There has been a great deal of attention devoted to the concepts of The Seven Deadly Sins recently in popular forms of discourse, from the new series of cultural studies at Oxford University Press, the collection of essays edited by Robert C. Solomon (Wicked Pleasures [1999]), and the outstanding articles on the sins by major novelists and poets published in The New York Times Book Review in 1993, to an hour-long special broadcast that same year on MTV and the feature-length film Seven of 1995.  From elite culture to popular culture, in other words, the seven deadly sins have retained their interest as cultural constructions.  It is time to revisit them in research on the period of their greatest dissemination and utility, the Middle Ages.  The most recent research on this topic, in fact, has allowed these seven concepts to emerge from a narrowly theological inquiry and to be seen, individually and as a series, in the same light as other historically defined objects of study central to the Humanistic endeavor.  By focusing on the major cultural contexts in which the sins were defined, the seminar will seek to deepen the participants' appreciation for the ways in which the conception of morality in the Middle Ages was a response to varying cultural factors, and will make the study of the sins available for inclusion in the participants' regular college instruction.

The seminar has been designed so as to provide a location in which scholars in the Humanities and the Social Sciences can discuss the ways in which the culture of the Middle Ages constructed morality.  The practical goals of the summer will be for me to assist the participants in their research project, and to make available to the participants in the seminar an exciting group of guest lecturers.  The results of the seminar will, I hope, be disseminated in special sessions at the annual Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo.

I am seeking to recruit participants drawn from a wide variety of fields:  college teachers who specialize in anthropology, history, and the study of literature, as well as specialists in art history, sociology, and those with a primary focus on theology and ethics.  From two years of residence at institutes for advanced study in America and Britain, I am aware that interaction among disciplines is an essential ingredient in achieving a reinvigorated educational environment that will bring a new vision to the relationship between the sins and the niches of culture that were of vital importance in the construction of these moral categories.  The participants will be expected to have a basic knowledge and understanding of medieval culture and history in its broad outlines, not limited to their own fields of specialized research.  It will be helpful, although not a prerequisite, if participants have a working knowledge of French and German, in particular, or other modern European languages in which the scholarship on the sins is regularly published.  It will be especially useful if they can read Medieval Latin.  Nevertheless, the majority of the medieval texts used in the seminar will be made available to the seminar in their original languages with an accompanying English translation.

Intellectual Rationale

NEH support for the study of the seven deadly sins at American universities began in 1978 with an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers at the University of Pennsylvania, directed by Prof. Siegfried Wenzel.  The present seminar seeks to follow this educational innovation and reinvigorate its content, in the current climate of ethical discourse in our culture, by taking maximum advantage of the unique manuscript, research, and human resources available at the University of Cambridge, England, and its institute for advanced study, Clare Hall.  

The Study of the Seven Deadly Sins:  
From Dogma to Cultural Constructs

The seven deadly sins (pride, envy, wrath, avarice, sloth, gluttony, lust – in their most frequent order) are sometimes thought of as inflexible categories of medieval dogma or, when they are found in examples of contemporary popular culture (such as the feature-length film Seven), as signifiers for something of an arcane perversion, a vehicle for an evil which is both mysterious and ancient.  Such a view, of course, does not address the longevity of the idea of these seven constructs as comprehending the basic categories of evil in western culture.  The very fact that even as this list of seven sins was being replaced by psychological, utilitarian, and other models of behavioral analysis it still could be adopted from Catholic to Protestant use during the Reformation, and further adopted for secular utilization both before and after that point, makes the seven sins a worthy object of cultural inquiry in the Humanities.  Current research in the intellectual history of moral thought in the Middle Ages has demonstrated, moreover, how nuanced and differentiated the constructs actually were that came to be known as the seven deadly sins, how much their definition depended on a complex interaction with the cultural environments in which they were enumerated.  The most recent research on this topic, in other words, has allowed these seven concepts to emerge from a narrowly theological inquiry and to be seen, individually and as a series, in the same light as other historically defined objects of study central to the Humanistic endeavor.  In this way, current research does not define the categories of the sins merely as theological entities, but rather as differentiated articulations of what can be called discrete forms of an interrupted actualization of socially accepted forms of desire.  Parallel to this definition, the virtues can be understood as ideals of the socialization of desire.

