transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:05] Scott here with another episode of the History Unplugged Podcast. When medieval historian Peter Jones found himself falling into depression while teaching at a Siberian university with icicles sprouting around his eyelashes and 40 below weather, he asked himself what a medieval sufferer would do, and he found out something interesting. The Middle Ages, for all its reputation as a dark and superstitious time where the answer to every health problem was leeches, was actually the Golden Age of self-help. A medieval merchant consulting a priest about melancholia, what they called depression, would receive diagnosis, confession and penance based on the seven deadly sins, a psychological framework that mapped the seven basic patterns of human thought long before modern psychiatry existed. What we think of as a simplistic ethical model was actually an intricate system for understanding behavior, so much so that Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, credited it for his social media success by mapping each sin to platforms. Tinder on Lust, Yelp on Gluttony, LinkedIn on Greed, Netflix on Sloth, Twitter on Anger, Facebook on Envy, and Instagram on Pride. Today's guest is Peter Jones, author of Self-Help from the Middle Ages, What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living. We discuss how a fourth century Egyptian monk, Evagrius Ponticus, formulated eight what he called wicked thoughts to help monks identify psychological roots of temptation, why Pope Gregory the Great consolidated them into seven sins in the sixth century, and how the 1215 Lateran Council made yearly confession mandatory, transform intellectual theory into practical psychology for the masses. This looks at how time-tested systems are often the most practical, and I hope you enjoy this discussion with Peter Jones. One more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for word from our sponsors. Your book open sounding like a Dostoevsky or Tolstoy novel with exile in Siberia, and it's not quite exile, although I imagine the landscape can really make it feel like that. When you were there, you were thinking about what a medieval priest would tell you if you were having problems. Tell me a bit about that and how this led to your exploration of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Speaker 2:
[02:08] Yeah. Well, I mean, it was a very lonely time in many, many ways. My wife is an academic as well, and the two of us moved to Siberia on a bit of a gamble. Actually, my wife thought that Chemin was in Germany when she applied for the job, and then it wasn't until she got the Skype interview. It's Russia. Then she assumed it was near Moscow, and then it was when we started doing more research. Okay, it's Siberia. But it seemed like such an adventure, and actually, we were about to have our first child. Our daughter was about to be born, so we really didn't have many economic options. Siberia just seemed like the answer to everything, as well as a crazy move. We moved there, my daughter was three months old. We actually, to be honest, we had a lovely time for the first maybe 18 months, two years. I really loved it there. It was everything I wasn't expecting it to be. The cold, in fact, I loved it. As long as you dress right, it's refreshing. Going outside every day is an adventure. I love learning the language. We love the institution and everything about that. Kind of strange circumstances led to my wife taking a research position in Dublin, bringing our daughter with her, and I stayed on in Siberia foolishly, not wanting to quit my academic career, kind of feeling like we both needed, we needed two salaries. So I stayed in Siberia and foolishly abandoned my family for that period and felt terrible. And I was, you know, it was a terrible mistake of mine, but I just wanted to carry on teaching and carry on researching and it was brutal, but there it was. And the cold, stark reality of living alone for this long period, yeah, I was extremely lonely. And I think, you know, the book starts with depression, really. I mean, you know, I was in a pretty bad place. I would talk to the two portraits in my apartment, one of Yuri Gagarin and one of Lenin. And for a while, those were really the only two people I spoke to, you know, while I was there, other than on video call. And I was teaching, I wanted to teach a class on the Middle Ages, which is my expertise. Often at that university I was at, I was asked to teach things that were outside my field. But I begged and begged the director and eventually said, you can teach the Middle Ages if it's fun. And I said, well, what about the Seven Deadly Sins? And for me, I'm a medieval historian, I did my PhD in medieval history, and I'd always been fascinated by theology. And I never really taught it, funnily enough. In medieval history, you often end up teaching the big hits, the Crusades and things like that. And I realized that actually, I've always been interested in everything that the Seven Deadly Sins are all about. This is a system of theology and morality, but really it's also a system for coping with internal struggle. It's what I described in the book as a map of the brain, and it's totally not what I thought it was. When I proposed the class, The Seven Deadly Sins, I kind of thought, well, it sounds accessible. But my idea of it is kind of what the, I think the pop culture idea of it is. It's kind of a forbidding moral system, a bit outdated, a bit dusty, but it might be fun to read about. But reading it, I just discovered, wow, this is actually kind of therapy. It's kind of how people did therapy a thousand years ago, how they spoke about the tough stuff, the internal struggles, the difficulties, the depressions, the anxieties, the temptations, desires, the breakdowns that we all had kind of had. So I taught a class and I learned a lot about medieval therapy, I think, in the process.

Speaker 1:
[05:30] Yeah, it was interesting to see that although we hear the Seven Deadly Sins and we think of superstition or we think of Brad Pitt saying, come on, what's in the box? Or the different ice cream flavors of Magnum bars. Some people do take it seriously and I didn't realize that Silicon Valley is even more sociopathic than I thought it already was. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, which feels like being in an eternal HR session when you're scrolling through there and force positivity. He said that social media sites should intentionally or at least understand Seven Deadly Sins so they can weaponize it against their user base and make them addicted. That's just a, let his flag fly right there.

