Sin—what is it? This mapping of American sins shows some popular notions of how to interpret the Seven Deadly (or Capital) Sins. These caught popular attention in 1995 in the movie Se7en, which parodied them by making them into a serial killer’s staging for his murders.

As the above map shows, we consider sin to consist mostly of a few peccadillos having to do with chocolate and sex. In France everyone is supposed to have a péché mignon, a “cute little sin,” such as liking chocolate, to which they succumb. As for the latter, we think that every healthy person has a sex life, and so people like vowed celibates are somewhat defective. One perverse development of this notion is that Catholic priests would not be pedophiles if they were married, which is of course absurd.

“Sin” means something else entirely. It means falling beneath yourself, “missing the mark,” in the classical translation of the Greek word. To sin is to make yourself less than you are meant to be, to amputate a piece of your full humanity.

As Jim Hanigan, one of my professors at Duquesne University, used to say, “We sin because it feels good.” In other words, evil being the distortion of a good, we get a short-term benefit for a long-term cost. The act results in pleasure, whether physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual. Because it is pleasurable, it tends to be habit-forming. But the consequences are all out of proportion to the pleasure.

Evil destroys. It is like  a cancer, which begins when cells “decide” they do not want to die in the usual timeframe of cellular life, but become “immortal.” As a result, these cells multiply wildly and if unchecked, eventually kill the body of which they are a part. Sin is first a decision to choose the short-cut that evil presents, and damn the consequences.

Jesus’ famous teaching on the sin of lust—to look on another with “lust in your heart”—is not about sexual attraction. We do not decide to be sexually attracted to another. It is a basic good of being human, just as the pleasure of sex is part of God’s good creation. Lust is the desire to possess sexually, to make the desired one a dehumanized object for the satisfaction of an appetite. Even deciding to do so, even if there is never an act, is already a sin, Jesus is saying.

Sexual pleasure itself is morally neutral. But we choose to indulge in it for all kinds of reasons, many of which make a good thing into something dehumanizing. Prostitution, pornography, fornication (casual sex) and adultery are all examples of this.

Vital to committing a sin is making a decision. You cannot sin if you are coerced, or if you are truly ignorant that such a choice is evil. The decision to sin is itself the sin.

And there is a hierarchy of sins, which the traditional teaching on the seven deadlies emphasizes. At the bottom rung are sins of the body, lust and gluttony. Then there are sins of the psycho-emotional, envy, covetousness (greed), anger. Finally there are the worst, the purely spiritual sins: pride and its obverse, sloth (accidie), which is not laziness but rather shrinking away from the good gifts of God.

So it is that the hypocrisy of believers, our spiritual pride, so often condemned in the harshest terms by the Lord, is at the height (or rather, depth) of sin. The present church fights are grand occasions for capital sin, whose consequences are the very thwarting of the gospel message by its messangers, deadly not only to us but to all who cannot hear our message, so loudly our actions contradict it.

There are consequences, present and future, but those will wait for another installment. Meanwhile, I must contradict Miss Amos: we are all “abnormally” attracted to sin. At its core, sin is not rational. It is abnormal, if routine. Why choose evil over good? Why choose the short-term benefit despite the long-term inescapable consequence? But we do.  Oh, we do. All the time. There is no péché that can qualify as mignon.

But it is rude of me, Gentle Reader, to imply that you are a sinner. I confess to being one, however. Accidie seems to be one of my finer (lesser) temptations.

[A good book on the seven deadlies is William Stafford’s Disordered Loves, 1994, Cowley Brothers. And the recipes at peche-mignon.fr really are tasty...]