The Other Six Deadly Sins

Dorothy L. Sayers

An Address given to the Public Morality Council

at Caxton Hall, Westminster

October 23rd, 1941.

SLOTH

The sixth Deadly Sin is named by the Church Acedia or Sloth.  In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair.  It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment.  It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing.  lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for.  We have known it far too well for many years.  The only thing perhaps that we have not known about it is that it is mortal sin. 

The war has jerked us pretty sharply into consciousness about this slug-a-bed sin of Sloth, and perhaps we need not say too much about it.  But two warnings are rather necessary.

First, it is one of the favourite tricks of this Sin to dissemble itself under cover of a whiffling activity of body.  We think that if we are busily rushing about and doing things, we cannot be suffering from Sloth.  And besides, violent activity seems to offer an escape from the horrors of Sloth.  So the other sins hasten to provide a cloak for Sloth: Gluttony offers a whirl of dancing, dining, sports, and dashing very fast from place to place to gape at beauty-spots; which when we get to them, we defile with vulgarity and waste.  Covetousness rakes us out of bed at an early hour, in order that we may put pep and hustle into our business: Envy sets us to gossip and scandal, to writing cantankerous letters to the papers, and to the unearthing of secrets and the scavenging of dustbins; Wrath provides (very ingeniously) the argument that the only fitting activity in a world so full of evildoers and evil demons is to curse loudly and incessantly “Whatever brute and blackguard made the world”; while Lust provides that round of dreary promiscuity that passes for bodily vigour.  But these are all disguises for the empty heart and the empty brain and the empty soul of Acedia. 

Let us take particular notice of the empty brain.  Here Sloth is in a conspiracy with Envy to prevent people from thinking.  Sloth persuades us that stupidity is not our sin, but our misfortune: while Envy at the same time persuades us that intelligence is despicable—a dusty, highbrow, and commercially useless thing. 

And secondly, the War has jerked us out of Sloth: but wars, if they go on very long, induce Sloth in the shape of war-weariness and despair of any purpose.  We saw its effects in the last peace, when it brought all the sins in its train.  There are times when one is tempted to say that the great, sprawling, lethargic sin of Sloth is the oldest and greatest of the sins and the parent of all the rest. 

 

But the head and origin of all sin is the basic sin of Superbia or Pride. In one way
there is so much to say about Pride that one might speak of it for a week and not
have done. Yet in another way, all there is to be said about it can be said in a
single sentence. It is the sin of trying to be as God. It is the sin which proclaims
that Man can produce out of his own wits, and his own impulses and his own
imagination the standards by which he lives: that Man is fitted to be his own
judge. It is Pride which turns man’s virtues into deadly sins, by causing each selfsufficient virtue to issue in its own opposite, and as a grotesque and horrible
travesty of itself. The name under which Pride walks the world at this moment is
the Perfectibility of Man, or the doctrine of Progress; and its specialty is the
making of blueprints for Utopia and establishing the Kingdom of Man on earth.
For the devilish strategy of Pride is that it attacks us, not on our weak points, but
on our strong. It is preeminently the sin of the noble mind—that corruptio
optimi which works more evil in the world than all the deliberate vices. Because
we do not recognise pride when we see it, we stand aghast to see the havoc
wrought by the triumphs of human idealism. We meant well, we thought we
were succeeding—an look what has come of our efforts! There is a proverb
which says that the way to hell is paved with good intentions. We usually take it
as referring to intentions that have been weakly abandoned; but it has a deeper
and much subtler meaning. That road is paved with good intentions strongly and
obstinately pursued, until they become self-sufficing ends in themselves and
deified.
Sin grows with doing good. . .
Servant of God has chance of greater sin
And sorrow; than the man who serves a king.
For those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them,
Still doing right.
T.S. Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral
The Greeks feared above all things the state of mind they called hubris—the
inflated spirits that come with over-much success. Overweening in men called
forth, they thought, the envy of the gods. Their theology may seem to us a little unworthy, but with the phenomenon itself and its effects they were only too well
acquainted. Christianity, with a more rational theology, traceshubris back to the
root-sin of Pride, which places man instead of God at the centre of gravity and so
throws the whole structure of things into the ruin called Judgment. Whenever we
say, whether in the personal, political or social sphere,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul
we are committing the sin of Pride; and the higher the goal at which we aim; the
more far-reaching will be the subsequent disaster. That is why we ought to
distrust all those high ambitions and lofty ideals which make the well-being of
humanity their ultimate end. Man cannot make himself happy by serving himselfnot even when he calls self-service the service of the community; for “the
community” in that context is only an extension of his own ego. Human
happiness is a by-product, thrown off in man’s service of God. And incidentally,
let us be very careful how we preach that “Christianity is necessary for the
building of a free and prosperous post-war world.” The proposition is strictly
true, but to put it that way may be misleading, for it sounds as though we
proposed to make God an instrument in the service of man. But God is nobody’s
instrument. If we say that the denial of God was the cause of our present
disasters, well and good; it is of the essence of Pride to suppose that we can do
without God.
But it will not do to let the same sin creep back in a subtler and more virtuousseeming form by suggesting that the service of God is necessary as a means to the
service of man. That is a blasphemous hypocrisy, which would end by degrading
God to the status of a heathen fetish, bound to the service of a tribe, and liable to
be dumped head-downwards in the water-butt if He failed to produce good
harvest-weather in return for services rendered.
“Cursed be he that trusteth in man,” says Reinhold Niebuhr [Beyond Tragedy]
“even if he be pious man or, perhaps, particularly if he be pious man.” For the
besetting temptation of the pious man is to become the proud man: “He spake
this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous.”