Speaker 2:
[06:15] It's pretty cynical, isn't it? The idea is that any good tech product app or whatever will exploit one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Okay. Obviously, Yelp appeals to your gluttony, Tinder to your lust, and so on, and Instagram and what is X and all these other things, I guess, appealing to different other more deadly emotions, more deadly sins like anger and envy. Yeah. But yeah, the problem was that Reid Hoffman said that this is a great way to make money, that if you lean into them, you can really make a great product, appeal, hook people in. I mean, to clarify, it's interesting that Reid Hoffman later clarified that and said, actually no, it's kind of Silicon Valley's duty to reform these sins within people. So I don't know, he didn't really clarify what that would look like, but I guess he means like you hook them by appealing to their lust, and then you reform them to care about real people. I don't know how that works, he left it kind of tantalizingly open. I kind of actually think both of those ideas are pretty wrong though, and that's what I'm trying to get out in the book. There's something really pathological, of course, about leaning into all seven of the sins. Like if you just let your lust and your envy and your anger go to max, that's going to look pretty terrible for all the people around you, and that hasn't really changed. But I think at the same time, fighting them all and trying to live a life with zero levels of all of these things, I'm not sure what you'd look like at the end of that. But yeah, I think Reid Hoffman and Silicon Valley, they love a fad and they love a kind of skin-deep reading of something like this and then they run with it. But yeah, definitely not endorsing their approach.

Speaker 1:
[07:44] Really not helping making the conspiracy theory seem right about everything if they're saying, yeah, we're trying to intentionally engineer the human psyche based on ancient understandings of evil, and we're rooting for team evil here. So definitely not helping their case.

Speaker 2:
[07:59] These guys are building the AI brains as well, which is really a second level of scary.

Speaker 1:
[08:04] Yeah, this is the Panopticon, and this is what we have to deal with, with what they're starting out. Well, this is a good way to understand what we're up against. Let's look at the historical background of the Seven Deadly Sins, because we've talked about it as a medieval system, and that's where it becomes widespread and used for reasons of reform in the Catholic Church and how people come into more regular contact with priests. But its origins are in the Middle Ages. I mean, you could really call it a Robin system, based on where it starts out at in the ancient world. So who originally formulates the ideas that lead to the Seven Deadly Sins and who systematizes it?

Speaker 2:
[08:40] Okay. We should say from the outside that the Seven Deadly Sins are pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust, and I guess we'll unpack those a bit later, but this is not how they began. They began not as Seven Deadly Sins, but in fact, eight generic thoughts was how they began their life, and I'll explain that a bit. They begin in the desert just outside Alexandria in Egypt, in the late 300s AD. It's a guy called Evagrius Ponticus who is a fascinating figure, in many ways a very familiar figure to us now. He's a disgraced politician, basically. He's from the Black Sea, what is now Turkey. He has a successful political career in the mid-rank in Constantinople and there's a sex scandal and it brings him down. He's a bit of a laughing stock and he leaves politics. He drifts and eventually he ends up in the desert just outside Alexandria. This is not unheard of. In fact, there's a big community down there, a community of, I suppose, if I call them mumps, that gives you one idea. But really at the time, there was a cutting edge radical youth movement to this thing. I think they were really free thinkers who were trying to find themselves in the desert with a form of meditation, prayer and sort of manual labor, well, weaving baskets, if we can call that. So Evagrius becomes one of them. These guys live in little cells. They're not in a community. In fact, they're spread out. You could wave to each other, but you can't really speak to each other. The cells are far enough apart. Evagrius spends his day watching the sun rise and set, weaving the baskets. But he tries to, I think, he's got a lot of demons. He writes a lot in Greek and the works are really moving. He opens up about his own psychology in fascinating ways. But he writes a lot about how he's tempted by demons, and how these demons have pursued him his whole life. These demons are the things that dragged him into politics in the first place, made him want to be a big player. These are the demons that gave him that lusty desire to have the sex scandal in the first place. He's now trying to fight them in the desert. So he performs a series of challenges, like he stands in freezing wells of water. He lies out in the desert exposed, his back exposed to all the mosquitoes and he gets bitten at night. He sort of chants mantras. But he also writes down all of his negative thoughts. This is kind of a very modern sounding idea, but he kind of journaling. He's going to write down everything that occurs to him that's negative or tempting in some way and he's going to try and understand. He's trying to understand all of his negativity through this process. So he compiles all of these thoughts into a book. Some of these thoughts, by the way, are really banal. You know, I miss the cup I used to hold in my hand and the feeling of it in my hand, things like that. And some of them are, you know, a bit more, you know, like this fiery passion I feel at night for the woman I left behind in Constantinople. So all of the thoughts are there. It's really frank. He takes a step back, he compiles that book, which he calls Talking Back, Anti Reticus, and he decides that there are eight categories that all the thoughts fit into. Eight categories that summarize all of our negativity and temptation. And these, he calls the eight generic thoughts. They're pretty familiar. There's sadness and vain glory, which aren't in the Seven Deadly Sins as they became, but there's pride and there's gluttony and there's lust and there's greed as well. Now, the interesting thing about this is Evagrius said, well, these are generic thoughts, so they're not deadly sins, right? So the difference is, he's not saying that these are special, terrible things that come to you when you've got a pretty filthy mind. He's saying, these come to all of us, no matter whether we like it or not. They're like the mosquitoes in the night. They're like a cold virus. You catch it no matter what you do. You don't have to be bad to catch it. So that's the origin really. And then, well, the idea really takes off after that.

Speaker 1:
[12:22] Yeah, it's interesting that there's no envy, which I guess if you're in the desert in Egypt, there's nothing to envy. It's, oh, the other guy gets a little bit more shade in his bare monk cell. That's all I can think of.

Speaker 2:
[12:35] Better basket. Yeah, something like that. Exactly.

Speaker 1:
[12:37] From here, then it migrates west and north. And later on, Pope Gregory consolidates it into the Seven Deadly Sins. So is this how they are in their final form?

