Abbot Christopher Jamison
In this projects the students from elementary up discuss the question.
In the text the discussion is lead by the sequence of highlighted passages and the questions on the foot notes. The commentaries of the students are in baloons. It is better to discuss the text in paragraphs and after your students have given their opinions let them read the commentaries.
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[ii]In an exclusive adapted extract from his forthcoming book, Finding
Happiness, Abbot Christopher Jamison examines the modern attitude to the
Seven Deadly Sins and re-introduces us to the sin that never made the list.
How has our neglect of acedia, or spiritual apathy, affected our culture[DK1] [DK2] ?
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In 2004, a MORI poll
commissioned by the BBC asked over 1,000 Britons if they had ever committed
any of the Seven Deadly Sins, namely, pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed,
gluttony and
lust[DK3] [DK4] . Top of the list was
anger, committed by nearly 80% with all the other sins being committed by
well over half those interviewed. But when asked ‘Which is Britain’s
deadliest sin?’ they mostly ignored the traditional seven and went for cruelty [DK5] [DK6] and adultery as the two worst. When
asked which of the deadly sins they enjoy, the easy winner was lust followed
by gluttony. In the subsequent reporting of the survey, the list of Seven
Deadly Sins was treated as a bit of a joke. Some writers and actors were asked
for comments on the deadly sins and said they couldn’t frankly see what was
wrong with most of them. “Whatever you're doing, with pride you never drop
below a certain standard.” “Anger isn't a sin; it’s good to let off steam.”
“Sloth is doing nothing. How can doing nothing get such a bad press?” The
fundamental attitude was ‘where’s the harm in a bit of pride or sloth?’ In a
world where ‘avoiding harm to others’ is the overriding moral rule, the Seven
Deadly Sins seem to have had their day.
Yet looking more closely
at the responses to the opinion poll, it is surprising that those who saw
cruelty as the top sin did not connect it to anger as the source of cruelty
and that they did not see lust as the source of adultery[DK7] . People today see wrong
doing solely in terms of outcomes. The private sphere is mine to command
exactly as I like and in the public sphere I have only to avoid harm to
others. In so far as they are seen as key actions that harm others then the
Seven Deadly Sins are indeed unhelpful.[iii] They are only useful when seen as
describing the principal human tendencies that lead people away from living
well towards harmful actions. In other words, their usefulness is
dependent on believing that spiritual awareness is a vital dimension of human
life and that without such self-awareness there is no happiness. The Seven
Deadly Sins were never intended as a guide to harmful actions but as a guide
to the roots of harmful actions; when viewed in that way, their insights
continue to challenge us to greater personal honesty about our innermost
thoughts.
The Seven Deadly Sins are
derived from the Eight Thoughts of John Cassian, the monk who, in the Fourth
Century, systematically recorded the teachings of the Desert Fathers and
Mothers. He described how monks and nuns were always afflicted by Eight
Thoughts or Demons. The transformation from Eight Thoughts to Seven Sins
begins with Pope Gregory the Great in the Sixth Century. Gregory began this
process by removing one vice from the list: acedia, a Greek word which
can be translated as spiritual apathy. The
disappearance of acedia from ordinary people’s vocabulary deprived
Western culture of the ability to name an important feature of the spiritual
life, namely, loss of enthusiasm for the spiritual life itself[iv].
While the word has disappeared, the reality of spiritual carelessness is
strongly present in our culture.
The purpose of all such
lists of thoughts or sins is to provide a framework within which people can
develop their self-awareness. Self-awareness [DK8] here has a
particular meaning that we need to distinguish from introspection[DK9] ;
introspection is only looking at me, whereas self-awareness involves
considering how I interact with the world around me.
Self-awareness is attentiveness to my way of relating to people and things.
In particular, it involves understanding how my outlook affects the way I see
the world and how it affects the world itself. This self-aware life does not
accept that there is a private world of introspection and a public world of
actions. It insists that my interaction with the world includes my attitudes
as well as my actions. This approach refuses to accept the modern belief that
something is good so long as it does no harm to others. My own inner world is
a place that can do harm or do good not only to myself but to other people as
well. Simply being angry, for example, is bad for me and bad for those who
have to deal with me; the vibrations of my anger affect others even if I
never do anything bad. So self-awareness here means an awareness of my place
in the world.
Without such
self-awareness, the inner life of human beings will lead them to do wrong.
Legislation and policing alone will not prevent public harm to others nor
will telling people that harm to others is bad. We need people to work on
their self-awareness and we need to teach children to do this from an early
age. If we want to protect the environment, then ask people to contain their
greed. If we want to reduce violence, help people to contain their anger and
so on. We have to [DK10] enable[DK11] each person to live out the discipline of
self-awareness not only for personal happiness but also for society’s
happiness.
The fundamental insight
shared by the ancient philosophers like Plato and by Christ is that an
interior discipline of thoughts is needed. The
only way to avoid bad actions and promote happiness is to go deeper than the
actions themselves and to train our thoughts.