In the 19^th and earlier 20^th century, and primarily in German scholarship, the sins were studied in three main contexts:  First, they were seen as part of the history of Catholic dogma on matters of moral theology, something which appears clearly in the sub-title of the major work on the sins and dogma in this period, the monograph by Otto Zöckler.  Second, the origins of the sins became part of the historical study of monastic spirituality in Egypt, where established lists of evil thoughts (later reformulated as the sins) first appeared.  The focus here was on the debt this aspect of Egyptian monasticism owed to both Hellenism and Early Christian literature.  Stefan Schiwietz's three-volume Das morgenländische Mönchtum, published between 1904 and 1938, is typical of endeavors in this second context, as is the monograph by Siegfried Wibbing.  Third, the iconography of vices and virtues formed the subject of a number of studies of medieval art, in particular in the tradition of Prudentius's Psychomachia, such as one can find in Adolf Katzenellenbogen's classic monograph.  The common factor in these studies is a tendency to examine their subject from structural and historical perspectives in which the content of the sins is imagined to be relatively stable.

Much of this earlier research was summarized and extended into the area of literary scholarship in 1952 in the monumental monograph by Morton Bloomfield, which not only was the first major American study of the sins, but also contributed a far more comprehensive view of the place of the sins in medieval culture that was also sensitive to some of the major changes in the composition of the lists of sins in response to varying cultural factors.  Bloomfield's work proved highly influential in the educational context of American universities, in particular, but it also served as the starting point for the ongoing interest among subsequent European medievalists in this aspect of medieval moral thought.  The publication in 1967 of Siegfried Wenzel's study of sloth and his fundamental article in Speculum the next year detailing problems in the history of the sins not addressed by Bloomfield's work set the agenda for much historiographical work to come.  As a result, factors such as the place of the virtues in the comprehension of moral thought in the Middle Ages, the influence of Aristotle, and the genesis of rationales for the sins in Scholastic thought were the focus of some later work, such as the recent studies by Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio.  At the same time, the study of individual sins has been, and continues to be, advanced in work by Lester Little, Alexander Murray, or more recently Richard Newhauser on avarice; Mireille Vincent-Cassy on envy and sloth; and Pierre Payer or Ruth Karras on lust.

Yet much scholarship of the last twenty years has also moved beyond an agenda in which the seven deadly sins are seen to function almost hegemonically in the environment of pastoral theology.  John Bossy's important essay in 1988 articulated ways in which the seven sins were seen by late-medieval culture to be inadequate, a topic which was in some regards anticipated by Bloomfield's work, but not fully realized there.  Likewise, analyses of other enumerations of morality in the Middle Ages, like Casagrande and Vecchio on the sins of the tongue, or Newhauser on the nine accessory sins, have called attention to the way in which cultural exigencies (such as the oral nature of preaching and confession) elicited a response that gives evidence of the flexibility of medieval moral thought.  But recent scholarship has also begun to address topics and use methodologies that open the question of the cultural use of the sins to a more diverse analysis and call into question some of the assumptions of earlier scholarship.  Barbara Rosenwein et al. on anger, for example, is deeply invested in the current debate on the use and construction of the emotions in historical research, Michael Theunissen has questioned the supposed historical break between the melancholy articulated in antique texts, sloth in the Middle Ages, and modernity's representation of depression.  Other approaches to the delineation of the moral categories of the sins have adopted methods of psychological research (Patrick Boyde), or the findings of anthropology (Newhauser), or a gender studies perspective (Karras) to yield new insight into the ways in which cultures fill the categories of moral analysis with an ever-changing content. 

With so much recent attention focused on the sins, it seems that the time is right to revisit the content of a past NEH Summer Seminar with a new group of interested and engaged college teachers in order to reinvigorate the educational potential of the study of the seven deadly sins at American universities.

The Cultural Contexts of the Seven Deadly Sins

In order to allow the participants to clearly relate the presentation of the sins to a specific context, it is proposed here that the seminar focus on the locations of medieval moral thought and their interaction with the contents of the presentations themselves.  It is in this way that one can speak of the sins as cultural constructions.  The following narrative will lay the foundation for the content and implementation of the project.

