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His Parson pontificates on all seven sins during the 60-mile journey from Southwark. The sins were a popular morality subject for writers and artists in the Middle Ages, including Geoffrey Chaucer whose pilgrims in his Canterbury Tales exhibit signs variously of pride (the Knight), greed (the Pardoner), envy (the Nun) and gluttony (the drunken Miller). Two centuries later, the future Pope Gregory I dispensed with the eight vice, vainglory, distilling the remaining list into the Seven Deadly Sins of today. It was the 4 th Century Eastern Christian mystic and writer Evagrius Ponticus who was responsible for the first reference to what he at that time described as ‘eight principle vices’. Here he categorises the ‘works of the flesh’ which will prevent the faithful from inheriting the kingdom of God as “adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings and such like.” In fact, the nearest to a complete list as we know it comes in Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. Interestingly, although sin is mentioned throughout both books of the Bible, from the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and the 10 Commandments in the Old Testament to the Gospel of St Mark in the New – they are never actually described under one single banner. The dictionary definition of sin is an offence against religious or moral law – the former being a ‘transgression against God’. The deadly, otherwise described as cardinal, sins are categorised as pride, lust, greed (avarice), envy, sloth, gluttony and wrath.Ĭonversely, the seven ‘virtues’ are said to be humility, chastity, charity, kindness, diligence, temperance and patience.

Let’s start with the second question first. But where does it come from, and what exactly are they? The phrase ‘seven deadly sins’ is part of our learned language. In each permutation of the centuries old Faustus myth, the Seven Deadly Sins are paraded before its eponymous antihero in their various personifications.Īnd from literature and poetry to music and art to theatre and latterly films, the idea of this septet of terrible vices has also been a cautionary subject matter for many hundreds of years.