What better to do on Valentine’s Day than consider the seven deadly sins?  Love is of course a virtue but other emotional states associated with Valentine’s Day — envy (her boyfriend got her roses), pride (my boyfriend is way hotter), covetousness (I want two boyfriends), gluttony (it wasn’t that big a box of chocolates), sloth (store-bought valentines this year), lust (no explanation required here), and anger (you didn’t bring home chocolates or roses!?!) — are the big seven deadly sins.

So I was excited to read the Common Reader Edition of The Seven Deadly Sins, a compilation of essays by seven authors on the seven sins. Excited not by the sins but by the authors chosen, especially W.H. Auden, Edith Sitwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Angus Wilson.  These guys must know a thing or two about sin, I thought to myself. Any great writer explores lust, pride, and anger in their books; any writer I’ve ever known experiences envy and gluttony and, although calling it writers’ block, sloth.  But the essays turn out to be a mixed bag: maybe these writers do know about the sins but judging from a few of the essays, these writers forgot a thing or two about writing.

It is interesting to see that a new afterward has been pinned on to this edition (the original publication came out in 1962; the “A Common Reader Edition” came out in 2002) which offers apology for the essays, stating the authors’ “arguments are rambling, the authors assert things and don’t tell us why, they are full of prejudices and unexplained quirks.”  I couldn’t have said it better.  Nevertheless there are good pieces in the book, such as Patrick Leigh Fermor’s very funny bit on gluttony  (he is  best known as a travel writer and he must have eaten his way across the world with all he knows about food) with its great line that gluttony’s “physical penalties may be the heaviest but it is the sin that leaves us with the lightest deposit of guilt.”  Yes, I know: not a layer of guilt but a stubborn layer of fat (is stubbornness a sin?  Is my fat sinning against me?).  Also, Cyril Connelly’s short story illuminating covetousness to an extreme degree is pretty funny.

Edith Sitwell’s piece on pride is the best of the pieces, and well in keeping with her famous quote (not used here): “The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.”  And Dame Edith argues that having pride in yourself, rightly or wrongly, is very necessary to survival.  But she does caution that pride plus flexibility (admitting you are wrong when you are wrong) is necessary to prevent the virtue of pride from turning into the vice of stasis and immovability.  In other words, flip-flopping is a good thing, at the right time.

But none of the  authors really get to the heart of the matter, which is what is sin, after all?  If one feels envy but gets over it and doesn’t insult anyone in the process,  if Jimmy Carter limited the lust to his heart and didn’t allow any spillover to the loins, if I am a total and complete glutton at Christmas (and will pay for it through July), if we as a country are proud of having a new and hopefully honorable and decent President, what harm is being done?  I posit that “sin” is an action that is harmful and hurtful. Not that sloth, as it is practiced on a large scale when humans fall down in front of their TVs for hours at a time, is not harmful (and surely the opposite of sloth, working eighty hours a week and blackberrying through vacation, that’s not good) but is it sinful?  Killing and torturing and raping are sins.  The rest of it, even lying and cheating and disrespecting what others have done for you, and disdaining life and rejecting friendship: these are the lesser sins.  Caveat, and it is a big one:
acting in any way at all to promote your own personal economic gains or religious objectives at the cost of other people’s lives, which is a form of killing after all, is a SIN.

But does defining and delineating what are the deadly sins matter unless we believe in hell?  To find out the answer to this question, don’t bother reading the essays in The Seven Deadly Sins. Read the books I’ve tagged as great books.  The books will show you, in genuine and living color, what happens when sins are committed, the prices paid by everyone in the room (metaphorically speaking) for the sin, its pain and damage spreading like ripples from a triple-bounced stone across a pond.  Try Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave, The Master of Petersburg, A Mercy, Respected Sir, The Emigrants. But these books are not all doom and gloom: there is humor in envy, anger, gluttony, covetousness, and lust (of course!), when done with the right touch, as in The English Major, The Crying of Lot 49, The Tempest Tales, Deaf Sentence, and the perfect The Elegance of the Hedgehog.