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Extract
Since this is the last lecture in the series about The Seven Deadly Sins, it might be a good idea to stand back and think for a moment about the point of such a list. That seven is a good, mystical number obviously makes us suspicious about any claim (if one was ever made) that the list of the deadly sins was arrived at by the exercise of pure reason. It is not difficult to add to them. Why is cruelty not a specific deadly sin? Cruelty does not obviously come under wrath, nor, for that matter, under pride, envy or lust. Aquinas lists cruelty (ferocitas) as a sin against temperance. He distinguishes it from ferocity and savagery (saevitia and feritas), which are ‘bestial’ vices. Cruelty, for Aquinas, is the vice of excessive severity in punishment. Its opposing virtue is clemency—the rational tempering of punishment—which Aquinas considers to be part of temperance. These are fairly persuasive distinctions. Yet Aquinas’s idea of cruelty seems to have little if anything to do with the sort of cruelty that has most caught the attention of the modern world, which was touched on by Nietzsche—the deliberate infliction of pain upon another for pleasure. This was philosophised upon even more interestingly by Jean-Paul Sartre as being part of a project to reduce the Other to objecthood, revealing and at the same time cancelling his freedom. That would seem a good candidate for an additional deadly sin.
Perhaps, though, we should think about the deadly sins as a sort of mirror image of the virtues—as these appear, for instance, in Aristotle.
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- Copyright © 2000 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
Footnotes
1
This was the last in a series of Lenten lectures, by various speakers, at Blackfriars, Cambridge.
References
2 Summa 2a2ae, 159, 1.
3 Page 343.
4 We might also think, though, of King Lear whose lesser, if more believable catastrophe leads to madness.
5 C.f. Summa 2a2ae 129.3 Aquinas argues that magnanimitas thinks little of others in so far as they fall short of God's gifts, that the contempt of the magnanimous man is for reprobates, that he gets no pleasure out of the kindnesses of others ‘unless he makes still greater return to them’‐so that, in short, these qualities ‘call not for censure but for super‐abundant praise.’
6 Being and Nothingness pp. 453–4.
7 Sartre pp. 454–5.
8 Sartre p. 455.
9 Sartre ibid.
10 Blackfriars edition of the Summa, by the way, likes the translation ‘spiritual apathy’. This is in keeping with a certain tendency to gloss rather than simply translate, but in this case it seems to me a very good translation.
11 2a2ae35 1.
12 2a2ae35 2.
13 2a2ae 35 4.
14 His account of it reminds one of the melancholy Jacques in As You Like It.
15 Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, p. 68.
16 I am grateful for these examples to Dr Nicholas Hammond.
17 Eliot here is speaking of the order he sees Joyce imposing on that panorama in Ulysses. 88
18 ‘Gerontion’ 2–6.
19 ‘The Waste Land’ 70.
20 ‘Baudelaire’Selected Essays p423. In the same paragraph, Eliot talks of Baudelaire's ennui as a true form of acedia, arising from the unsuccessful struggle towards the spiritual life.'
21 ‘Gerontion’ 7–12.
22 T.S. Eliot, Anti‐Semitism and Literary Form, Ch. 2.
23 Pope, ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ 202.
24 Sermon ‘Of the Nativitie’. Christmas 1618 Lancelot Andrewes, Sermons, Ed. Storey, p 85.
25 ‘Gerontion’ 18–19.
26 47.
27 21–22.
28 25.
29 cf. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet p 112.
30 32–46.
31 Cf. Kenner p 108.
32 112.
33 Kenner Ibid.
34 Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’ concluding lines.
35 V iii 149–53.
37 66–70.
38 ‘Little Gidding’ II.23 Pope, ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ 202.