Speaker 2:
[12:51] Yes. So what happens is they get translated into Latin from Evagrius' Greek and they become deadly sins with a guy called John Cassian, who I think is giving a bit of drama because this then under John Cassian becomes a preaching tool. Evagrius is just trying to understand his own brain and write about it. But later writers are trying to use this as something that you can make accessible for lots of people. Then Pope Gregory gives us the seven, the canonical seven that we still have. He gives them their order and he gives them an order, a ranking basically from least to most deadly. Least deadly is lust, and then gluttony, and then avarice, and then right in the middle there is sloth, which actually Gregory calls sadness. We'll come on to that a little bit later. It's a really ambiguous and enigmatic sin. Then the three deadliest sins in reverse order, anger, then envy, and then right at the top, pride.

Speaker 1:
[13:43] When we hear about these, and like I said, they're developed in the Roman world, but we think of them as medieval because for a long time, they were on the books, but it was more of an intellectual thought exercise that if you were at one of the few places of learning, you would come across these. Maybe if you were a priest that had access to a slightly larger library, which would be very rare until Charlemagne and still very rare until later on, you might know about them, but your average parishioner didn't have knowledge of them. If they did, they didn't come in contact with them, and it really wasn't part of their lives. But then what happens in 1215 when the Catholic Church is restructured and is far more powerful and far more systematic, and is on superior footing to the magistrates and princes and emperors of Europe when before it was on a much lesser footing, things change and then people do come into regular contact with the Deadly Sins. Everyone is familiar with them. It works its way into art of the Middle Ages, and it becomes this trope of medieval life that we know today. So what changes so that your average European Catholic will come in contact with them?

Speaker 2:
[14:51] Yeah, I mean, 1215, right, is a big year. For medievalists, it's huge. Magna Carta happens in 1215. But for medievalists, the bigger thing, I think, is the Fourth Last Rite and Council, less exciting sounding. But it also happens in 1215, in November of that year, and it just changes everything. There's a young and energetic pope, innocent the third. He's a lawyer by training and a theologian. He's only in his 40s, I think, at this state. He institutes all of these laws that change the church radically. There's so many things in there, like the Eucharist, the bread becomes the body of Christ in the Eucharist. That's enshrined in canon law from 1215. But one of the things is that there will be annual confession made every year. It's compulsory now to take confession in a private session with a priest. And this has never happened before in a compulsory way. And suddenly, this means that every parish priest is super busy across the continent, and they need to hear confession. What goes with it is that Rome sponsors a series of preachers and priests who can go out there, and people like the Mendicant orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans who can go out there and preach to people. This is a huge movement, which is trying to put the church on the front foot and get people invested and involved, confessing their sins, engaging with their priests. It's like taking control of the whole religious network and not being too passive about it. Suddenly, everyone's taking confession every year, and it's always a therapy session, and priests need a handbook to deal with all these confessions, and the Seven Deadly Sins becomes the perfect tool. How am I going to deal with this therapy session I have to have on Tuesday with these guys? Well, I'll work through the seven sins one by one. It just really fits, and it's a great way to cover the full gamut of your psychology and the full gamut of the things that you may have thought or done wrong in the last year. So that's really what explodes. I suppose also we should say the universities. We didn't have universities and literacy in a really sort of big functional way until the late 1100s, the early 1200s. First universities are like Paris, which is a series of schools in the 1130s, 40s, Bologna, round about the same time, and then Oxford towards the end of that century. So universities give a whole new energy as well. Those people are trained to read these things and then to talk about them, to preach about them, to write new treatises about them. So the whole, the energy, Europe's intellectual energy just goes up by many orders of magnitude in the late 1100s and the early 1200s. The sins just explode and they ride on that wave until by the 1300s, we have the deadly sins are just in every literary work. Every great writer seems to touch on the sins from Dante to Chaucer to John Gower, Boccaccio, and they're in artworks, the works of Giotto. You can't pick up a book and I spent a lot of time in manuscript libraries, you basically can't pick up any one of these compilation books which have lots of different miscellaneous material. You can't pick up one of those without finding the Seven Deadly Sins somewhere, whether it's a doodle or a note in the margin or full-blown treatise, they just really explode across the continent.

Speaker 1:
[17:49] Yeah, this is what you see in artwork where there's punishment and in Dante's Divine Comedy or Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Early Delights, all the ironic punishments that people experience in hell, where if you're a glutton, you have to slosh around like a pig or you're being forced to consume toads and vipers, that all comes from the Seven Deadly Sins?

Speaker 2:
[18:10] It's pretty dark, isn't it? Yes. Dante particularly sees on the Seven Deadly Sins. We have a lot of descriptions of hell and hellish torches before Dante and visions of hell, people who fall asleep and have a vision of hell and then write about it. It's not always closely tied to the sins. Dante decided to go a lot more explicit about it. His Inferno doesn't map exactly the Seven Deadly Sins. Interestingly, he adds a few that aren't there. Treachery is right at the bottom, not really a deadly sin, although it's related to pride, I guess. But it's in his Purgatorio that he really goes full out on the system. Dante's Purgatory Mountain, which is the second part of that great poem. The pilgrim goes up the mountain and sees all the souls in Purgatory who have to purge themselves of each of the Seven Deadly Sins one by one. In the order established by Pope Gregory, they have to start with their pride, the worst sin, carrying a heavy rock on their back to atone for thinking they can handle everything on their own. Then they have their eyelids sewn together for their envy, realizing they need to rely on other people. They're doused in thick smoke for their anger and so on, right up the mountain until it gets a lust at the top. So, yeah, it's a complicate relationship. I think Dante really leans into it in a big, big way. But yeah, the sins have always, I suppose, been tied to, they've been a way to organize the punishments of hell.

