Seven deadly sins

The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, is a Western religious grouping and classification of vices. This grouping emerged in the fourth century AD and was used for Christian ethical education and for confession. Though the sins have fluctuated over time, the currently recognized list includes pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. There is a parallel tradition of seven virtues.

The seven deadly sins are called "capital" because they are the origins of other vices. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a mortal or deadly sin is believed to destroy the life of grace and charity within a person.

The tradition of seven deadly sins as we know it today originated with the desert fathers, specifically Evagrius Ponticus. Evagrius identified seven or eight evil thoughts or spirits that one needed to overcome. Evagrius' pupil John Cassian brought that tradition to Europe with his book The Institutes. The idea of seven basic vices or sins was fundamental to Catholic confessional practices as evidence in penitential manuals as well as sermons like "The Parson's Tale" from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. This connection is also clear in how Dante's Purgatory is arranged according to the seven deadly sins. The concept of seven deadly sins was used throughout the medieval Christian world to teach young people how to avoid evil and embrace the good as is evident in treatises, paintings, sculpture decorations on churches. Works like Peter Brueghel the Elder's prints of the Seven Deadly Sins as well as Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queene show the continuity of this tradition into the modern era.