This deep human insight
is expressed by Jesus with imaginative force in the Sermon on the Mount:
(Matthew’s Gospel 5: 21-22 and 27-28)
You were told ‘do not kill’ and that if you do kill you will answer
for it before the court. But I say anyone who is angry with another person
will answer for it before the court.
You were told ‘do not commit adultery’ but I say that if you look at a
person lustfully, you have already committed adultery with them in your
heart.
This is not Jesus simply
creating impossibly high standards; he is saying
that anger and lust are the origins of murder and adultery so get a hold of
them before it is too late. As a society, we seem to have forgotten
this very
simple insight[DK12] .
Acedia: the forgotten
Deadly Sin
One way of
viewing our current situation in Western society is that we have suffered a
catastrophic loss of understanding of the need for self-awareness leading to
widespread acedia. Until the modern era,
the Church and especially its religious orders provided a constant reminder
to ordinary people of their need to examine their conscience every day and to
reflect deeply on their way of life. The Church provided a series of
exercises, some simple and some complex, to enable people of all kinds to
live a self-aware life. At its worst, this provoked unhelpful guilt. At its
best, these spiritual exercises enabled people to remain self-aware.
Pre-modern European societies were often ignorant, poor and sometimes cruel,
but they had a strong sense of the vital importance of the interior world of
each human being. That interior world was the resource that enabled them to
survive the horrors of their age.
The interior world of
human beings is a mixture of irrational and rational forces. The spiritual exercise of reason was the ancient and
monastic response to this world, with daily reflection on the workings of my
innermost soul; from such exercises flowed the solutions to life’s challenges
and temptations.[DK13] By contrast, in our culture, we are brought up without explicit and
systematic spiritual formation, being informed that we can do and think what
we like provided that we don’t harm others. Spiritual practices such as
meditation are considered purely optional extras for an eccentric few and so
we are subtly led to understand that the spiritual struggle is not worth the
effort. While we want music with ‘soul’ and condemn ‘soulless’
bureaucrats, we have a created a culture of spiritual carelessness that
neglects the disciplined life of the soul[DK14] . This state of mind is often accompanied by statements such as ‘I
have no time for that sort of thing’, where having no time means both not
having enough hours in the day and not having the inclination.
Spiritual carelessness
seems to me to underlie much contemporary unhappiness in Western culture. The word is no longer used not because the reality is
obsolete but because we have stopped noticing it[DK15] . We are too busy to be spiritually self-aware and our children grow
up in a culture that suffers from collective acedia. Acedia has
so established itself that it is now part of modernity.
A parallel can be drawn
with the world of medicine. Before the discovery of germs, hygiene was not
considered essential so many deaths were caused by infections that nobody
could see. Once the existence of germs had been identified, physical hygiene
became rigorous and lives were saved. Similarly, the cause of much
unhappiness lies hidden from view but is truly present. Our demons
are unseen thoughts that make us unhappy and spiritual hygiene is as
necessary as medical hygiene if these diseases of the soul are to be healed[DK16] [DK17] . But we are a spiritually unhygienic society. While we know that we
must find time to brush our teeth, to visit the doctor and to take exercise,
we have no such shared conviction about the need for spiritual exercises.
Even monks and nuns can
experience the temptation to forget about the spiritual life. In one ancient
collection of stories about the desert fathers and mothers, the very first
story begins with a surprising statement about the most famous monk of all.
‘When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by acedia.’
Towards the end of that same collection Amma Syncletica
offers the insight that ‘acedia is full of mockery[DK18] .’ Our society is ‘full of mockery’ towards those who insist on the
reality of the soul and its essential disciplines, disciplines which have
been preserved almost uniquely by the best of the world’s religious
traditions but which are scorned by increasingly strident atheist
commentators.
Our culture implies that
indulging the Seven Deadly Sins is the way to happiness; more food, more
things and more sex combined with personal aggression and vanity are the way
to happiness. This is the message hitting us day by day. The good
news is that most people in their heart of hearts know this message is a lie
but many lack the means to live out an alternative[DK19] . This spiritually careless culture does not have to run our lives,
however, and helping people to overcome our culture’s endemic acedia
is one of the key tasks of the Church today.
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[1] Throughout
the reading and analyzing the text I noticed the lack of understanding or
realizing the meaning of some words. Beyond the translation the students have necessity
of weaving definitions to catch the depth of the discussion. So as we went on
reading and highlighting the main ideas some questions were proposed to clarify
what some key terms were, such as spiritual life, well, harm and so on.
[i] Notes
by Paulo Piccinini – Elementary, 2010.
Notes by Larissa
Schelbauer – Intermediate, 2010.
Notes by Gustavo Bianchini - Intermediate, 2010.
[ii] The seven sins are a private
question – so how to get rid of them? How to solve them?
To solve the seven sins believing in God, you try to be a good person,
observe yourself and try to be strong not to sin because if Jesus
Christ came to the world and got to win the sin. So you get to win the sin too.
I disagree with Paulo because it´s not because Jesus won that everybody
can win. Each one is different and Jesus had very developed self-awareness. And
not everybody will get to reach this standard.
