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Americans are doubtless a religious people, but we don't believe in the hard stuff any more. Certainly not in the doctrine of sin, original or otherwise, which seems to have gone missing, even among evangelicals, sometime around the time hell disappeared.
Still, we seem to gravitate, in fascination if not faith, to the Seven Deadly Sins, those transgressions classified by Catholic thinkers from Pope Gregory the Great on as particularly hazardous to our spiritual health. Perhaps it is the enumeration. (Why seven?) Or the parlor game of ranking them. (Is lust worse than gluttony? Is pride the worst of them all?) For whatever reason, books on the Seven Deadly Sins appear with some regularity—far more often, to be sure, than books on the Seven Cardinal Virtues.
The latest contribution to this genre is a series of books on the Seven Deadly Sins from Oxford University Press, each initially delivered as a lecture at the New York Public Library. The series runs from a Buddhist meditation on anger by Columbia University Buddhist Studies professor Robert A. F. Thurman to a raucous satire on sloth by the playwright Wendy Wasserstein (who died in January from cancer). Indulging the other sins are Francine Prose (gluttony), Simon Blackburn (lust), Joseph Epstein (envy), and Phyllis A. Tickle (greed), and, in the recently published seventh volume, Eric Michael Dyson on pride.
One of the more entertaining subplots of these books is the tendency of each writer to cast his or her subject as the King of All Sins. Greed, Tickle boasts, "is the mother and matrix, root and consort of all the other sins." Envy, Epstein insists, is the "subtlest" and "cruelest." Gluttony, claims Prose, is the "most widespread." Pride, Dyson asserts, is "the most deadly of the seven sins."
The volumes also channel a broader cultural tendency to metamorphose their respective sins into mere sicknesses, and then into virtues. In Envy, for example, Epstein diagnoses his "sin" as just "poor mental hygiene." After informing us that pride is "the fundamental sin," Dyson tells us that it may well be the "crown of the virtues." Wasserstein's satire on Sloth—cleverly gussied up as a self-help book, complete with chapters on "Success with Sloth" and "Uberslothdom"—is actually an ode to the same.
Blackburn, a University of Cambridge philosophy professor, takes a more straightforward approach in his rehabilitation of lust (not coincidentally, the fattest volume in the series). "Lust gets a bad press," Blackburn writes in his introduction, and he devotes the rest of the book to puffing it as "not merely useful but essential." In the gospel according to Blackburn, the real sinners are those—Catholics mostly—who want to regulate our sexual hydraulics, damn up its "freedom of flow." Blackburn even suggests that we might want to "take our lust neat, without the fantasies and crystallizations of love." So when he asks of prostitution and pornography, "are they quite as bad as normally painted?", we know that the correct answer is no.
Blackburn's conflation of lust, sex, the sex drive, and sexual desire illustrates another flaw of some of these books, namely a refusal to discriminate with care between their subjects and related malefactions. Tickle, for example, lists acquisitiveness, covetousness, avidity, cupidity, and avarice as greed's aliases, but does not distinguish carefully among them. One of the ways that Dyson gets around to praising pride as "a boon" and "a stroke of moral genius" is by conflating it with self-respect, self-esteem, self-love, self-regard, and self-love. Thurman, by contrast, discriminates helpfully between anger and hate, describing the latter as "more a conceptual or mental attitude" and the former an "emotional state." Epstein distinguishes between envy and wistfulness, envy and resentment, envy and revenge, envy and jealousy. "One is jealous of what one has, envious of what other people have," he writes.
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