Standard teaching, not formally defined

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.

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.