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Epstein also provocatively divides the sins into the cold (pride, greed, sloth, envy) and the hot (lust, anger, gluttony), recalling Blackburn's very different but equally intriguing typology of the sins of youth (his beloved lust) and the sins of middle age (envy, anger, gluttony).
Of all these books, Dyson's Pride is the most frustrating, Epstein's Envy the smartest, and Thurman's Anger the most intriguing. Dyson seems to be content to channel a combination of Jesse Jackson and Gordon Gekko (of Wall Street fame), whispering—shouting actually—not "Greed is good!" but "PRIDE IS GOOD! I AM SOMEBODY!"—throughout. To put it more pointedly, he fails to fulfill his assignment, first by declining to think much about the perils of pride at all (except in the cases of racism and nationalism), and, second, by riffing repeatedly on entirely unrelated topics—from the Bush Administration's policies on electronic surveillance (bad) to international courts of justice (good). Who knew?
Epstein offers a host of insights that seem obvious once he has expressed them (for instance, the fact that envy tends to crop up among the sexes rather than across them). And he excels at seeing the big picture. Much intergenerational conflict is rooted in envy by the old of the young ("envy tinged with regret," he calls it). Feminism is built on envy, he argues, as is Marxism. (Greed is capitalism's sin, he notes; envy is socialism's.) Even the tabloids come under Epstein's envy eye—as purveyors of Schadenfreude charged with the enviable task of bringing the rich and the famous to heel.
Oddly, the only book that really seems to treat its subject as a sin (sans scare quotes) is written by an adherent to Buddhism, a religious tradition that has not classically preached this doctrine. "I am angry at anger—I hate it," Thurman's book begins. And in the chapters that follow he provides an antidote to this "poison."
To his credit, Thurman sees his sin as social. War, he says, is "organized anger," and he criticizes Hollywood's action/adventure genre (including Kill Bill, which stars his daughter Uma) for glorifying anger-turned-violent-turned-deadly. The centerpiece of this book, however, is Thurman's step-by-step exegesis of classic Buddhist teaching on the psychology of anger and its antidote: patience. Readers unfamiliar with Tibetan Buddhism's distinctive style of argumentation may find some of that exegesis rough sledding, but the reward for those who mush on to the end is a glorious trek—with the 7th-century Tibetan Buddhist scholar Shantideva as their wizened guide—down the middle path between "resignation to anger" and "resignation from anger." Thurman also includes a riotous one-page distillation of the havoc he believes was wreaked—in Eden, Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Egypt—by the angry God of the Bible.
Flannery O'Connor, the sin-obsessed novelist of the once sin-obsessed South, wrote, "The Catholic novelist believes that you destroy your freedom by sin; the modern reader believes, I think, that you gain it in that way." The Seven Deadly Sins series was written for this modern reader. But what has been lost as sin has been sacrificed to freedom?
The stock answers are close at hand. What has been lost are guilt and fear, Catholic bishops who worm their way into our bedrooms, Puritan divines who take sadistic pleasure in dangling us over a fiery pit. But such answers are too pat.
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