Speaker 1:
[19:30] Well, let's unpack them now and let's go with the Capstone sin, since everyone says it's the worst and this can be a feeder into all the other ones. Pride. What is it? We know what we mean when we say it, but it's delved into far more for people who will study these systematically, theologically. What is it?

Speaker 2:
[19:49] Yeah. When we say pride now, it's a pretty positive word for all kinds of reasons. Really, as a deadly sin, this one is all about ego. If I say narcissism, if I say self-absorption, if I say self-obsession, then that's the kind of territory we're in with pride. Pride, the Latin is superbia. The super in superbia means going above or beyond something. The idea is twofold. You're either going above or beyond your own capacities, or you're going above and beyond what's socially acceptable in terms of your estimation of yourself. So a classic symptom of pride is basically deciding that you don't need anyone else's advice. You can kind of sum it up in five words. I don't need other people. It's that moment where you ask your friends, what do you think, should we go through the park or should we walk straight along the busy road? And they say, I think we should go through the park because that'd be nicer. You say, actually, let's just do the busy road because it's quicker. You take their advice, you listen to their advice, then you don't take it. That's kind of a classic kind of, you're turning your back on other people. You're kind of, ultimately, pride is the kind of impulse where you follow your own strands no matter what other people say and it gets you into kind of hot water. Yeah, I can give loads of examples. I guess the biggest example of it really is someone like Lucifer, who's the big legend and myth in the Middle Ages. Obviously, Satan. Lucifer is notable, right, because he was once a beautiful angel. He once had six wings and was the fastest flyer, the most beautiful singer. But Lucifer's mistake was he looked at himself and decided that he was better than all the other angels, that what he had was more special and that other angels should worship him instead. Consequently, in the legend, he's struck down by God to the earth and he falls to the earth and he forms this crater which now forms the crater of hell, which is why hell is on the ground. So the idea there is that Lucifer, by focusing only on himself and being so self-absorbed, he inflates his own sense of self. He sees himself, he sees that he's beautiful and decides, I must be a god. So really pride is this hyperinflation of your own image of yourself.

Speaker 1:
[22:02] There's a fix for each of these as well. I'll probably come back to Purgatorio a lot because Dante comes up with a punishment that will cure you of your illness and in Purgatorio, people are doubled over due to huge stone slabs on their back. So they're looking at the ground because they can't stand up right, and they see examples of carvings and depictions of people being brought low. But in general, is this how they formulate curus of this, thinkers that you have to take your eyes off yourself?

Speaker 2:
[22:35] Yeah, I think it's on the one hand, the classic cure for pride is humility, right? But I think there's a confusion here. I think humility isn't to humble yourself and say, I am nothing, I am a worm, which some monks do like writing things like that in medieval books. The idea, the real cure for pride as it's written about, John Gower writes about this in his Confesio Amantis when he's talking about Narcissus. The real cure for pride is actually to look at yourself properly, to gaze at yourself and come to understand yourself for what you really are. Humility doesn't mean I am nothing. Humility means recognizing yourself accurately with all of your limitations and all of your capacities for what they are. That can involve good capacities and bad capacities. So the answer to pride is to say, okay, well, what am I good at? How can that be useful? Because if you don't do that, and Thomas Aquinas writes about this, you end up being what he calls poosilanimous, like you have a weak soul, a weak mind. If you just say, I'm useless at everything, I really am a worm. Well, maybe you're really good at C++, or maybe you're really excellent at ping pong, and maybe that's quite valuable. If you just used it, you can help other people. The trick is to look at yourself and say, what am I? John de Conde, the 14th century poet, writes, and he's writing about pride when he writes this, that the solution is not to look in the mirror less, it's to look in the mirror more, but to really look at yourself. Keep a mirror with you night and day so that you look and you recognize the true person looking back at you. John Gower, when he wrote about Narcissus, he didn't say Narcissus' mistake was that he'd fallen in love with himself. His mistake was that he looked at a reflection of himself and didn't recognize the person he saw, thought it was someone else. And that's what pride is. It's not recognizing yourself for what you really are. The massive ego, the narcissist, like Lucifer in medieval writing, is someone who has created a false image of themselves, a puffed up image of themselves, and they believe their own hype. So the answer is not to, as I say, do the opposite and say, I'm a worm. There's another false image of yourself. The answer is to keep that mirror with you and gaze at it until you see the real person looking back at you and have learned to love that for what it is.

Speaker 1:
[24:51] The next one is envy, and this is usually confused with greed because people hear both and think, well, it's a desire to have something. There are different words and they are distinct, which is why we have them. What is the distinction? So what is envy?

Speaker 2:
[25:08] The crucial thing here is that envy is not wanting something at all actually. In fact, it's much more perverse than that. If you have a beautiful car, with envy, when we say it today, it's like I want that car for myself. But medieval envy, how it was in this system, I don't want your car, I want your car to explode. I want it to rust up. I want the paintwork to scratch. I want your success to be destroyed in some way. Envy is, the word in Latin is invidia, which means not seeing or wanting not to see or seeing against. Envy is really when you can't bear to look at someone else's success, and you would actually rather they had no success at all than have the success for yourself. It's a curdling of your desire. That's how it's written about. Giotto, the artist, paints it so beautifully in the Arena Chapel, and this is definitely worth Googling, his image of invidia in the Arena Chapel. It's a puzzle. There's all of these codes going on in this image. But it's essentially, it's a woman called Envy, and out of her mouth, there's a snake, which is turning back to bite her in the eye, so she can't see anything at all. And this is what Envy is. It's kind of a spiteful desire, which has turned in on itself and blinds you and sort of starts to burn you from the inside.