The longevity and centrality of the seven sins testifies to the authoritativeness and versatility of what began as an element of monastic education.  Their origin is found in the list of eight "evil thoughts" (gluttony, lust, avarice, wrath, sadness, sloth, vainglory, pride) that developed in the hermit communities of northern Egypt.  These eight logismoi may have been common in the oral teaching of the Egyptian monks, but in written form they are found earliest in the Greek works of Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345–399).  In the octad, Evagrius systematized the theory of demonic intrusions on the contemplative work of the anchorite so that the monk would be better armed to defeat the demons who used temptations to hinder his attainment of apatheia ("passionlessness").  John Cassian (c. 360–433/35) learned of the octad from Evagrius and made the order of logismoi in Evagrius's De octo spiritibus malitiae central to his Latin works written for cenobitic monasteries in Marseilles.  Here, the "evil thoughts" were now termed vitia, each with a list of sub-sins to which it gives rise.  Cassian emphasized the concatenation of the first six sins, a sequential relationship in which an excess of one vice becomes the foundation for the subsequent one.  Vainglory and pride become dangerous precisely when the previous six have been extirpated.  The ascetic orientation of these early monastic octads, written for communities of holy men, can be seen in the way control of bodily desires lays the foundation for the defeat of more spiritual temptations.  Pope Gregory I (c. 540–604) synthesized Cassian's monastic thought with Augustine's view of sin as reflective of the will.  Using most of the octad's components, Gregory reversed the order of sins:  what he explicitly called two "carnal sins" come after five spiritual ones, with pride serving as the root of all seven "principal vices":  vainglory, envy, wrath, sadness, avarice, gluttony, lust (Moralia in Iob, 31.45.87–90).  When pride itself was included in the list, the result could be understood as a variant of a sin octad, but in either case, Gregory considered these sins the origins of all sinfulness.  The excesses of the ego depicted in the heptad's spiritual sins emphasize the importance of humility for Gregory as the central virtue of active obedience to authority within the community in moral, monastic, and secular political terms.  Pride was most commonly (though not exclusively) considered the foundation of sinfulness in the early Middle Ages.  Gregory asserts that the determination of intention in any act necessitates close examination of motives that may reveal a gap between the appearance of virtue and its origin in the impulses of vice.  He presupposes, thus, a certain amount of moral ambiguity in any act.

The heptad reflects an ideal of hierocratic ideology and social hierarchy.  In the early Middle Ages many other presentations of vices and virtues were addressed to the needs of the nobility:  Martin of Braga composed the very popular Formula vitae honestae (570–79), a treatise on the cardinal virtues, for the moral instruction of the Suevic King Miro and his court.  Typical of the aristocrats directly involved in the ethical renewal of the Carolingian reforms is Wido, Margrave of the Marca Britanniae, to whom Alcuin addressed his influential Liber de virtutibus et vitiis (c. 800).  The reformers emphasized ethica, the study of virtue leading to correct living, along with the liberal arts and logic as the disciplines of philosophy:  Alcuin frames his treatise with systems of virtue (at the beginning, theological; at the end, cardinal virtues).  His compilation of scriptural and patristic texts as governing authorities served the further end of aiding uniformity in the Carolingian church, which allies his and other Carolingian and post-Carolingian treatises on moral theology with the genre of the florilegium.

The internalization of concepts of the individual and spirituality in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries anchored moral theology in psychological processes.  Hugh of St. Victor (1096–1141) reinterpreted concatenation as a description of developing sinfulness which began with the common classification of sin according to the subject it is directed against:  pride removes the sinner from God, envy from his neighbor, wrath from himself.  The last four sins marked stages in the sinner's descent into slavery to sin (De quinque septenis).  The intended audience of this view of the sins now includes new classes of an urban population.  The renewal of interest in Augustinian theology in the 12^th century marks a tendency to see caritas as the most important virtue instead of Gregory the Great's focus on humility.  The Ethics of Peter Abelard (1079-1142) for the first time systematically analyzed the importance of intention and conscience, i.e., the inner disposition of each human being, in the determination of what constitutes vice and virtue.  The interconnection between monastic theology and the developing "theology of the schools" produced many other presentations using the symmetry of vices and virtues (or related qualities, especially the gifts of the Holy Spirit).  The Liber de fructu carnis et spiritus by Conrad of Hirsau (c. 1070–c. 1150) treats the Gregorian heptad and an opposed list (theological plus cardinal virtues) and was influential in the development of illuminations of matching trees of vices and virtues; Alan of Lille's De virtutibus et de vitiis et de donis spiritus sancti (c. 1170–80) examines the gifts of the Holy Spirit, defines the sins and their progeny, and makes the theological virtues a category of one of the cardinal virtues; the façade of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris (early 13^th cent.) arranges personifications of virtues with roundels of exemplified sins in a way that summarizes types of representation of both.  With the shift to a growing profit economy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, treatments of avarice and its sub-sins (usury, illicit merchant practices, etc.) began to vie with pride more frequently in discussions of which sin is the root of all others.

