Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Now, don't worry, this isn't going to be a religious sermon. I'm certainly not qualified to administer that. But instead, I might be able to soothe your anxiety, soothe your soul with a bit of a history lesson. You will be surprised to learn that the seven deadly sins aren't in the Bible.
They were thought up by a Greek monk, really, in the 4th century, who fled to the Egyptian desert after becoming embroiled in a scandal with a married woman. There, isolated, doing some mindfulness, the monk Evagrius Ponticus began to map the darkest patterns of the human mind. And he came up with what would become the seven deadly sins. By the Middle Ages, people were obsessed with them.
They were painted into murals. They appeared in sermons, in popular literature. It was believed that of those seven deadly sins, everyone had one in particular that they had to work on. A weakness that revealed who they truly were.
In this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit, I've been told that I'm going to find out what my particular sin is, which I'm really looking forward to, and I'm really looking forward to sharing it with all of you. I'm being joined by the expert, the historian, Peter Jones, who's just written a new book, Self-Help from the Middle Ages. What the seven deadly sins can teach us about living.
We're going to delve into them. We're going to talk about sin. And we're going to look into the history of this religious and cultural phenomenon. It was a system of control, sure. It was a system of working out how people could live alongside each other in society. We're going to find out how the medieval mind understood human behavior and psychology. Enjoy. Pete, thanks for coming on.
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Chapter 2: What are the Seven Deadly Sins and their origins?
Thank you. What a pleasure.
Well, we get the pleasure to be talking. Wallowing in sin is what we're going to be doing, in a good way. There used to be eight, though. Tell me. This is news to me.
Well, it's true. Right. They weren't the eight deadly sins. They were once the eight generic thoughts, which is a terrible title for a book.
See why it didn't catch on.
No, it didn't catch on. Yeah, the origin is kind of strange. It begins in a political scandal. a guy called Evagrius Ponticus, who was a politician from the Black Sea coast to what is now Turkey. There's a sex scandal.
What period are we talking about?
We're talking about the late 300s. Okay, so Roman Empire still reasonably coherent. Absolutely. Writing in Greek, politics happening in Constantinople, sex scandal, Evagrius loses his career and sort of wanders off into oblivion. And he kind of, he's depressed, he's despondent, it's a midlife crisis. He drifts down to the desert just outside Alexandria. Classic. Well, everyone was doing it.
This is just a well-trodden path. We would call them now monks. But at the time, it didn't have a label like this, really. These were lost souls who were looking for a radical experiment in living. And they moved to the desert about two days' walk outside of Alexandria.
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Chapter 3: How did Evagrius Ponticus contribute to the concept of sin?
And they'd build these little cells. you know, far away from each other, close enough you could wave and see someone waving, but not see their facial expressions. It's kind of lonely. And Vagris was one of these. Spent his day weaving baskets, watching the sun rise and set, and trying to, you know, it's mindfulness really, you know, thinking a lot, contemplating, meditating.
And Vagrius puts himself through a load of experiments. He stands in freezing cold water. He sort of flagellates himself. But he also decides he's going to do a mind experiment. He's going to write down every tempting, negative, difficult thought in this enormous thing, which he later publishes as a book, which we call Talking Back. And in that book, some of these thoughts are really petty.
I miss the cup I used to hold in my hand. I miss my life. I miss my family's olive grove in Ibora on the Black Sea. And he decided, when he got all of these thoughts written down, they all belonged in eight sort of categories. Nice. Eight buckets. And these he called the eight generic thoughts.
And which, are they rough? Have they transmogrified into the deadly sins? Or which is the one that we've dropped?
Okay, so there were once, for Aragos, there were two things that we now call pride. There's pride and vainglory. Pride is kind of this ego, this inward thing. Your self-esteem being too high or whatever. And vainglory is boasting, basically. So it's like bragging.
Okay, that's the outward manifestation of it. So we've merged those together.
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Chapter 4: Why did the Seven Deadly Sins become popular in the Middle Ages?
Yeah, and he also had two kind of sadness sins. He had sloth and sadness. Sloth, which he called Arcadia, which is lack of care. And sadness, which is just total misery, despair.
And did these go viral? I mean, where do we get Seven Deadly Sins from?
Okay, so it's a great idea, and Navagrius practices it himself, but it's in the desert at that point. There's a guy called John Cassian who comes to the desert, and he's been tasked with finding something to popularise. He needs to preach to peasants in the French countryside, and he needs to make a book.
There's a timeline, come on, get people involved, get them engaged in thinking about reforming their lives, becoming more moral. John Cassian goes to the desert and discovers a Vargas system and thinks, this is fantastic, this is dynamite. But he thinks it needs a tweak, and it's just what you said at the beginning. Generic thoughts, it's not so good, it's not so catchy.
Cassian calls them deadly sins.
You say system, he's identified these. Is it like intrusive thoughts and then dealing with them? What's the system beyond identifying all the difference?
So the idea is that... Your brain works this way no matter who you are, no matter how good you are. These are the eight patterns of thought that tempt you every single day. So pride, that's a kind of egotistical tendency. Or self-belief, at its more modest degree. I'm pretty good at this. I'm excellent at making coffee. Maybe other people want to share my coffee, and then it goes too far.
I'm the best at making coffee, and all other coffee is terrible. So they're spectrums of thoughts, which I suppose they're excessive thoughts. Have none of these and you are an angel. You're not really human at all. But start to think along these pathways of ego, desire, appetite. Those are things that make us human, these kinds of tempting thoughts.
And once you've identified them, by speaking of them, you can help to combat them. That's the idea.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of pride among the Seven Deadly Sins?
B, an hour with the punch bag in the garage, then go for a hot stone massage. Or C, finally buy that monogram silk kimono. Oh,
That's a hard one. These are quite random. Given that choice, goodness me, I would actually, this is a bit manosphere coming up, I think I might do the punch bag, actually. Okay, good, good, good. Why not?
Okay, right, I'm now totting up. Okay, good, we're in a good place. Thank goodness. Okay, right, so we're now going to do the quotation. These are all quotations from medieval guidebooks on the sins. So these are all quotations. So I want to know which of these medieval quotations feels most accurate these days. I do not fear my enemies. They will be crushed. Whoa.
That's A. B. It's the fire that's in the cup that kindles the soul's torches. It's the heart that's drenched in wine that flies to heaven's porches. Sorry, that's a bit much, a bit long. Or C. Our eyes rise up to truth when we gaze at beautiful things.
Okay, well, I'm afraid I'm C there.
Beautiful. Okay, so tossing these up, this is quite tough, but I'm afraid, Dan, your sin is avarice. Avarice? Greed. How funny. Well, what I will say about this is it's actually a beautiful sin, and actually it gets the best treatment in the book.
Oh, listen, you're like those horoscope people who go, actually, Sagittarius is the best one. No, it is.
Well done for being Capricorn. Okay. Okay, avarice is not just, it's not greed in the way we understand it. It's not just a desire for money. Avarice is an appreciation of objects. Avarice is an attention to the beauty and complexity of material things in a way that involves a lot of care. Done right, and this is, now we're getting horoscopes.
Done right, avarice is a commitment to finding soul in objects. You collect things, you make beautiful objects, and in so doing, you recognize that you're building the story about yourself in the world, and you're imbuing things with soul. Gone wrong, however, avarice becomes an attachment to these objects.
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