Speaker 1:
[26:28] Hey, everyone, Scott here. We're going to take a short break for a word from our sponsors. The example that's given in Purgatorio, when Dante is scaling Mount Purgatory, is that the Envy's have their eyes sewn shut. So they all have to sit huddled together and support each other. You have to rely on people fundamentally. You can't just wish for their downfall because their downfall is your downfall. So you have to do what you didn't do when you were envious of them and wish for them to go down. So pretty good picture right there.

Speaker 2:
[27:02] It's such a beautiful scene and such a harrowing scene. But I love a moment in Envy in Purgatorio. Dante says, is there anyone from Florence here? And they all answer, we're all Italians, which is nice. Like putting aside, like the envious person is bitter about this intercity rivalries. The people who are learning to cure their envy on Mount Purgatory have learned that we're all just one community.

Speaker 1:
[27:26] The next one, anger. This is also described in detail because there are different forms of anger. And sometimes anger could be described as a righteous anger if it's one being angry for the right causes and anger at things that are bad. The bad anger that's the mortal sin is somebody who's wrathful, doesn't have control of himself, doesn't have patience. You'll lose all your human faculties. That's part of it. What does it look like here and then how is the antidote described?

Speaker 2:
[27:56] Well, I think the thing about anger is that actually a lot of medieval writers were happy to say that there is a good anger, there is such a thing as good anger or righteous anger, positive anger, which they don't necessarily always say about envy or pride. And the thing is that this is the time of crusades, of holy war. So I guess a certain amount of religiously inspired violence is kind of sanctioned or at least church sanctioned. There are kind of two schools of anger in medieval writing. There's this kind of stoic school. Having said everything I've just said about holy anger, the stoic schools say you should never really feel anything. So anger, you should make it kind of abstract, an intellectual problem. You deny my visa application and I can see that there's an intellectual angry position. You shouldn't have done that. You've made a mistake or whatever. But the perfect thing is to feel nothing and to just use procedures to solve the problem. You should never feel any kind of anger and it extends to anything. Someone cuts off your left arm. You should not be angry. You should kind of try and seek retribution, keeping a kind of an even temperament. They're the stoic school. You should never feel any emotion too strongly. But then the other school, and this was associated with Lactantius, the early Christian writer, this school says, no, we should lean into your anger. It's impossible to feel any joy if you can't also feel the negative emotions too, and anger is one of them. I think the point here is always that a certain amount of anger is essential to get things done. There's a Bible story, Judith and Holofernes. Holofernes has surrounded Judith's town and is besieging it and has cut off the water supply. The plan is to starve all the children to death so that the town will surrender. Judith has righteous anger and it's okay. She solves this problem by sneaking into Holofernes' camp, pretending she switched sides, seducing him and then slicing his head off. You know, this is the time before kind of international law. This is how problems got solved, I guess. But there was a sense that embedded within Christianity and embedded within medieval culture was an acceptance that sometimes you need to take out a blade to solve your problems. But I think anger becomes a deadly sin when you start to enjoy it. It becomes a deadly sin when you start to wipe the blade after you've sliced off a tyrant's head and then go looking for another tyrant to decapitate. It's kind of that impulse where it's no longer the problem that you're trying to solve, that's making you angry. It's because you want more anger because you love the buzz.

Speaker 1:
[30:19] And another way that is described as a problem is that it's uncontrolled. In Purgatorio, the angry, the wrathful, they're enveloped in a thick smoke. It's something that blinds them. It's a force of nature. It's not controlled. It's not directed. It's just general. It strikes everyone like a cloud. It doesn't really discriminate. It's just completely hurting people by the wayside because there's no control over it.

Speaker 2:
[30:45] It's so dangerous because it's the moment you lose reason. And so the idea is that you should know when you've gone beyond reason, when you've stopped thinking logically or rationally through a situation. And many writers are absolutely terrified about that surrendering of reason, that you become like an animal, that you lose the thing that makes you human. But of course, judging when have you lost reason and when haven't you, it's really tough.

Speaker 1:
[31:10] The next one, Sloth, I think this is the most misunderstood because if you hear that, you just think somebody who's lazy, who does absolutely nothing. They play video games all day long. That's not exactly how it's defined by different people. If we come back to Evagrius Ponticus, he used a word Acedia and it doesn't quite mean sloth. It's more like a complete rejection of duties. You have responsibilities to others and you don't do them. You might be energetic about it. You might be seen as hardworking about it, but you don't do what other people deserve. There's a book called Acedia and it's discontents. In this book, they describe the ultimate example of this is Judge Holden, the character in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, who seeks to annihilate all responsibilities and duties to other people. Another example is a con man or Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Someone who in his own way is really hardworking, but he does it because he wants to get around systems. He wants to break the law. He's not lazy. He just whatever duties and rights other people he wants, he wants to get around it and work it. Now, that's not the universal definition, but there are different ways that people see this that go beyond just, eh, I don't want to get up today and go to work. It's more than that.

