Short Stuff: The S7VEN Deadly Sins

The Seven Deadly Sins are tied to religion, but not really in the Bible. So where did this naughty list come from? See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:07Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, Jerry's here for Dave and we're talking today about the seven deadly zins.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Seven deadly zins?

• 1:16Josh Clark?

  Did I say zins?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  That's a wine brand.

• 1:19Josh Clark?

  It is. I was thinking it's pretty bold to, to label your wine as deadly.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, good point. Never thought about that.

• 1:28Josh Clark?

  But I think what they're, I think they're able to, because the seven deadly sins are so widely known.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35Josh Clark?

  That people don't normally stop and think it says deadly on this wine label, uh, because they know that they're talking about something else.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  It's a pretty widespread thing. If you've seen the movie seven, obviously very prominent in that. It's just a big thing in pop culture. It was even a, a sort of interpretation of Gilligan's Island, which I had never really been too acquainted with.

• 1:57Josh Clark?

  Oh, you haven't? That it's a, it's a fan theory.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that apparently Sherwood Schwartz is kind of backed up in some ways, but that the professor's pride. And of course, we're also going over the list of the sins with this list. Professor's pride, the skipper is anger or wrath, ginger, obviously lust. Mr. Howell, obviously greed. Mrs. Howell, gluttony and partially sloth is what this says. Mary Ann is envy and then of course Gilligan is sloth and he's the one that is keeping them trapped on the island through his sloth.

• 2:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there are some really great fan theories around Gilligan's Island, not just that one.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I love that stuff. It's fun.

• 2:35Josh Clark?

  I do too. But yeah, that's the seven deadly sins, the skipper and the rest. They haven't always been called the seven deadly sins. And as a matter of fact, seven is a trimmed down version of the original eight. They've been called everything from the capital vices, cardinal sins, capital sins.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:57Josh Clark?

  Vice sins, I think if you want to combine everything together. And the Roman Catholics are nuts for this kind of stuff. And over the centuries, as the church has evolved, the whole thing has just kind of been whittled down or changed. There've been different names. I think Pride used to be called vangloriousness or vanglory. Instead of sloth, they had melancholy, like basically, don't be sad. But regardless of how totally associated it is with Catholicism and Christianity in general, it actually doesn't appear in the Bible.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. By the way, I think vanglory is probably already a band name, but that would be a pretty good band name.

• 3:42Josh Clark?

  Metal, for sure.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. Or unless it's, yeah, or yeah, or I was gonna say probably like a Nickelback type of thing, maybe. Whatever that is, whatever kind of music that is. I don't even know what category that is.

• 3:55Josh Clark?

  I don't either. A poor Nickelback, but I think they're one of like the richest bands on the planet.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sure. Anyway, vanglory, coming to a theater near you, or a concert venue near you.

• 4:05Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  But you could also call it theater. I'm getting sidetracked.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Speaking of theaters, everyone should go out and get tickets for our live tour this year, right?

• 4:17Josh Clark?

  Ooh, good one, Chuck. Yeah, you can get tickets on stuff you should know.com. All the links are up there. We're going to Denver, we're going to Seattle, we're going to San Francisco. In April, we're going to Chicago, Madison, Wisconsin, Akron, Ohio, and then we're doing a whole tour of every single city with a population over 5,000 in Canada.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  That's not true. We're sorry you couldn't go everywhere in Canada, but we did our best. Some theaters on the East Coast didn't work out, but we tried, everybody.

• 4:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I think we're doing six cities, though, which is, you know, it's pretty good.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  It's gonna be fun. Can't wait. But go grab tickets. It's gonna be fun. Happy to be back out on the road. And back to the seven deadly sins, I believe he said, if you look in the Bible, you're not gonna find them. And that's because they're not really in the Bible. The original sin, when, you know, Old Adam and Eve there in the Garden of Eden in that book were described as disobeying God and establishing the sinful nature of humanity. But there's not a list of, like, the Ten Commandments are in there, but the seven deadly sins are not in there. The seven deadly sins came to be because of a particular writer who was a monk in 345 CE named Evagrius Ponticus.

• 5:27Josh Clark?

  Which means Evan the Pontiac in English.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 5:34Josh Clark?

  According to me, at least.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  That's right. But he was the guy that gets credit, basically, as the first person to kind of write these things out and get it out en masse.

• 5:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah, but he had eight of them, the eight evil thoughts, right? He was a theologian, a monk, who really put his money where his mouth is. The last several years of his life, he went out and wandered around the desert in Egypt and lived on herbs and barley, essentially. He prayed, he fasted, he meditated, he did his best to not think any unholy thoughts. I'll bet that was more difficult than you'd think. And he wrote a bunch of this stuff down in the Antireticus, which is his celebrated masterwork. And this is where the eight evil thoughts first appear.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  That's right. Gluttony, lust, and of course, we're not talking just sexual lust here. It's kind of lusty desires for worldly things. Greed, which was avarice at the time. Anger, sloth, sadness, vainglory, and pride are all in there.

