This page groups vices by the language their earliest name comes from. Wikipedia notes that "synonyms for vice include fault, sin, depravity, iniquity, wickedness, and corruption," terms drawn from several different source languages. Browsing by originates-in-language lets a visitor find every vice whose oldest name traces to the same tongue.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingFaults a tradition names and warns against, given in its own list with the reason it holds them harmful. The lists are not equivalents: the Latin capital vices are a catalogue of sins ordered by gravity, while the Buddhist and yogic kleshas are an analysis of what obstructs the mind, and neither is a translation of the other. 1 Size of the Traditional SetSeven capital vices in the Latin Christian list fixed by Gregory the Great 2 Origins
Whose Classification This IsThe familiar seven are Latin Christian. Evagrius Ponticus listed eight evil thoughts in the late fourth century, John Cassian carried them west, and Gregory the Great reduced and reordered them to seven around 590. The list went on moving through the Middle Ages before settling into its modern form. It is not a universal scheme. 3 Learn More
The Faults the Traditions Warn Against
This category holds the vices, the faults that moral and spiritual traditions name and warn against. It gathers the seven deadly sins of Christian teaching: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth, each with its Latin name and the demon later tradition attached to it.
Each entry gives a vice in the terms the tradition names it, the reason it is held to be harmful, and, where the tradition draws the pairing, the virtue set against it.
How traditions count them
The seven deadly sins themselves went through several forms before settling into the familiar list: the Western scheme descends from the eight thoughts of Evagrius Ponticus, revised by Gregory the Great into the seven, and the ordering by seriousness varied from one authority to another. The entries note these shifts rather than presenting the list as fixed.
The vices connect to the virtues, with which the tradition pairs them, and to the demons that later writers assigned to each. The virtues set against them are treated in their own category.
Originates In Language
Sources
1. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source 2. Moralia in Job
Gregory the Greatbk. XXXI
3. The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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