Speaker 2:
[32:27] Yeah. I mean, so the original word, and you're absolutely right. This is the most animatic of the Seven Deadly Sins and the most misunderstood. The original word in Greek was, as you say, assedia. They never translated it in Latin, really. They left it in the Greek when they wrote it because I guess it's a concept they couldn't quite translate and we still can't translate it. We have sloth, which is totally misleading. Really, okay. Evagrius describes it as a kind of world-weariness, lack of care and I think it's quite well described by the phrase, an anesthesia of the heart. And maybe that captures the Saul Goodman example you had there. An anesthesia of the heart where you just no longer care about the things that you used to care so much about. And on the one hand, that can look like boredom, right? You know, I'm sitting here, my desk is full of books and I just I wake up one morning, I have to write about and I just don't want to write or read any of those books, right? This is, that's a kind of assadia. I've lost care for them. I'm bored. I'm bored by the things I used to love. It can also look like paralysis. You know, where am I going in my life? What do I want to do? I don't want to do anything. William Peraldas, who wrote this wonderful treatise on the sins in the 13th century, described assadia as standing in a freezing river that's rushing towards you and you don't have the energy to move. And I think those moments in our lives when we're just overwhelmed and we do nothing. I think that's assadia. I think the thing is, it's not, however, inertia without a direction. It's inertia in spite of a direction. A lot of the most moving descriptions of this deadly sin in medieval writing. The people who are affected by it, they know exactly what they want to and should be doing. Elizabeth of Schönau, this fantastic writer, and she was a nun in the Rhineland, Germany. She loved being a nun. She loved writing so much. She was so literary. She was so engaged with the texts. Then she woke up one morning and everything was ash in her mouth. Everything was nothing to her. Everything left her cold. I mean, it's also been described as your heart stops firing. Your heart withdraws itself. I think what I find so interesting about this sin, and as I read about it, I came to understand more about it. Of course, we could connect it with depression. Many writers have. Andrew Solomon's book, The Noonday Demon is just a beautiful book. He directly ties Acedia with depression in that. Yes, it does look a lot like depression. I think one of the things that's remarkable about it is what's so perverse about Acedia and this sin more generally, if it is a sin in our modern sense, is that it takes the things we used to love and turns them against us. It's almost like the more you love something, and Dante has Acedia at the start of writing, before he's writing his Commedia. He loved writing so much. He loved the passion he had for letters, for pursuit, for love and everything else. The bigger that love is, the harsher the fall, the more bitter that depressive episode is. Acedia is when it takes the mountain we've built up inside ourselves of love or passion for a thing or a person or whatever, and it inverts it. So we feel the full weight of that absent love.

Speaker 1:
[35:38] It's interesting that Noonday Demon, that's what a book described it, and Evagrius Ponticus called it that because the point is it's the sin that doesn't strike at night, or it's not something that people try to hide or do outside of the eyes of others. It happens openly, and it's a different thing. It's not something that you want to pretend isn't there, or you try to make it appear to be the opposite. It's visibly present, and there's something about it that can just be out in the open in a way that the other ones aren't.

Speaker 2:
[36:11] Totally, and it comes in your active time. It comes in your work day and noonday, right when you know you should be doing those things that your life is supposed to be about, and that's what's so cruel about it.

Speaker 1:
[36:23] The next one, Greed, we'll leave Mount Purgatorio for a second and go back to our friend Reid Hoffman, and when he was trying to control the limbic system of humanity and filtering all of our base desires into different funnels of social media. The one that's Greed is LinkedIn, and you go there, you see salaries slapped on top of different job postings if you're job hunting, and then you see the postings made by LinkedIn super users, and it is the most Patrick Bateman, American Psycho sociopathic thing you've ever seen in your entire life, where a bunch of pod people are sharing clever just-so stories about how they're networking with millionaires and billionaires, and they manage to outwit people all the time, like crush a job interview. It's just, it really feels like a circle of hell being on LinkedIn long enough of fake people trying to 10x or magnify whatever depressing success they got, where they now are living life to their fullest because they have a great position, fixing VLOOKUP fields on Excel spreadsheets. I'm making myself depressed just even thinking about LinkedIn, but it's all built on greed. So yeah, what do they have to say about greed?

Speaker 2:
[37:34] Gosh, I'm so glad I haven't been using LinkedIn. It sounds hell. So the thing about greed, and avarice is a call in the book, it's an attachment to objects and money as well. It's not just money, it's objects too. It's a fixation on things. I suppose the main message of greed as a deadly sin is that it's when you attach yourself so much to the accumulation of either money or objects, that you become the object yourself. So in terms of clothing, if you're just obsessed with buying clothes so that you can get a new LinkedIn picture, make it look nice, you become essentially, if you care about this so much, if you pour so much of your love into acquiring, wearing, photographing yourself in the clothes, you become a coat stand yourself, a mannequin. You hollow out some of your personality. We've only got a finite amount of care at the end of the day. And if you pour so much of it into those possessions and those things, then you do become boring in the process. You haven't got enough care to give over. If I really am spending nine hours a day shopping, I really don't have that time to make those phone calls to my mother or to you, my friend. So I think that that's the main message. It's a good place to say that, and Dante describes this. I know we said we'd leave Purgatorio, but he describes the deadly sins and others have said it before him as all perversions of love. All the deadly sins start from a place of love. Your love of self, your love of food, all of these things aren't necessarily unhealthy in themselves. By virtue of that, he is saying a certain amount of acquisition, not greed perhaps, but desire for things is healthy. If you go into a person's apartment and there are no things, there are no objects, there's a soullessness that you would feel. It's just a totally Zen space where there's no personality, there's no love. I go into a person's apartment and there are objects they've collected over the years that have meaning to them. It's like the story of their lives is mapped out. In some ways, it's an externalization of their soul. Medieval writers weren't hard-core about this. They weren't puritanical. The idea wasn't get rid of all things. The idea was to recognize that there's a certain amount of accumulation and a certain amount of desire for things that starts to make you boring, that starts to make you antisocial, that starts to suck that care into a place of just meaningless materialism. What would they have said about LinkedIn though? Do you know, what you described there just sounds like all of the pride and envy and probably the anger. It sounds like a nest of all seven deadly sins, the most terrible combo.