• 6:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And although we now think of the seven deadly sins as applying to everybody, that's not at all what Evan was doing. At first, he basically was creating this list of what to avoid if you're a monk, essentially. That's who it applied to initially.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, like if you really want to walk the walk like me, these are the things you need to avoid. And I promise I'm not thinking of them. I'm just writing about them.

• 7:02Josh Clark?

  That's right. You want to take a break?

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:06Josh Clark?

  Okay, we're gonna take a break.

• 7:23Josh Clark?

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• 8:23Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we going to do all this?

• 8:26Josh Clark?

  Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.

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• 8:53Josh Clark?

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• 9:35Josh Clark?

  All right, Chuck, so Evagrius Ponticus basically created the seven deadly sins, or eight deadly sins, as a roadmap for monks. And then some other people came along a couple centuries later, like, this is great. Like, how can we upscale this? And really get the most out of it in our corporate world? And one of the first people to do this was Saint Gregory the Great, who later became, or no, I guess probably first was Pope Gregory the First.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, and he became sainted later?

• 10:08Josh Clark?

  Has to be. I don't, I don't think anybody's ever been sainted. Yeah, you can't be sainted while you're alive, because you have to perform at least two miracles after your death.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Boy, you really remember that stuff.

• 10:20Josh Clark?

  I do. I do remember some of it.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Nice work.

• 10:25Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  So Pope Gregory I, before he was a pope, wrote his masterwork. And it was basically sort of a real dissection of the Book of Job called Moralia in Job. And it was a very influential book. And this is where his seven principal vices were laid out. And we're not going to read all the sort of gobbledygook, but it was, you know, vainglory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, and lust. And then sort of deeper definitions of what all those meant back then.

• 10:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and like all of the terrible behaviors that that come out of it, right? So like, like, like reveling in your neighbor's misfortune kind of thing. Like, like, these are the, these are what you want to avoid, right? And a few centuries after that, in the medieval era, other Christian writers that come like Thomas Aquinas really latched on to this. They're like, this is great. Like, why didn't we think of this stuff earlier? And one of the things that that kind of became popular to get this across as a conception is called the Tree of Vices. It's an icon with pride as the root of this tree. And then the rest of the this deadly sins kind of coming off as branches.

• 11:40Josh Clark?

  And it became very familiar because you would paint this on the wall of your church somewhere.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:47Josh Clark?

  The reason you were painting it on the wall of the church is because the you had to confess these particular kind of sins at least once a year. And then do whatever penance the local priest told you to do for them. Or if you didn't do that, they're deadly because they were deadly for your mortal soul. And after, after that, you would, after you die, you would go to hell. That's why they're called deadly sins. It's not like they kill you here on earth. They kill you spiritually after you die. So to confess those sins, though, you had to know what they were. And that's why they would paint the Tree of Vices on the church wall.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that for some reason struck me as funny. It was the Fourth Lateran Council in 1214 where the, you know, you got to confess two times a year. That's where that came from. And I just love the idea of people are like, well, all right, what are the sins? And I'll let you know if I did any of them.

• 12:39Josh Clark?

  That's right. That, yeah, you just go up and like trace your finger and be like, oh, okay. Yeah, I guess I did that. I did revel in my neighbor's misfortune. That time you stepped into a bear trap? Oh, my God, I thought that was hilarious.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  That's right. The Germans would have a name for that one day.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  So people were pretty obsessed during the Black Death of what happened after you die. That's, I mean, people were already, heaven and hell wasn't a brand new thing. But that's when it was like, people are dying all over the place. And like, where are we going? Like, we're really kind of worried about this. So it became very ubiquitous, talking about sins, talking about life after death. Sermons became obsessed with it. It was in the Canterbury Tales in the form of the Parson's Tale. And so it was just kind of really latched on the seven deadly sins in particular as kind of the hot thing in Catholicism.

• 13:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And it's still around in Catholicism. Apparently in 2008, the Catholic Church were like, hey, we've updated some more seven deadly sins for the aughts, I guess is probably how they put it. Genetic modification is one. Carrying out experiments on humans.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:48Josh Clark?

  Polluting the environment. Can't get behind that. Causing social injustice. Sure.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Heck, yeah.

• 13:52Josh Clark?

  Causing poverty.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  You know it.

• 13:55Josh Clark?

  Becoming obscenely wealthy.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:57Josh Clark?

  And then, of course, taking drugs.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:01Josh Clark?

  Doesn't seem like a deadly sin.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you know.

• 14:04Josh Clark?

  They were on a roll.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  So those are the seven modern deadly sins? Is that how they're framing it?

• 14:08Josh Clark?

  That's, that's what they tell me at the Vatican.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Fantastic.

• 14:12Josh Clark?

  Well, I guess that's about it. Go forth and look out for the seven deadly sins, I guess.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't do those.

• 14:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Short Stuff is out.

• 14:25Speaker 00

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