What is the sin of envy in the Seven Deadly Sins?

Some people think that envy as a sin is a silly idea. The idea that it’s wrong to see something you want and become motivated to get it is, in a certain sense, the entire basis for our economic framework in the modern West, and there’s a lot you could say about the value of positive motivation towards a goal.

What is the mortal sin of envy?

But this isn’t what Christians are talking about when they’re talking about the sin of envy. Envy is a sin for many reasons. First, it’s the opposite of gratefulness. It’s about being discontent with what you have, leading to self-inflicted misery. That is of course a toxic state to be in. But the deeper, more nefarious issue with envy is that it’s usually founded upon resentment. Someone who is envious of another person doesn’t simply wish they could have what the other person has, they usually want to destroy or bring down the other person. The attitude, “If I can’t have it, no one can” comes out of a fundamentally toxic stance towards the world, that you are the most important person in it, that your desires are more valid than other people’s, or that you are in some sense a judge over the whole world. The worst manifestation of this is probably the idea that if you can’t have something, it must be destroyed.

You see this destructive (and self-destructive) impulse at work everywhere, from the brutal history of Marxism to famous stories in the Bible. The story of Cain and Abel is perhaps the most straightforward example. Cain and Abel were brothers who both made sacrifices to God, but Abel’s sacrifice was found acceptable to God while Cain’s was not. The text doesn’t say exactly why, but that’s not really important for the point of the story. What’s important is that, instead of changing his ways or trying to improve himself so that he could also present a worthy sacrifice, Cain murdered his brother Abel. Someone was doing something better than him so he removed that better thing.

The impulse to hate and destroy that which you don’t have is the essence of the kind of dark resentment that hides at the base of envy. This comes up all the time in worldly issues, especially politics. It’s very common today to see movements and groups who claim to be disadvantaged in one way or another, but their requests for accommodation so often contain (and sometimes only barely disguised) the desire to destroy and tear down those things or groups that they view as responsible.

This is why we have to be very careful about how we look at our relationship to others. Being inspired to be better by someone else is of course a good thing; but ingratitude towards the good things in your life, let alone any amount of hatred, resentment, or desire for someone else to fail, is where this sort of thinking becomes sinful and self-destructive.

The Seven Deadly Sins and their meanings

Envy is listed as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, a popular list in Western Christianity since the Medieval era. What most people don’t know about this list is that the Seven Deadly Sins is only the most recent version of a list that has been re-shaped several times over the centuries. One interesting detail about this tradition is that envy isn’t one of the original “deadly” sins. Analyzing why that is gives us a better sense of what Envy really is, deep down.

The idea of keeping a distinctive list of sins goes all the way back to the early Christian Evagrius Ponticus in the fourth century. He composed a short explanation of these in his work On the Eight Vices, in which he categorized the major vices according to whether they were of the body, the heart (or emotions), or the mind. He listed Gluttony, Lust, and Avarice (or “greed”) as the three sins pertaining to the body; Dejection (or “sadness”), anger, and despondency (or ”listlessness”) for the emotions, and vainglory and pride for the mind.

Over time, however, this list of eight vices would become modified and condensed into the form in which we recognize it today. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory I revised the list: he combined dejection and despondency into sloth (or “laziness”); he combined vainglory and pride into just pride; and he added envy, bringing the total down to seven.

Much, much later in the late Medieval period, Thomas Aquinas would base his own list of sins on Pope Gregory’s, which solidified them in Catholic tradition. They would be taken up by Lutheranism in the centuries to follow, and by that point this particular list of sins became the standard in the Western imagination.

Different lists of the Seven Deadly Sins

If you search around for different lists of sins, you’ll find many different variations. Which is the most authoritative list? It’s hard to pinpoint it exactly, as it depends on who you read. Part of the problem is that people use different words to describe the different sins, such as “avarice” for “greed”, “excess” for “lust”, and “listlessness” for “sloth”. It’s important to keep in mind that these variations are mostly due to translation. The original list of vices were written in Greek, and some change happened when they were translated into Latin, and then finally into English. Not all of them translate exactly into another language, and this has produced some of the changes in these lists over time.

There are also different kinds of lists that have appeared through the spiritual tradition of Christianity. The most notable alternative is probably from St. John Climacus’ The Ladder of Divine Ascent, in which he compiles a much longer list: avarice, anger, pride, gluttony, lust, fear, despondency, deceit, vainglory, malice, slander, talkativeness, and insensitivity. There has a been a lot of debate about the history and the evolution of these kinds of lists, even to the point where it’s been hypothesized that the “personality test” known as the Enneagram is actually a direct descent of this spiritual tradition in Christianity.

But what actually is sin?

However, what’s more practically important than establishing the exact, “definitive” list of which are the major sins, is how to think about sin in general. Part of why the idea of “sin” is a sore spot in the modern West is that many people feel judged by the idea of sins, and they feel condemned and therefore defensive about this topic. I think that’s the wrong way to think about sins. The problem is that Western tradition since the Medieval era conceived of sin primarily in terms of a punishment, and so part of the purpose of categorizing sins was to discern exactly how guilty you were for committing different of the sins (as in the distinction between “mortal” sins and “venial” sins). No wonder modern Western people are so anxious about this topic!

But this is not how the early church fathers understood sin. Saint John Cassian, a student of Evagrius, wrote a description of how each of these sins attacked the person, what signs to look out for, and how to fight back. He did not treat the sins primarily as crimes, as in the later Western tradition, but as diseases of the soul that needed to be properly diagnosed and treated, and he wrote a variety of prescriptions on how to deal with them. When describing anger, for example, he calls it a “deadly poison” that “blinds the eyes of the heart with [its] somber disorders” (“On the Eight Vices” from The Philokalia, vol. 1, (Faber and Faber), p. 82), and he describes the goal of overcoming unchastity as “perfect self-restraint and true purity” (p.75). His text reads like a doctor’s analysis of the maladies of the soul.

The problem of sin as the early Christians understood it was as a disease that lead to death. The goal of religious life was to overcome sin, to become healthy so that you can ultimately be cured of death by participation in Christ’ conquering of death and evil.