Anger by Robert A. F. Thurman, Envy by Joseph Epstein, Gluttony by Francine Prose, Greed by Phyllis Tickle, Lust by Simon Blackburn, Pride by Michael Eric Dyson, Sloth by Wendy Wasserstein,
The Seven Deadly Sins: Oxford University Press and The New York Public Library.
That Phyllis Tickle is absolutely smart; and a fun writer to read. Her introduction to her slim volume, Greed, is worth the price for the whole package. (That could be said for any one of these books.) She runs through a history of Christianity, bringing it to our world today: “This culture [is] faced with issues of human responsibility and training and social management, even of human manipulation, for which no prior intellectual guidelines exist and for where there is not yet a fully realized shared imagination.” Yup, that pretty much sums it up — the Reformation is done, Christendom is gone, the landscape has shifted. Infused with knowledge from science, psychology, medicine, from other social and political sciences our understanding of religion is brought into sharper focus. (See the Letters to the Editor in this magazine the last few months as readers discuss the Virgin Birth as metaphor.)
Sin, too, is under review. We no longer immediately damn a man for stealing: we ask why he stole. Was it poverty? Bullying? Social Conditioning? Perhaps he has a chemical imbalance. Behind simple right and wrong are larger social issues, hidden psychologies, subtle medical dynamics. There is more to everything. Even the ancient list of the Seven Deadly Sins has subtleties, as the brilliant essayist Joseph Epstein writes in Envy: “Connoisseurs of the deadly sins divide them into the warmhearted or cold-blooded sins. Lust, anger and gluttony in this reckoning are thought warm hearted, bodily sins, proceeding as they do from physical passions; pride, greed, sloth and envy are cold-blooded, proceeding as they do from states of mind, and (with the exception of sloth) inherently crueler.”
Sloth is possibly the one sin that would likely not make the cut if the list were to be reimagined today. The late, great playwright Wendy Wasserstein makes a good case for a little more sloth — a push-back against the tyranny of the work ethic: “I always felt I was on the verge of finding happiness, if only I could lose weight, develop a better vocabulary in thirty days, have tighter abdominal muscles and buns, speak Spanish, achieve inner peace, schedule my day more efficiently, become more assertive, communicate more clearly, express the full range of my emotions, get a man to marry me in ten dates, get my daughter into Harvard at age twelve, understand the subtext of everything a man said, eat only organic produce, have the heart of a Rollerblader in South Beach, Florida, learn the joy of having sex in four hundred different positions and loving every one of them, find my inner child, renew my outer adult, come to terms with bad things happening to good people, embrace the Hebrew God, embrace the Christian God, embrace the Muslim God, and learn to write poetry like the actress Suzanne Somers.” (Doesn't that pretty much sum up our age?)
The list of the vices is not biblical; Gregory the Great honed it in the 6th century as a teaching tool, if you will, to better understand our fallen nature. Dante, of course, built an epic poem around the list. These seven slim volumes may lack that grand stature but they elicited in me an emotion that is neither a vice nor a virtue: pure joy. What else would you get when you give seven smart people seven juicy subjects?