Early Scholastic literature began to treat sin and virtue within a wider approach to systematic theology, though attempts to adduce a theoretical rationale for a system of sins (generally as aberrations of the human will) produced any number of classifications of the sins:  Peter Lombard's Sentences (c. 1150), the standard textbook for Scholastic education in theology, had suggested four:  Augustine's distinction of sins by their origin in cupidity or fear; Jerome's classification of sins of thought, word, or deed; the distinction according to the subject sin is directed against; and the Gregorian heptad (Sent., 2.30–44).  The seven sins could not easily be justified as the most important or the most serious sins.  The phenomenology of sin and virtue became central to theology as a discipline, but this opened up new avenues of classification.   The use of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics reinforced academic moral theology's move beyond hamartiology (and an interest in only seven chief sins) to instead become a theory of virtue, devoted to questions touching the divisions of the virtues (intellectual, moral, theological), their causes, and their interconnection.

The importance of the sacrament of penance influenced frequent Scholastic attempts to distinguish between explicit violations of God's law (deadly sins) and acts that do not directly breach this law (venial sins).  The attempts to define venial sin also included the idea of a diminution of any inherent human sinfulness due in part to the imperfect nature of human intention or human knowledge, as one can see, for example, in "Le profit de savoir quel est péché mortel et véniel" and other works by Jean Gerson (d. 1429).  The seven sins no longer suffice as a schematic organization of the multitude of errors that Gerson discusses, which in one treatise amount to 58 different kinds of deception by the devil (i.e., vices disguised as virtues).  With an endless choice of feigned virtues that self-examination will expose as sins, Gerson’s sinner has arrived at what has been described as a “paralysis of the soul” typical of a late-medieval guilt culture.  An interest in the Jewish scriptures that had begun in the twelfth century, uneasiness with the lack of a biblical foundation for the capital vices, and a concern to bind morality into a juridical system resulted in the emergence of the Ten Commandments, especially among Franciscan theologians beginning with Duns Scotus, as the moral system that would be universally taught after the sixteenth century.

In pastoral theology, art, and literature, the capital vice tradition remained dominant through the sixteenth century.  The reforming efforts of the Church to control the content of catechesis by reinstructing congregations at all social levels in matters of the faith culminated in canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) that legislated confession for all Christians at least once a year.  Many regional councils demanded that clergy preach on vices and virtues, as well.  The examination of the conscience envisioned here included material specific to women and all classes of society.  The question of how to organize the sins to be confessed and preached was answered very early by drawing on the capital vices, which now became the seven deadly sins.  Robert of Flamborough's early thirteenth-century Liber poenitentialis recommended the heptad precisely because the genetic relationship of the vices (and their progeny) facilitated confession.  Eventually, the number of progeny was vastly expanded, but the basic classification of seven chief sins and their chief remedies remained, though often in tandem with other catechetical systems.  The outpouring of penitential and homiletic texts treating vice and virtue, initially addressed to the clergy, was the work especially of the Dominicans and Franciscans (in particular in the cities), and it influenced the development of vernacular works on morality, now addressed to the urban laity.  William Peraldus's widely transmitted Summa virtutum ac vitiorum (1236–1250), which played a seminal role in the development of the sins of the tongue, influenced important vernacular treatments of the vices and virtues such as Friar Laurent of Bois' Somme le roi (1280) and (indirectly) Chaucer's "Parson's Tale" (late 14^th century).  The recognition of the cognitive value of images for educating pious Christians drew in the late Middle Ages on the intersection between pastoral literature, the natural-philosophical understanding of animals, and traditional moral iconography to produce emblematic presentations of the vices and virtues in many media and for many functions, from supporting the Benedictine reform to promoting civic ethics (as in the Regensburg tapestry of the vices and virtues, c. 1400).  The confluence of pastoral literature and a high degree of emblematic iconography also characterizes late-medieval and Renaissance literary treatments of the vices and virtues, from Dante's (1265–1321) Divine Comedy to morality plays.

Avaritia