The Eighth Deadly Sin
· The Atlantic
Sometimes, staring brainlessly into my laptop in the trough of a weekday afternoon, experiencing myself as a kind of online shadow, a thing of fidgets, a half-being hollowed out by roaming spectral appetites—for destruction, for gratification, for the email that never comes—it occurs to me to ask: Now, which of the seven deadly sins is this ?
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Anger’s in there somewhere, sure, a kind of generalized psychic road rage, but not enough of it to qualify. Same with envy, pride, gluttony, lust—just floating shards. Avarice? Nah. Of the seven, sloth probably comes closest, that enigmatic void state known to the early Christians as “acedia.” But not even acedia, bottomless as it is, can quite comprehend this plugged-in groundlessness, this ether-sweeping emptiness, this interstellar elongation of the spirit. Sin, the theologians tell us, is whatever separates us from God. Whatever blocks the beams of divine love. And at 3:23 p.m. in Caffè Nero, I am all but unreachable by heavenly radiation; I can feel it wavering, honey-colored, at the fringes of my soul. So have we done it at last—you, me, the kids? Have we invented an eighth deadly sin?
I thought initially that the title of Peter Jones’s Self-Help From the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living was an oxymoron. Self-help is our thing, after all, our exemplary piece of circular modernity, our little closed circuit—the distressed subject coming to its own aid. The medievals, more vertical in their thinking, would have counted on the down-rushing swoop of God’s grace.
But Jones, a medieval historian, shows us that the High and Later Middle Ages (1100 to 1500, roughly) were every bit as goofy as we are about human nature and behavior, and equally hooked on buzzwords, listicles (Catherine of Siena’s five different types of tears, Thomas Aquinas’s five varieties of gluttony), and junk science. To explain the inexplicable (that is, themselves), the medievals used the 12 signs of the zodiac, the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm—and the seven deadly sins. Jones takes the seven one by one, a chapter for each, arguing that this gnarly old taxonomy represents not only a timeless decoction of human wisdom but something of a moral map for our present wanderings. I think I agree with him, but let’s see.
It turns out that there were eight, at least in the beginning. Evagrius Ponticus was one of the world-abandoning superstar Desert Fathers of fourth-century Egypt. Influencer-like, he stood in freezing wells and subsisted on bread and oil, and after much torment and cogitation, he drew up a list of what he called “generic thoughts,” or routine invaders of the spirit: gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, sloth, vainglory, and pride. Subsequent spiritual engineers made their tweaks to Evagrius’s system, but the decisive overhaul was performed 200 years later, by Pope Gregory the Great. He rolled sadness into sloth, vainglory into pride, added envy, and voilà: the seven deadly sins.
[From the November 2024 issue: Hillary Kelly on Oliver Burkeman’s unlikely approach to self-help]
Now the sins were characters. They could be personified, and artists went to town. An illustration for Guillaume de Deguileville’s 14th-century poem “The Pilgrimage of Human Life” depicts avarice as a woman whose arms have been cut off (she retains the stumps) and replaced with allegorical limbs—feathered claws for rapaciousness, hands holding begging bowls and scales for moneylending, and so on. And is her tongue hanging out? Is she drooling with money-lust? It looks like it. Giotto painted envy as a woman—yes, the medievals, like us, were misogynists—a slanderous monster with a snake squirming out of her mouth, turning back, and reentering her head at the eyes. Also, she has huge, swiveling, batlike ears. And her feet are on fire.
Ghastly as they are, these allegorical images don’t really touch us moderns, or not deeply. Much more disturbing and relatable, in Giotto’s case, are the sour-faced onlookers and eavesdroppers who lurk at the edges of his frescoes in the Arena Chapel, in Padua: the servant watching in disaffection as an angel tells Anne that she is going to give birth to the Virgin Mary; the scowling, black-veiled woman overhearing Anne tell her husband, Joachim, that she has conceived. To be one of these characters, Jones writes, is to be a “bitter witness.” We know these people. We are these people. Social media: a cloud of bitter witnesses! This is envy—invidia—as it lives inside us, shriveling our spirits and kindling our meannesses.
Because this is 2026 and everything’s got to be personal, Self-Help From the Middle Ages prefaces each chapter, each sin, with a reminiscence from the author’s time teaching medieval history at a university in Siberia. Hemmed in by the cold, under laboratory conditions as it were, Jones self-examines in the lurid light of the seven deadlies. His transgressions are meek—a bit of ogling at the hot springs (lust), a snippy comment in a faculty meeting (anger). He doesn’t trash the common room in an alcoholic blaze or crucify a colleague’s cat. But this is precisely the point: The sins are quotidian, undramatic, regular human business. You can do all seven without leaving your house. The trick is to recognize the sins, to “name” them (in a modern but very appropriate locution). They offer a kind of diagnostic prism, refracting the black, primordial beam of sin into lesser rays of the identifiably and manageably human. And once you know what you’re dealing with, you can summon its opposite. If pride is getting the better of you, engage humility; if gluttony, moderation; if envy, compassion; and so on.
Otherwise they’ll hold us, they’ll dominate us, these sins. While I was reading the chapter on anger, I experienced a surge in understanding as to the nature of sin itself. Sin is subtle, seductive, addictive, of course: The medical encyclopedia The Property of Things (circa 1240) describes anger very perceptively as a “wave of bliss.” (Oh, the white-hot elation of righteousness, carrying me away!) But it’s also rigid and carceral, a system of control. Jones gives us the 13th-century Catalonian doctor Arnaud de Vilanova, who, after limited success treating anger with the miracle drug theriac (made from viper’s flesh sweetened with honey, a distillation of lilies, and about 40 other ingredients), fell to pondering the character of the malady itself. As Jones writes, “Fury pulls the mind away from reason (ratio), Arnaud reflected, and losing yourself in anger is like letting a puppeteer take control of your brain as well as your limbs.”
A puppeteer controlling your brain? Heavy-metal fans know where this is going—straight to the primary text of compulsion and merciless soul-negation, Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”: “Master of puppets, I’m pulling your strings / Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams / Blinded by me, you can’t see a thing / Just call my name ’cause I’ll hear you scream.” This is where the personification of the seven deadlies comes in handy: You, you naughty person, you libertine, rage beast, sybarite, whatever, might think that you’re committing a sin. But it’s the sin, the master of puppets, that is committing you. Unless you can turn, look it in the face, and summon the right ally.
As for the eighth sin, the new one—having Wi-Fi—is there anything to be done about that? Naturally, excessive online-ness has its counter-impulses: the digital detoxes and the dopamine fasts, all in the fine old spirit of medieval asceticism. You can go online right now and learn about how to be offline. But to free ourselves from this one, to even have the beginnings of a program to free ourselves, I think we’re going to have to do the truly and terrifyingly medieval thing. We’re going to have to get on our knees and pray.
This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “The Eighth Deadly Sin.”