmitted under other names, translated into Slavonic and Russian, and printed in her most influential ascetic anthology the analysis of the eight thoughts produced by the same man. The eight are not received despite an inquiry into their author but because they were tested against experience for sixteen centuries and found to describe what happens.

See Also

References

  • Cassian, John. The Institutes, Books V–XII. Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 58. New York: Newman Press, 2000.
  • Cassian, John. The Conferences, Conference 5 (Abba Serapion, “On the Eight Principal Vices”). Trans. Boniface Ramsey. Ancient Christian Writers 57. New York: Paulist Press, 1997.
  • Evagrius Ponticus. The Praktikos; Chapters on Prayer, 6–14. Trans. John Eudes Bamberger. Cistercian Studies 4. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1972.
  • Evagrius Ponticus. On the Eight Thoughts and On Thoughts. In Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • Gregory the Great. Moralia in Job, XXXI.45. Trans. Morals on the Book of Job. Library of Fathers. Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1844–50.
  • John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.
  • John of Damascus. On the Virtues and the Vices. In The Philokalia, vol. 2. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
  • The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1. Trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. (“St John Cassian: On the Eight Vices”; “On the Holy Fathers of Sketis and on Discrimination”.)
  • The Rule of St. Benedict, 42 and 73.
  • Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae, I–II, q. 84, a. 4.