[iii] tendencies that lead people away from living well
towards harmful actions – what
does it mean to our society?
It means that
the seven deadly sins just have a meaning when meant to justify the wrong conduct and it depends on
what I consider wrong, it depends of my inside, if I believe in something else
than the physical part.
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What is to
live well? To live well I think that the people
must be happy and have no problems and have independence to do what they want.
-
In the poll, to live well is to do what I want with
my life and to avoid that which causes some harm to the others. It is to live
in society.
To live well in my society you need to have a good
job, have material goods and have a good relationship with other people. By Paulinho PHN
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What is
harm? The
“harm” is something that the person do to another to affect her as much
psychologically as physically.
Harm is some attitudes that cause damage to the
others (physical or moral damage). The seven deadly sins serve as a guide to
avoid the harmful actions.
The meaning of harm in my society is some attitudes that cause damage to the others
(physical or moral damage). In my opinion harm is to cause damage to yourself
too, because God created you. Example: It is wrong to use drugs, drink excessive
alcohol, etc… By Paulinho PHN
[iv] What is “spiritual life”?
The Monk has an advanced active spiritual life because they meditate,
pray. We, “normal beings”, don´t have such an intensive spiritual life as
Monks, because we aren´t recluse and we work, study. So we don´t have time for
it, but we have a spiritual life. How do we foment our spiritual life? Praying,
going to the church, participating in groups, moviments, … By Paulinho PHN
The spiritual life is a part of the real life that people dedicate to their
religion, faith and other things. And in this part of the life the people
dedicate to go to the church, pray and help the needy people, in this part of
the spiritual life the people dedicate their time to beliefs of their
religion.
It’s the building of the soul. It’s the way that people interact with
the world and with the rest of the society. It’s a building because each day it
is being perfected.
[DK2]Some people want to
gain Money with the spiritual apathy or religion. By: Gustavo
Today, most of the people is more
worried with the having than the being.
By: Larissa.
[DK3]It’s impossible not to
commit any of them. By: Larissa
It´s impossible not to commit, because all people commit just one of
this seven deadly sins in their daily life.
By: Gustavo
[DK5]I think cruelty and
adultery are deathly sins because the people who committed don’t have heart. By
Paulinho PHN
[DK6]Adultery I don´t
consider a deadly sin; because this is common to some people. But cruelty I consider. By: Gustavo
I don’t guess that adultery is considered a deadly sin, because it’s something
common in our society, but it is the begin of many inadequate conducts and
behaviors. I considered sin the cruelty, mainly if it is with animals. By:
Larissa
[DK7]The Lust isn’t source
of adultery but help to commit, because the lust is wanting other things, so
adultery is wanting other person and lust is connected. By Paulinho PHN
[DK8] Self-awareness works
a intern control that contain our impulses and instincts that can affect the
others. By: Larissa
[DK9]The introspection help
to equilibrate our mind, to do the correct things, have good decisions and
don´t commit the deadly sins. By:
Gustavo
[DK10]I think that firstly
each person must develop our introspection and so they will know how to develop
self-awareness. By: Larissa
I think that the people must live to learn. Living and learning! By:gustavo
[DK11]I think that we need
to make people conscious for us to live, because we transmit energies so
positive as negative and this energies influence attitudes of others. By Paulinho PHN
[DK12]I have a girlfriend and
If I look, think and desire other girl is a sin, because you have something and
aren´t satisfied, wanting something more. This is lust. So you need to
eliminate this sin to live well with God, with other people, with yourself. By Paulinho PHN
[DK13]To win the seven
deadly sins you need daily reflections, observe yourself. The life have
challenges and temptations, so you need to pray, to believe and to ask for God
to guide you. By Paulinho PHN
[DK14]Some people don´t
dedicate their time to spiritual life, and this contributes to crime.
By: Gustavo
Our culture besides neglecting the disciplined life of the soul, it doesn’t get to accept many other
kinds of discipline, that’s why many times we don’t respect some
simples rules, as for example, few people get to respect the limits of
speed.
[DK15]I think that the
people don´t dedicate time for their spiritual life and because this they
commit many mistakes and that causes anger, envy...
By: Gustavo
[DK16]I think that before
our demons were unseen. Today the most of people knows the origin of one little
part of our unhappiness, and it means that some demons are known. By: Larissa
I think that this “demons” are the lazy, because any people don´t
dedicate your time to their spiritual hygiene By: Gustavo
[DK17]God exists, demons
exist. So you have to decide What way you want to walk. If you decide to follow
God’s way you need to regret and observe your actions and thoughts.
[DK18]I think that the
mockery is in our society every day, and this contributes to the destruction of
the humans. By: Gustavo
I agree. Actually mockery could be considered such as a form of defense.
The people think that if they hide their true feelings, their true wishes, they
are free of accusations and so they fell better with themselves. By: Larissa.
[DK19]I think that our
culture could not exist, because the facts that occurred many years ago,
occurred because of the seven deadly sins.
By: Gustavo
It’s easier to live this way. Accepting that something is a lie means that
people must look for the truth. By :
Larissa
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