Speaker 1:
[40:06] The next one is probably the most relevant for the 21st century, which is gluttony. We've never had a higher BMI. Well, thanks to Ozympoch, we're able to taper down, but that almost feeds into it more because we have so much food we need to take yet another drug to make us not eat as much so we don't get overweight. And gluttony was a problem. It's a seven deadly sin. It's one of them. But in the Middle Ages, I still think, how much of this could it really have been a problem for the average person? You're mostly dealing with malnutrition and not starving. And if there is anyone who's overweight, it's probably the abbot, somebody who's taking the tithe of grain. And thanks to the brewery next to the monastery, you can imbibe in that quite a bit. And tax collecting on farmer's produce, he gets a good deal of food coming in, so he can be overweight. And there's a little bit of truth to the stereotype of the fat abbot. But other than him, it just doesn't seem that widespread of a problem. So maybe help me understand medieval gluttony, because these are the people whose writings we're looking at. It's very different from 21st century gluttony. And what would they say as the cure to this? Scott here, one more break for a word from our sponsors.

Speaker 2:
[41:25] Well, I think the thing is, actually, surprisingly, there is a lot of care and concern about food, and people do have access. Okay, so subsistence level people working in agricultural jobs, okay, perhaps less so, maybe gluttony isn't. But the kinds of people are being preached to in these new sermons which are in cities. A lot of these are accessing kind of exotic foods. I mean, like little snippet, Thomas Aquinas, who I mentioned in the book, what's gluttony for him? What's his kind of desire that's taking him beyond a reasonable amount? He just really wants, it's herrings, he just really wants herrings one day, right? Just like he used to have in Paris. And this is just about possible. If you really go out of your way and you make a sort of 20-mile detour, he could have got herrings. So they look prosaic to us. They look really innocent and small. I suppose that the point is, we live in a culture where there's kind of a bit of a puritanical oscillation between, on the one hand, the BMI's, as you say, have never been higher. And our access to luxurious stuff is absolutely incredible. Dubai chocolate lattes, we can get them. And there's so much temptation. But on the other hand, there's this kind of puritanical answer that the answer to this temptation is to abstain, sort of fad diets and kind of a kind of ultramarathon culture where you kind of ignore all of this stuff. But I think the answer to gluttony in the middle ages, gluttony wasn't just about eating too much. It was a problem not with the body as much as it was with the mind. It was about thinking too much about food. The idea was that gluttony, a bit like what I said about avarice, is an obsession that makes you kind of boring and antisocial, an obsession where you suck too much of your care into food and you turn away from things that really matter. The answer to gluttony was actually moderation. If you become puritanical, if you say, I'm only going to eat a raw diet, like Catherine of Siena did, she only ate herbs. She emaciated herself this way. She is a saint, but a lot of people suspected her of gluttony because she was such a food obsessive, that this was seen as suspicious. It was seen as something excessive and extremist. The argument they always made, these critics, was that Jesus didn't starve himself in exactly this way. Jesus ate the fishes and so on. The answer was always moderation, was always to say, right, just eat whatever, just don't care about it too much. Francis of Assisi was not a vegetarian. He ate whatever was put in front of him, whether it was a pile of bones or a lobster pie at one stage, he famously ate. The idea was that he didn't care. He lived a life of moderation where you didn't fuss or fixate on the food that you ate. I think that's the main difference. I think we tend to think of gluttony as a overeating problem. I think they thought of it as an overthinking problem.

Speaker 1:
[44:14] Yeah. It sounds like how they're describing alcoholism, where in AA, they'd say it's most often one is consuming way too much alcohol and it's destroying their life. But even if you don't, the fixation itself can be the problem. Because if the fixation isn't gone, then there's always the possibility of the over consumption to return. It sounds like there's a similar thinking there with food. So hey, maybe they modern alcoholic treatment got some ideas there from what need treatments. Then the last one is lust. Again, the app world is handling that very well with Tinder, Bumble, any dating app. They really have that one locked down and that might be the most monetized of all the sins here. Well, hard to tell. I guess you can make a market for a lot of them, but that one seems really obvious. Evagrius Ponticus had a lot to say. The lady he met in Constantinople must have been quite a knockout because he is writing all about her and describing all about this sin. What did he and others who follow it say to describe it and then deal with it?

Speaker 2:
[45:18] Lost is often described by medieval writers as like a fire. William Proudice describes it really well. He says, humans are flammable, lust is a fire, so run away. Don't catch fire. Some writers are really extremist about it. They'll say, lust is this extremely contagious, extremely seductive thing, that we look at someone, we're seduced by them, we want to follow our sexual desire to a point of culmination and that the problem with that is we end up using people. Like all the Seven Deadly Sins, the idea is that taken to their logical conclusion, you result in an extremely antisocial place. And so a lot of the anxiety about lust for medieval writers was that by fixating on people's bodies, we forget their minds, their personalities. William Proudice also says that it's the sin of being out of time. Meaning what? Meaning that with love, I care about you, I care about your past, I care about your family, I care about where you're headed, your job interview next month. But with lust, I don't care about any of that, I just care about right now. And it's beautifully seductive, it's beautifully romantic, but there's an antisocialness built into it. It's a not caring about you built into it. So they write a lot about that and their concerns about that. What goes with that, and I hope it's implicit there, is it's not a puritanical culture. I mean, there are puritans in the Middle Ages, of course there are, and they're really sensational puritans. The monks who abstain their entire lives, laws against masturbation, you name it. There are all of these things in medieval kind of communities. But on the other hand, sex is kind of everywhere. There's not a prudishness in the general population. So your average kind of folk story, like the Fablio tales, which are kind of sung entertainment, they're all full of what we would now think of as pornographic imagery. And not just imagery, they're pornographic stories. Husband, wife having an affair, court and husband chisels off the lover's penis. I suppose that doesn't sound like pornography, does it? That sounds terrifying. Well, let's take the better example of St. Martin's Wishes, which is a fantasy story where these two peasants are given all wishes by a saint and wife takes first wish and asks for the husband to have penises all over his body. She just wants more and more satisfaction from him. He asks for her to have the same, like for her body to be covered in vaginas, and then it goes back and forth. She then says, I want all the penises gone, and all the vaginas gone, and then suddenly they realize they've got bare bodies and they asked to be put back to normal. Kind of a conservative ending. It's what I call like kind of anti-pornographic pornography, really, because in the end, the audience listening to that are titillated. The descriptions of the penises are really graphic, and I won't repeat them. It's really steamy stuff. So the audience enjoys that. But then at the end, there's this really conservative message, which is anti-lust, which is kind of, wasn't it better when everyone just had one of everything and they cared about each other as people rather than as kind of a vehicle for sexual gratification.

Speaker 1:
[48:21] Got to give it to the medievalists that they really knew how to do the David Cronenberg style body horror or Lovecraftian stories like that, the Hieronymus Bosch, the distorted people being tortured for all eternity, they really knew the body horror genre long before we figured it out.

Speaker 2:
[48:38] Oh, it's true. The Spanish horror movie makers really need to take note. They need to get more inspiration from these things because they're really graphic and grotesque.

Speaker 1:
[48:47] So to tie these in together, when we were first talking about depression and how it would have been diagnosed and solutions offered in the modern period versus the medieval period, what does modern psychology and psychiatry offer that would have been offered in the Middle Ages and vice versa? What do those things lack? Because you noted at the beginning of your book that depression would probably be treated with antidepressants, maybe some nutrition recommendations, and statistically we know that those fail after about 12 months and then the cycle begins all over again. If we have so much more information and clinical help, why are things not better? But then on the flip side, others would say, well, what do you do about crippling PTSD or things that some general advice for a general population wouldn't be able to help accurately diagnose? The different systems, what do they have and what do they lack?

Speaker 2:
[49:44] Yeah, I don't think there's a situation where one is superior to the other. Let's be frank, medication for depression is fantastic and is the right pathway in many, many cases. However, I think there's a certain framing thing. I think, and I'm sure that modern psychologists would agree with this, the framing of it as a pathology, as some problem with the brain or problem with you is the thing that creates and maintains a stigma which in many ways, the Middle Ages didn't have this because if acedia, sloth is one of the deadly sins then, and if the idea is that these seven deadly sins, and this was the idea that they're all of us, all of us have them all of the time. They are common as the cold virus or mosquitoes that you can't outrun them. They're human. They're what make us human. I think therefore, these things aren't framed as a pathology, as a problem with you. They're framed as this is it. This is what it is to be human, to go through depression, to feel cold, to feel numbness, to feel as if you'll never love again, sometimes, as terrifying as it is, to accept that that is part of life, and to feel we're suffering alongside others in the process, and not to think, oh my god, what have I done wrong? Where did my life go off track? How have I got this pathology? I think it's a refreshing alternative take. I'm not saying it's right to supplant what we think about as depression. I don't think so at all. I think we need both. And I'm certain that medical intervention is the right thing in so many cases. But I think there's something freeing about seeing it that way, you know, seeing it as, oh, this is what it is to be human. In terms of the actual advice, a lot of what I read in medieval advice does look a lot like CBT. And I think they're actually closer together than we might imagine. You know, the idea that by training yourself to rethink and to reframe some of your thoughts, you can come to a different understanding. Not necessarily solve your problem, but find a new path that might work for you. William Peraldes, again, who I mentioned earlier, writes about this so beautifully when he writes about the Fourth Deadly Sins sloth, Arcadia. You know, try to remember that fields that bristle over and grow with thorns and a barren often go on to have fruit and they're more loved when they do that than a field that never really had many thorns, but never really gave much fruit either. And I suppose the point there is to see a bout of compression, to try and see it as a necessary clearing ground, a pause, a chapter break, an opportunity to clear the decks for something, refreshing something new. Easier said than done. Of course it is. But I think if that can, and it did unlock this problem for some people, or a lot of people, for around about a thousand years, then it must have had some value to it.

Speaker 1:
[52:36] Well, thank you for sharing all this with us. And there is a lot more to unpack here for listeners who want to check out Peter's book. It's called Self-Help from the Middle Ages, What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Levi. Peter, thank you for joining us. That's all for today's episode. If you like to see show notes with sources, maps, links, anything else related to this episode, and all my other ones as well, go to parthenonpodcast.com. That's the name of the podcast network this show is a part of, along with James Early's Key Battles of American History, Steve Guerra's Beyond the Big Screen and History of the Papacy, and other great history shows as well. If you like to support this show, the two easiest ways to do so are to subscribe to it on the podcast player of your choice and leave a review. The second thing is to join the membership program for History Unplugged. If you do so, you'll get completely ad-free episodes for the entire back catalog which is about 600 episodes and growing. All you have to do is go to patreon.com/unplug. Thanks for listening and see you next time.